This book delves into a topic of great contemporary relevance: the relationship between folklore, memory, and history. Guy Beiner argues that Ireland is a case study for this relationship and deploys a very comprehensive set of articulations between these three domains.
The study that was the basis of the book focuses on one event, the failed French invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798, and on how it has been represented at different levels: in professional historiography and in folk history. Through very thorough research, Guy Beiner shows how stories of what local people perceived as the most significant historical event in the pre-Famine period, persevered into the mid-twentieth century. But although the time frame of Beiner’s research ends half a century ago, he moves forward in time to illustrate contemporary forms of commemoration expressed in heritage sites. The book examines how members of communities in the West of Ireland remembered and commemorated into the mid-twentieth century an episode that took place in the late eighteenth century. These commemorations reach into the twenty-first century, revealing that social memory manifests itself even after periods of alleged oblivion.
Beiner, a professional historian, sets out to prove that folk traditions are valuable sources for historical reconstruction. He contends that historiography’s elitist approach has disregarded folk traditions, and asserts that in social memory, history and historiography--the past and its representations--are intrinsically tied. In the process of making his case, he proves that folk history is more than just a historiographic source.
The author argues that there is a wealth of folklore accounts about “The Year of the French” as it was called by the communities of the West of Ireland. Folk history, commonly known by the word seanchas, which he says has been described as “orally preserved social historical traditions,” has provided accounts of the events of 1798. He shows how throughout modern Irish history, oral historical traditions have been in constant interaction with influences of literacy.
Beiner offers a very thorough description of folk genres that make reference to the facts of 1798. Among them, he analyzes tales and mini-histories (concise and simplified historical narratives that combined oral tradition with information derived from literary sources), songs and poetry in Irish, rebel songs and ballads in English, loyalist songs, rhymes, proverbs and sayings, prophecies, and toasts. His list of materials that anchor memory goes on to include other elements like toponymics, monuments, and ceremonies.
Beiner asks how to avoid the dichotomy between a “positivist” approach that searches for surviving residues of the past and an “interpretive” approach that focuses on the ethnographic present. He contends that it can be done through recontextualization work and through an exercise of restoration of the situations in which the folk expressions were performed.
By cleaving to the ethnographic present in the folk history of The Year of the French during the first half of the twentieth century, Beiner shows that it offers a remarkably rich body of evidence for a sociological-historical study of how the French invasion and the 1798 rebellion were commemorated.
The author arrives at the conclusion that, at some level, the social memory of Ninety-Eight began long before 1798. He thus asserts that memory can precede history and stresses that the unique value of folk histories is that they do not conform to historical standards and therefore pose a radical challenge to historiography.
I understand that historians will find this book very provocative in its positive assessment of folklore materials. But one wonders why the cover material presents folklore only as a “source” for historians, when the book makes such a solid case for the significance of folk materials as cultural expression as an entity with value in itself. Will historians take note of folklore expressions? That is a methodological as well as a political decision for them to make. Beiner’s sharp analysis demonstrates that folk traditions will continue shaping the memory of the people of the West of Ireland.
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[Review length: 656 words • Review posted on July 8, 2008]