Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage has gone on sale on the Berghahn website with a time-limited discount of 25% available with the code WALS9840.
curator.ie has developed an online component for A Very English Savage on the Ballymaclinton blog site. This picks up any loose ends, errata etc in the book as well as adding additional research that followed the end of writing. It also creates an online space for engagement with readers of the book. MORE
about the book
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is the first in depth study of Haddon’s contribution to anthropology since Alison Hingston Quiggin published her memorial ‘sketch’ in 1942. Walsh focuses on Haddon careen in Ireland, a period usually regarded as irrelevant in the historiography of disciplinary anthropology. He uses overlooked, primary sources and associated records to argue that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists, set out to revolutionise anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers. Walsh focusses on Haddon’s career in Ireland and fills significant gaps in Alison Hingston Quiggin’s 1942 ‘sketch‘ of Haddon the Head-hunter, which is the only biography published to date. The result is a painstaking reconstruction of a culture war that divided anthropology in the 1890s. That war has been ‘forgotten’ by disciplinary historians who focussed instead on evolutionary science bracketed by race and colonialism, although recent developments in anthropology make this story of a very English savage worth remembering.
A Very English Savage pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ photography in the Aran Islands in 1890 and Walsh argues that he pointed Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge in the direction of folk living on islands off the west coast of Ireland. This aspect of Haddon’s work is explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
The exhibition recreates a slideshow Haddon presented in 1890 using ten, fine art prints of the photographs Haddon used to make his slides. The original negatives are held in Trinity College, University of Dublin. Walsh discovered them in 2014 and commissioned a set of digitally remastered negatives in 2019. Andrei Nacu, curator at the Royal Anthropological Institute used these digital negatives to create a new set of prints for the exhibition, which also draws on collections in Dublin, Belfast, Cambridge and Australia to situate Haddon’s ground-breaking 1890 ‘ethnography’ in a wider photographic experiment.
Andrei Nacu and Ciarán Walsh, curators of the ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. Photo Hanine Habib.
HEADLINES
‘THE BOLEX BOYS’ EXHIBITION OPENS IN KERRY WRITERS’ MUSEUM
’The Bolex Boys’ exhibition takes its name from the famous 16mm camera and profiles the work of independent filmmakers John Lynch & Michael Mulcahy. They created an extraordinary cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of North Kerry from the 1970s onwards. The exhibition opened in Kerry Writers’ Museum on 19 October 2023 with a special screening of a newly digitised and restored copy of their 1971 masterpiece The Way I Remember It, featuring a script Eamon Keane devised and narrated in 1978 in a masterclass of storytelling.
Funded by the Regional Museums Exhibition Scheme 2023, Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
HADDON AND THE ARAN ISLANDS: AN EXHIBITION IN THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, LONDON.
LEFT: Anon. 1890. Green, Lane, Haddon, Beamish. Digital print of cyanotype. MAA P.48150.ACH2, with permission of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. RIGHT: A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine photograph pasted into Dixon’s family album. NLI VTls000284434_005 (detail), with permission of the National Library of Ireland.
‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opened in the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) on 15 October 2023. The exhibition features twenty five photographs that are organised around a slideshow Haddon presented in 1890 and titled ‘The Aran Islands’. It was the first in a series of slideshows that made the islanders visible at a critical moment in the development of cultural nationalism and literary modernism. ‘The Aran Islands’ slideshow is the cornerstone of Ciarán Walsh’s book Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage, which was launched in the RAI on 31 October. Restrictions on ‘illustration‘ limited the number and scale of photographs reproduced in the book and the solution was to show them in an exhibition, mimicking Haddon’s adoption of the slideshow when cost became a barrier to the publication of these photographs in 1890.
‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ is about photography and the exhibition features new prints from negatives discovered in 2014 and digitally remastered in 2019. They are framed by a series of photographs that deal with Haddon’s influences and impact. Most of these photographs have never been exhibited before and the exhibition constitutes a radical look at the photographic record of the islands and the origins of visual anthropology.
A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Walsh and Ciarán Rooney, 2019). The original negative is held in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin. © curator.ie.
curator.ie | innovate – engage – excite
Making History: https://fb.watch/nu8Ph0T_jp
Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong public engagement component and a collaborative ethos. The emphasis quickly shifted from contemporary visual arts and media projects to an engagement with historical, social documentary photography and the stories associated with it. His ability to find ‘lost’ material and use it to tell new stories led to a funded PhD in 2015, which he completed in June 2020. He currently works as a freelance curator and writer using the project model he developed in a series of critically-acclaimed exhibitions.
He launched the series on Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands in 2009 with John Millington Synge, Photographer, which was a big hit at Le Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris the following year and the Irish Museum of Modern Art incorporated the exhibition into ‘The Moderns‘. He followed this with The Irish Headhunter, the Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne (2012-23), a ‘lost’ history of Victorian ethnography in Ireland. An Island Portrait (2013) developed out of this project and pushed the format of a visual history beyond text, telling the story of the Blasket Island community as revealed in a wide range of photographic archives. This led to the curation of other photographic collections connected with the Aran Islands. The discovery in 2014 of a ‘lost’ collection of photographic negatives made in the islands in 1890 was the starting point for a six-year project that focused on the photography of Alfred Cort Haddon. This project culminates in the exhibition Haddon and the Aran Islands in the Royal Anthropological Institute, opening in October 2023 and running until February 2024. The exhibition in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London in October 2023. The exhibition sets the scene for the launch of ‘Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage, Walsh’s provocative study of Haddon’s art and activism in Ireland in the 1890s.
Walsh’s work on Haddon is widely recognised as ground-breaking because it went against the grain of most histories of anthropology, especially Anglo-Irish anthropology in relation to cultural naturalism, literary modernism and colonial legacies. In 2022, Bérose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology began the process of rewriting the history of Anglo-Irish anthropology when it commissioned ‘Artist, Philosopher, Ethnologist and Activist: The Life and Work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940)’, a preview of A Very English Savage. It also anticipated a vigorous, public engagement with colonial legacies triggered by a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020. That caught the academy off-guard, but it put Walsh at the forefront of an exciting new phase in public history and the curatorial model he developed was a good fit for the current focus on public engagement with archives and a parallel movement in people’s histories.
Peoples’ history is the cornerstone of ‘The Bolex Boys’ project, a collaboration with Kerry Writers’ Museum and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media through the Regional Museums exhibition Scheme 2023. ‘The Bolex Boys’ exhibition opens in Kerry Writers’ Museum on October 19 2023. The project developed in tandem with ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ and features the work of independent filmmaker John Lynch whose film The Way I Remember It (1971) became the basis for a collaboration with film maker and sound-man Michael Mulcahy and actor Eamon Keane, whose narration is a remarkable achievement in the art of story telling. Lynch and Mulcahy documented life in rural North Kerry over fifty years, producing a remarkable archive of social history that shares much with the ethnographic imagination explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, which ends with Haddon’s brief experiment in cinema in 1898.
Both projects build on experience gained working on the Ann Doherty Project, which Niamh Brennan (Donegal County Council Archive Services) and Caroline Carr (Donegal County Museum) developed with funding from the Heritage Council’s Heritage Stewardship Fund. The Heritage Council also provided R&D funding for The Irish Headhunter project way back in 2012 and, eleven years on, the project mix remains essentially the same: finding overlooked archives and devising innovative ways to excite public’s imagination about the social possibility of photography and film.
Public engagement is at the heart of each of these projects, as exemplified by the ten-year collaboration with Marie Coyne of Inishbofin Heritage Museum. Coyne engaged with the The Irish Headhunter project in 2012 and focus quickly turned to a collection of twenty four skulls Haddon stole in 1890 and gifted to TCD in 1893. In July 2023, TCD returned half of the collection for burial on Inishbofin. Walsh and Coyne, in collaboration with the Manuscript Library and Digital Collections at TCD, curated an outdoor exhibition of Browne’s photographs to add faces and life stories to the ancestral remains that had become known as ‘the stolen skulls of Inishbofin’. The Old Anatomy Steering Committee in TCD is stalling on the return of the remains of eleven other individuals to communities in St. Finian’s Bay and the Aran Islands. The campaign continues.
Independent film maker John Lynch with the 16mm Bolex camera he used to document life in rural north Kerry in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ciarán Walsh working on a collection of photographs Ann Doherty gifted to the Donegal County Council Archives Service in 2021.
Michael Gibbons, archaeologist, guiding scholars from Note Dame University through an exhibition of photographs of Inishbofin which Haddon, Charles R. Browne and his brother John took between 1890 and 1893. Ciarán Walsh and Marie Coyne, Inishbofin Heritage Museum, in collaboration with the Manuscripts Library, Special Collections and Digital Collections in TCD curated the exhibition as part of the return and burial of the remains of thirteen individuals Haddon stole in 1890 and gifted to TCD in 1895.
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