–
–
innovation in research & project management
I set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong educational component and a collaborative ethos. The emphasis gradually began to shift from contemporary visual arts and media projects to an engagement with historical social documentary photography. This started out as a search for “authentic” representation of folklife in Ireland in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which inevitably involved engaging with the communities who had been documented.


in 2009, Felicity O’Mahony, a librarian in TCD, showed me a series of photograph albums that were compiled by Charles R. Browne in 1897, which were held in the Manuscript Library in TCD. Everything changed … utterly … as they say. Dáithí de Mórdha and I developed the “Irish Headhunter Project” in 2012 and this led to a four year research and development contract with the Irish Research Council in 2015. This contract covered two main areas of practically oriented research.
The first was a detailed investigation of the “skull measuring business” in Ireland in the 1890s, that is a programme of ethnographic surveys which were conducted by the Anthropological Laboratory that was established by the University Of Dublin, Trinity College (TCD) and the Royal Irish Academy in 1892. This centred on ethnographic experiments conducted by Haddon in the Aran Islands in 1890.
The second involves placing this research into the public domain in a creative programme of public engagement on issues relating to body, image, and ethnicity, a project which, in many ways, is shaped by the anti-racism activism that Haddon developed between 1890 and 1895. During that period, Haddon used slide shows–performed ethnographies–as an effective mechanism for an affective engagement with geographical remote and culturally distant civilisations.


The entire project is centred around a collection of photographic negatives that were discovered under the “Old” Anatomy Theatre in TCD in 2014. The photographs were taken by Andrew Francis Dixon during a fishing survey in 1890, but they represent a foundational event in the development of a politically radical form of visual ethnography by Alfred Cort Haddon.
Work commenced in Maynooth University in February 2015. TCD joined the project in 2016 and Kimmage Development Studies Centre (KDSC) came on board as enterprise partners later in the same year. KDSC was absorbed into Maynooth University in 2018 and I became a fellow of the Shanahan Research Centre for the remainder of the project.

“Fieldwork” commenced in 2016 and, since then, has been split between work on the anthropological collections in the “Old” Anatomy Building in TCD and the Haddon papers in Cambridge; mainly in Cambridge University Library, but extending to the Haddon Library and the photographic collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Research was completed in 2017 and the last two years or so have been spent writing it up. This represents a major revision of the history of Anglo-Irish anthropology and the theoretical assumptions underpinning it.


post-doc: converting research into activism and advocacy
The Irish Research Council funded this work under its programme of employment based research. A key part of the project has been to work with an enterprise partner to find innovative ways of placing the results of my research into the public domain. My work with KDSC focussed on the development of online educational resources using visual technologies and networks and this will feed into strategies for creative public engagement.
The need for engagement was obvious, given the many myths that surround “Old” Anatomy and the historical collections associated with the skull measuring business in Ireland. This came to head with a public campaign to have the skeleton of the Cornelius Magrath, Irish Giant, buried. This led to a collaboration with the film maker Chris Nikkel and Brendan Holland, who created the 21st century version of the ethnographies performed by Haddon.

It was equally obvious that the politically radical and formally innovative photo-ethnographic practice developed by Haddon in Ireland had been completely missed by historians of disciplinary anthropology, who tended to focus on race, bracketed by evolution and empire. This produced what can only be described as disciplinary folklore, which was passed down by the historicists who laid the foundations for a “modern” history of “modern” anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, which still influences the historiographical treatment of anthropology, ethnology, and folk studies as practiced in Ireland in the 1890s.
This was first challenged in public – ironically enough – in a presentation to a conference on Folklore and the Nation, which was organised by the Folklore Society in March 2019. This will be featured in a collection of essays being edited by Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart, which will be published by Routledge.
The conference programme continues with the “vanished knowledge” project, which involves creating a panel for Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future, a conference being jointly organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), the Royal Geographical Society, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS (University of London), and the Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the British Museum. It will run from 4 – 7 JUNE 2020.

“Vanishing knowledge” was a phrase coined by Haddon as code for the human and cultural consequences of genocide by habitat destruction after an anti-colonial speech in Ipswich in 1895 had been widely criticised. This project revives and reconfigures the idea of “survival” as an issue of urgency for anthropologists / sociologists and geographers (read more).
This will provide a context for a major revamp of the curator.ie website, Other projects are in development, but it is too soon to reveal the details. Nonetheless, the project has now moved from research to implementation and implementation looks like it will involve a lot of advocacy and activism.
Ciarán Walsh, September 2019.






www.curator.ie is managed by Ciarán Walsh.
It was designed by Rob Condon of Kerrynet Solutions.