Andrei Nacu and Ciarán Walsh at the Haddon and the Aran Islands exhibition they curated for the Royal Anthropological Institute in October 2023 (photo Hanine Habib).
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ciarán Walsh set up www.curator.ie in 2010 and works from his home in Ballyheigue, County Kerry.
A graduate of NCAD (1984), he completed a PhD (Anthropology) in 2020 and resumed work as a freelance curator and writer. Recent curatorial projects include archivist/curator in Donegal County Council Archives Service (2022) and curator of The Bolex Boys exhibition in Kerry Writers’ Museum (2023). Between 2012 and 2023 he worked with Marie Coyne, Director of Inishbofin Heritage Museum, on the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls of Inishbofin’, the remains of thirteen ancestors stolen in 1890 and held in the Anatomy Museum in TCD since 1892.
Since 2020, Walsh has developed a series of journalistic and cross-over academic projects designed to engage the general public with issues raised by his research. These projects include blogs and podcasts for RTÉ BRAINSTORM (2020-22) and the inside story in the Irish Examiner (2023) of the return and burial of the Inishbofin remains. Dearcán Media profiled his work on Inishbofin for a feature documentary due for release on TG4 and BBC in the spring of 2024.
Berghahn Books (New York, Oxford) published Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage in October 2023. Walsh co-curated the Haddon and the Aran Islands exhibition in the Royal Anthropological Institute to set the scene for the book launch and to exhibit – for the first time ever – photographs featured in the book alongside photographs that put these in context. The exhibition runs until February 2024. He is currently developing an online component for A Very English Savage on the Ballymaclinton blog site.
Ciarán Walsh | curator & writer
Ciarán Walsh is a freelance curator specialising in ethnographic photography and filmmaking. His current work has come full circle as his investigation of Alfred Cort Haddon’s photographic study of the Aran Islands leads back to the photography of John Millington Synge, which he curated in an exhibition that marked the centenary of Synge’s death in 2009. This exhibition was the start of a journey into little known or overlooked archives in search of evidence that linked ethnographic photography, cultural nationalism and literary modernism as they converged in the Aran Islands in the 1890s. Synge led to Charles R. Browne, nicknamed the ‘Irish head-hunter’ because of his association with Alfred Cort Haddon, who revelled in his ‘Head Hunter’. nickname. In time, my investigation of historical studies of race became a platform for an engagement with racism in contemporary Ireland; despite of the apparent indifference of academic anthropology before the murder of George Floyd in 2020 sent shockwaves through universities worldwide.
C. R. Browne, The People, c. 1897. Silver gelatine photographic prints pasted into an album. (Tim Keeffe, 2012). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin.
That investigation started with Browne. He while managed the Anthropological Laboratory at Trinity College, University of Dublin and assembled an extraordinary collection of social documentary photographs taken along the west coast of Ireland between 1890 and 1897. In 2012, Dáithí de Mórdha and I curated the Irish Head-hunter | Fiagaí na gceann Gaelach exhibition and toured it to each of the areas featured in Browne’s archive, starting in Dún Chaoin / Blasket Islands and travelling to the Connemara, the Aran Islands, the National Museum / Country Life in Mayo and ending in the Haddon Library in Cambridge in 2013. Ten years later, Marie Coyne, Director of Inishbofin Heritage Museum, and I curated a selection of the exhibition and showed it on the old pier on the occasion of the return and burial of the remains of thirteen individuals Haddon and Dixon stole in 1890 and gifted to TCD in 1892 (more below).
Browne’s albums contained a photograph Haddon set up of the two of them measuring Tom Connelly’s skull in the Aran Islands (top left). Trying to figure out what was going on led to a search of archives in Cambridge, especially the forgotten Irish component of the Haddon Papers in the University Library. In 2013, Haddon Librarian Aidan Baker discovered Haddon’s file on the Aran Islands, which had been ‘lost’ for one hundred years. It raised even more questions about what Haddon was doing in Ireland between 1880 and 1901. Then, in 2014, another search uncovered photographs Haddon and Andrew Francis Dixon took in the islands in 1890. That discovery led to a funded PhD which unfolded between 2015 and 2020 and produced an academically naive but highly regarded thesis on ‘The Skull Measuring Business: Some Murderous Little Facts from the Forgotten Spaces of Anthropology In Ireland’.
Dixon took over fifty photographs while working for Haddon on a fishing survey in 1890. Haddon sent a box of the glass plate negatives to Welch, a photographer in Belfast, to be processed as lantern slides. On their return, Dixon seems to have put them on a shelf under the ‘Old’ Anatomy theatre in TCD, where they lay undiscovered until 2014. Dixon’s camera was lost, but the camera shown is a kit-built quarter-plate from the same period and matched the negative holders Dixon used (foreground). In 2019, I commissioned Ciarán Rooney to print a new set of photographs from digitally restored scans of the negatives.
‘Murderous little facts’ references a story Francis Galton told about the death of ‘a beautiful theory’ and I adopted this as a metaphor for a critique of the way academics ‘forgot’ what Haddon was doing in Ireland because a theoretical position on evolutionism (bracketed by scientific racism and colonialism) superseded many of the little facts revealed by a new reading of Haddon’s papers and associated records. Perhaps the biggest surprise – given the photo of Tom Connelly – was solid evidence of Haddon’s association with anarcho-utopian activists and his adoption of photography as a vehicle for anticolonial activism. This research connected with a more general review of ‘forgotten‘ anthropologies instigated by the History of Anthropology Network in 2015, which in turn led Berghahn Books to commission A Very English Savage in 2021. Bérose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology commissioned ‘Artist, Philosopher, Ethnologist and Activist: The Life and Work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940)’ as a preview in 2022.
The ‘post-doc’ phase more generally has been dominated by the campaign to have the Haddon Dixon collection of ancestral remains returned for burial in Inishbofin, the Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay (The Glen) in Kerry. The campaign started in 2012 when Marie Coyne, Director of Inishbofin Heritage Museum, engaged with the Irish Head-hunter project and the conversation turned to a photograph Haddon took in 1890 of thirteen skulls he stole – according to his journal – from St Colman’s Monastery on the island. TCD denied all knowledge of the collection and the search for it became the motivation for ‘The Skull Measuring Business’. In 2023, Board of TCD instructed the Old Anatomy Steering Group to return of the Inishbofin remains but the Anatomy Dept of the School of Medicine continues to stall on the return for burial of the Aran Island and St Finian’s remains. Dearcán film the later stages of the campaign for TG4 and BBC.
Otherwise, my combination of curatorial, archival and public engagement skills has been employed in a number of projects. In 2022, I completed an eight-week programme of work as archivist/curator 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. He also curated an exhibition titled ‘The Bolex Boys’, (after the famous 16mm movie camera) that features the work of two independent film makers, namely John Lynch and Michael Mulcahy. The exhibition focuses on the restoration of a film Lynch made in 1971 and remastered in 1978, when Mulcahy recorded a soundtrack devised by Eamon Keane. The project has been developed by Kerry Writers’ Museum – the project is about storytelling through film – with funding from Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Regional Museums Exhibitions Scheme 2023. The exhibition opened in Kerry Writers‘ Museum on 19 October 2023.
Six days later ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opened in the Royal Anthropological Institute and the exhibition set the scene for an RAI research seminar and launch of A Very English Savage on 31 October 2023. This event marked the culmination of a writing experiment that I began in after the award of a PhD . It started with a series of journalistic projects designed to place my research into the public domain in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. The logic of that experiment was simple enough. A Very English Savage reveals for the first time ever that Haddon was the grandson of antislavery activists who daughters were socialists and feminists. It is no surprise then that Haddon envisaged anthropology as a form of anti-colonial activism. He combined journalism and slideshows in a campaign against ethnocentric racism at home that permitted genocide overseas. This brought him into conflict with academics who restricted any investigation of ‘social’ issues – structural racism and genocide included – under the name of anthropology. I adopted the same strategy and parted company with Maynooth University.
The same debate is happening today as evidence mounts of analogous restrictions on sociologists and anthropologist operating in a neoliberal academy. I devleop this topic at the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies, “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures,” between December 4-7, 2023.
Independent film makers Michael Mulcahy and John Lynch
.
Since then, he has focussed on social documentary photography collections in various archives, building upon the success of his internationally acclaimed exhibition of John Millington Synge’s photography with the equally ground-breaking “Irish Head–hunter” project, funded by the Heritage Council and the OPW. This involved digitising and exhibiting a little-known collection of photographs taken by anthropologists in the west of Ireland in the 1890s. RTÉ News reported it as one of the most important archives to have ever entered the public domain (link). Further research funded by the Heritage Council uncovered equally important archives in Cambridge and the discovery of the Haddon-Dixon photographic collection in TCD in 2014 led to an Irish Research Council funded PhD with Maynooth University in association with TCD school of Medicine and Kimmage Development Studies Centre.
Memberships
Connradh na Gaeilge
Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
History of Anthropology Network
Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project
Recent Publications
2023. Alfred Cort Haddon, a very English savage. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
2023. ’Normalising the Abnormal: Trinity College Dublin Decides what to do with its Collection of Stolen Skulls‘, AJEC (Anthropological Journal of European Cultures) Blog: Academic Research in the Anthropology of Europe:
2022. ‘Artist, Philosopher, Ethnologist and Activist: The Life and Work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940)’, Bérose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. Electronic document: https://www.berose.fr/article2641.html?lang=en.
Journalism
2023. ‘Shooting Skellig — 150 years of photography on Michael’s Rock’. The Irish Examiner. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41198965.html
2023. ‘How Inishbofin skull came home to rest in ‘peace forever’. The Irish Examiner. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlight/arid-41188345.html
2022. ‘How the roots of Riverdance can be found in Kerry’. RTÉ Brainstorm (selected for broadcast as podcast) (link).
2021. ‘Don’t kick that skull or the dead will come after you!’. RTÉ Brainstorm (link).
2021. ‘The case of the missing skulls from Inishbofin’. RTÉ Brainstorm (link).
2020. ‘Why does Kerry have a lower rate of Covid-19 than other counties?’. RTÉ Brainstorm (link)
2020. ‘The head-hunter who measured Irishmen’s skulls’. RTÉ Brainstorm (selected for broadcast as podcast) (link).
2020. “The Victorian Curator who Railed against Racism and Imperialism.” The Irish Independent Review, June 20, 2020, p. 10 (link).
Personal
Ciarán Walsh approaching the Great Blasket Island. Photo by Padraig O’Donoghue.
Ciarán Walsh is married and lives near the village of Ballyheigue in the south west of Ireland. He is a mountaineer, a kayaker and an occasional cyclist.