DECOLONISING PUBLIC SPACES IN IRELAND: A PRACTICAL CONTRIBUTION

Author Archives: Ciaran Walsh

DECOLONISING PUBLIC SPACES IN IRELAND: A PRACTICAL CONTRIBUTION

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on April 15, 2021 – 1:21 pm

Filed under Anthropology | Curatorial Projects

Ciarán Walsh’s latest post on RTÉ Brainstorm (14|04|2021) summarises a long campaign to repatriate 24 skulls stolen in 1890 from burial grounds in the west of Ireland by agents of the Anthropological Laboratory in Trinity College, Dublin.

Read: The case of the missing skulls from Inishbofin

The colonial legacies of universities and museums have become an issue, especially culturally sensitive material like human remains in anthropological collections that were tainted by colonial violence and scientific racism.

www.rte.ie

skeletons in the cupboard: anthropology and the diversity debate

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on November 24, 2020 – 7:24 pm

Filed under Curatorial Projects

https://www.tcd.ie/library/berkeley/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/cropped-P7015055.jpg

Cultural diversity in universities has been pushed to the top of the agenda by the Black Lives Matter movement and TCD has taken the its first steps towards a decolonised campus … maybe.

College authorities are considering renaming the Berkeley Library because Berkeley was a slaver: he enslaved four people on his plantation in Rhode Islands in the 1700s. Decolonising the campus will involve more than renaming a building or two. It may involve dismantling the Anthropological Collection in the ‘Old’ Anatomy Museum in line with international calls for the decolonisation of museums that hold culturally sensitive material.

Alfred Cort Haddon and Andrew Francis Dixon stole thirteen crania from a burial ground on Inishbofin Islands and TCD acquired the skulls in 1892.

The Anthropological Collection in TCD holds 24 crania stolen from burial grounds in the west of Ireland in 1890, making it one of the most culturally sensitive collection in the context of calls for western museums “to return objects looted in the violent days of empire.” (The Guardian).

Watch this space!

a new history of Anglo-Irish anthropology marks the centenary of the Haddon Library in Cambridge

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on September 25, 2020 – 9:48 am

Filed under Curatorial Projects, History of Anthropology

old tropes & new histories: an “Irish” reading of the Haddon Papers

is the theme of a 15 minute presentation by Dr Ciarán Walsh marking the centenary of the establishment of the Haddon Library. The event is part of Cambridge University’s Alumni Festival 2020 and is especially significant given that Walsh’s groundbreaking study of Haddon’s role in anglo-Irish anthropology started at the Alumni Festival in 2013.

The Irish section of the Haddon Library in 2013

Aidan Baker, the Haddon Librarian, invited Walsh to curate an exhibition of photographs from the Irish Ethnographic Survey as part of Alumni Festival 2013. The photo above captures the low level of interest in Ireland at the time, but, in preparation for the opening, Aidan searched the “locked room” for Haddon’s personal copy of the seminal “Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway”, which the Royal Irish Academy published in 1893. For some reason Haddon didn’t keep a copy, but Aidan found his file on the Aran Islands, which had been ‘missing’ for a century or so.

Aidan Baker, Haddon Librarian, with Haddon’s file on the Aran Islands, which was separated from the main body of his papers in 1913 and found in the Haddon Library in 2013.

That file contained ten pages from a journal that Haddon kept during his first visit to the islands in 1890, a manuscript of a commentary for the ethnographic slideshow that he performed on his return to Dublin, a sketchbook, photographic plates from “Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway,” a map and other documents.

This triggered a sustained reading of the Irish component of the Haddon Papers in Cambridge University Library, guided initially by Dr John Pickles. That began in 2014 and culminated in a radical review of Haddon’s contribution to the development of Anglo-Irish anthropology in the 1890s: a major piece of doctoral research (funded by the Irish Research Council) that has just been completed.,

A small part of that research will be presented in this exploration of new facets of the life and career of Alfred Cord Haddon:

https://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/festival/events/the-haddon-library-at-100-–-new-facets-of-alfred-haddon

Maynoothy University awards Ciarán Walsh a Doctor of Philosophy (Arts) Degree.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on September 15, 2020 – 4:04 pm

Filed under Curatorial Projects

Ciarán Walsh and Nuala Finn “attend” an online awards ceremony during which Maynooth University conferred Walsh with a Doctor of Philosophy (Arts) degree.

Dr Mark Maguire, Dean of Social Sciences at Maynooth University, announcing the award in a video posted on YOUTUBE.

Walsh’s research, funded by the Irish Research Council, uses the scientific study of race in an historical context to create a scientifically robust platform to challenge racism in a contemporary context, creating an interface between academic anthropology and civil society activism by employing a range of public engagement strategies.

It has been widely recognised as an original contribution to the history of anthropology, challenging a long-held consensus that anthropology, as practiced in in Ireland in the 1890s, was a uniformly evolutionist and colonial enterprise. Walsh argues that Haddon was influenced by anarchists and ant-imperialists and developed photography as an instrument of anti-colonial activism, which functions as an analogue of contemporary anti-racism campaigns.

A detail of Haddon’s photograph of Gododo, taken in the Torres Strait in 1888, juxtaposed with a screen grab form Celia Xakriabia’s video calling for an end to “legislated” genocide in the Amazon.

Haddon was primarily a photographer who used the study of folk-lore, art and dance – which he defined in 1895 as the study of the “deepest and most subtle ideas of mankind” – to humanise and socialise anthropology, which was restricted to the anatomical study of the natural history of the human species within the academy.

Haddon operated on an extramural basis, jumping the academic wall and working through a network of folklore and naturalist organisations, becoming an important resource for cultural nationalists in Ireland. This brought him into conflict with the academy, a confrontation that prefigures current debates about the relationship between academic anthropology and anthropologists who operate civic society and humanitarian contexts.

Professor David Prendergast, Dr Ciarán Walsh, and Mark Maguire.

To conclude, Walsh’s study of The Skull Measuring Business represents an original and formally innovative study of the issue of racism in the 1890s, which, 130 years on, has become a defining issue in contemporary Ireland. It also represents a novel contribution to debates about the practice and purpose of anthropology, a debate that is as old as anthropology itself and remains as ‘lively’ as it was during Haddon’s time in Ireland.

Ciarán Walsh joins RTÉ Brainstorm as a contributor

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on August 28, 2020 – 3:35 pm

Filed under Comment, History of Anthropology, Journalism

Ciarán Walsh has published his first article on Brainstorm, an online platform for researchers and academic that is manage by RTÉ.

The article asks if readers have ever thought about the political significance of the shape of their heads and goes on to make a connection between Victorian anthropology in Ireland and facial recognition systems in use today, killing a couple of sacred cows along the way.

For More:

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0811/1158475-skull-measuring-head-hunter-alfred-haddon-history-ireland/

one editor, two curators & one new history of anthropology

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on June 20, 2020 – 12:06 pm

Filed under Advocacy and Activism, Anthropology | Curatorial Projects, Journalism

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/the-victorian-curator-who-railed-against-racism-and-imperialism-39297723.html

Today, the Irish Independent publishes a segment of my research on the skull-measuring-business in Ireland in the 1890s. Commissioned by Jon Smith, Editor of the Review at the Irish Independent, this article looks back at a column that Alfred Cort Haddon wrote for the newspaper in 1893 and 1894, when it traded as The Daily Irish Independent.

Haddon worked as a curator in the Natural History Museum in Dublin and, at first glance, he seemed to be writing a general guide to the collections in the Museum for the readers of the newspaper. However, a closer reading reveals a wonderfully subversive allegory that anticipates the Black Lives Matter movement and Tribal Voice, the 2020 anti-genocide online campaign co-ordinated by Survival International.

It is fitting that the current version of The Daily Irish Independent should publish this piece and, in the process, completely subvert the history of anthropology in Ireland.

So, to participate in a small moment of history, go out and buy the Irish Independent today.

5 years, 68 days, 6 hours, 31 minutes, & some seconds …

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on June 12, 2020 – 10:45 am

Filed under Curatorial Projects

I walked into the Anthropology Dept in Maynooth University at 9am on February 2, 2015 to begin a PhD and at 4.31pm yesterday afternoon Mark, the postman, delivered a letter confirming that I had been awarded the Doctoral Degree by the Academic Council of the University.

Many thanks to my wife and partner-in-PhD Nuala Finn.

To Dáithí De Mórdha who started the ball rolling in 2010, Aidan Baker and John D. Pickles who opened the archives in Cambridge to me in 2013, and the team in Maynooth who kept this project on the road and moving forward: Mark Maguire, Andrea Valova, Hana Červinková, David Prendergast, Denise Erdman, Jacqui Mullaly, and Conor Wilkinson. Thanks also to my partners in this project: Siobhán Ward and Martina Hennessy, the guardians of the skull-measuring lab in TCD, and my enterprise mentor and academic guide Rob Kevlihan.

There are many more people who made this PhD happen and a full set of acknowledgements can be read here.

Tim Robinson’s Connemara: TG4 on 10|06|2020

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on June 3, 2020 – 5:32 pm

Filed under Ethnography, Film

Tim Robinson’s *Connemara* with a “Connemara stone” from Ballyheigue Beach.

Things happen in threes, so they say.

Cathy Galvin, a poet and journalist whose family emigrated from Mason’s Island in Connemara, contacted me about Charles R. Browne’s ethnographic study of Carna. Cathy also sent me an essay by Kevin T. James on the meaning of “emptiness” in Connemara.

James built his essay around an entry in the visitors’ book of Mongan’s Hotel, the pub/shop/hotel operated by Martin Mongan in Carna in the 1890s. Mongan is an intriguing character and, as usual, I consulted Tim Robinson on Mongan, Mason’s Island, and the tricky issue of the emptiness of Connemara.

I had just begun re-reading Robinson’s Connemara: listening to the wind (first published in 2006) when I went for a walk on Ballyheigue Beach and found several “Connemara Stones” in the intertidal zone, a favourite haunt of Tim Robinson’s. “Connemara Stones” are erratics, granite rocks that were picked up by a glacier in Connemara and carried south until the ice melted and dropped the stones at various sites in Kerry (see the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 119, 2 (2008): 137-152).

Synchronicity or what?

Tim Robinson 1935-2020 (Photograph: Nicolas Fève).

Then, TG4 announced the screening on Weds June 10, 2020 of a new film that it is broadcasting in memory of Tim Robinson and his wife and longtime collaborator Mairéad Robinson. The film explores the Robinsons’ topographical study of Connemara over thirty years.

Tim Robinson’s Connemara: listening to the wind is an intriguing book that has at its core an environmentalist’s awareness of the tension between emptiness and settlement over several centuries of social, political, and cultural disruption, a theme that he developed in a series of walks through the landscape.

It will be interesting to see what that looks like on film.

Remembering Tim Robinson

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on April 6, 2020 – 1:18 pm

Filed under Comment

Tim Robinson, whose death was announced on Friday, was a constant presence in the work I have been doing on the Aran Islands. Tim launched my exhibition of the photographs of John Millington Synge on Inis Meáin in 2009, an event that Giulia Bruna has described in her book on J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival.

Deirdre McQuillan interviewed Tim on the occasion and quoted his observation that, in Synge’s hands, the camera turns “itself back to front and photographs the artist. Synge’s sitters . . . do not confront the camera, they present themselves to it frankly and trustingly. And that is the stance of Synge himself in relation to the countryfolk he interprets in his own image.’ (The Irish Times)

Digital scan of the negative of Synge’s photograph of Mairtín Mac Donnchadha, “an islander of Inishmaan” (© TCD).

That statement could apply to Tim himself, but it was the quality of his scholarship and his meticulous rendering of local detail – in his map making and his writing – that made him an indispensable guide to the Aran Islands and Connemara.

May he rest in peace.

FOLK: an ethnography of a community who built a theatre in North Kerry.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on February 18, 2020 – 11:14 am

Filed under Ethnography, FOLK

Jude Kelly, founder of Women of the World Festival (WOW) and Pat Ahern, founder of Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland (Photo: Ciarán Walsh)

Pat Ahern and I have started recording a long conversation about the building of a state of the art theatre in Tralee, which opened in 1991 with the performance of a folk theatre manifesto that was devised and directed by Pat.

We have taken the name of that show – Forging the Dance – as a working theme for an ethnographic study of a group of people who developed a style of folk theatre over three decades, building a complex infrastructure that was designed to (a) sustain a tradition of song, music and dance related to folklife and custom in rural Ireland and (b) create a repertoire of folk theatre that captured the spirit of farming communities in culturally distinct districts.

Justin Walsh in the forge on the set of *Ding Dong Dedero, Forging the Dance*, 1991.

Pat Ahern aged around two. He is wearing a *cóta beag*, the traditional petticoat worn by young boys in the west of Ireland. His mother Maggie is standing in the doorway.

The recordings are designed to complement a personal archive that Pat has assembled and University College Cork (UCC) has digitised. So far the conversations have tracked the development of a form of folk theatre that was closely related to the rhythms and sounds of life in a small, farming community in North Kerry.

As a small boy, his mother took Pat to see a travelling theatre company in the local village hall. The experience triggered a fascination with theatrical form and he began to produce plays with his siblings and neighbours’ children in a hay-shed on the family farm. This was the beginning of a folk theatre movement that became the National Folk Theatre of Ireland and culminated in the construction of the first new-build theatre in the history of the state.

The construction of the new home of the National Folk Theatre in Tralee. The theatre and arts centre opened in 1991.

Pat Ahern and Liam Tarrant dancing at the opening of the *Teach Siamsa* Training Centre in Finuge in 1974 (Still from a film of the opening that has been posted online by Paul Kennelly).

Along the way we have explored the development of a theatre company in a former cinema in Tralee and the construction of training centres in north and west Kerry; in townlands where traditional music, song and dance were strong. As Pat puts it: “We went north for the dance and west for the language.” The idea was that these centres would keep the theatre rooted in vibrant and distinct folk cultures and communities.

Jude Kelly came to Ireland in 1975 as a student of drama in search of a new form of storytelling. She heard about the folk movement in Kerry and visited Pat in Finuge. She was profoundly influenced by the community-based, theatrical form he was developing in the training centres and presenting on stage in Tralee.

She met up with Pat again last Friday (February 14, 2020) and we recorded a long conversation about identity, folk, and theatre practice. It was the first of many such conversations that will tell story of the people who built a theatre in Tralee, a sort of long-format ethnographic study of the folk of North Kerry that will be delivered online (details to be announced).

In the meantime, the plan is to produce a short-form documentary, developing a story that was begun by Dermod McCarthy’s in Bímís ag Rinnce – Let us Dance, the 1975 Radharc Film that is listed in the British Film Institute (BFI) archive.