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Author Archives: Ciaran Walsh

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 1935-2020 (Photograph: Nicolas Fève).

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.


Paddy White performing at the opening of Teach Siamsa Finuge in 1974. Paddy used the chairs for support while he danced, but even so, he was the best exponent of the North Kerry style of dance developed by Jerry Molyneaux. Martin Whelan, the first General Manager of the National Folk Theatre, is standing in the background (Stills from A Radharc Film directed by Dermod McCarthy and filmed by Brian O’Reilly)
Still from a film posted online by Paul Kennelly

Turning research into knowledge: EASA (Anthropology) Conference, Lisbon 2020

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on February 17, 2020 – 11:57 am
Filed under Curatorial Projects

www.curator.ie in the field: Peadar Mór Ó Conghaile, Ciarán Walsh and Muiris Ó Conghaile taking a break during filming on Inis Meáin.

Do Haddon’s photographs of the Aran Islands change the history of anthropology as we know it?

I will put this question to historians of anthropology at a major conference in Lisbon in July 2020, when I present my research in a paper on Old Tropes / New Histories: an “Irish” reading of Haddon’s ethnographies.

I make the bold claim that the social-documentary approach to photography that Haddon adopted in his ethnographic studies of the Aran Islands represents the roll-out of an innovative, visual anthropology that he developed as a vehicle for anti-colonial activism in the 1890s.

That fits the theme of the 16th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). The conference will consider ‘such social, political, material and cultural currents in and beyond Europe, covering both the academic and ethnographic locations in which anthropologists work, in order to consider the ethical, political and intellectual challenges to anthropology that they pose.’


Thomas Fitzpatrick, 1894, Arran Isles. Weekly Freeman & National Press, April 21. See L. Perry Curtis’s book on The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland 1845-1910 (Fig. 38), which was published by UCD Press (University College Dublin) in 2011.

My paper addresses the sub-theme of imperial, colonial, and decolonial relations and legacies: taking the symbolic importance of the Aran Islands in the political campaign for home rule – decolonisation – in the 1890s as a starting point and projecting forward to the capacity of anthropologists to respond meaningfully to the contemporary challenges posed by climate change, habitation destruction, colonisation, forced migration, and genocide.

This builds on the work that a group of us will be doing at the Anthropology and Geography Conference in London in June 2020, but this paper is more historical in focus. It will be presented at a session that has been convened by the History of Anthropology Network to reassess ‘in creative ways ethnographic works produced by observers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose writings may regain importance in the eclectic futures of the discipline.’

I will make the case that Haddon’s photographs are full of surprises, some of which raise awkward questions about the history of anthropology. What if, for instance, some of the tropes generated by historicists who framed the history of anthropology before Malinowski – whose Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) is generally regarded as marking the start of modern anthropology – are based on a misreading of the archive?”


Haddon took two photographs of Michael Faherty and two women from Inis Meáin (Inishmaan) in 1892, noting in The Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway that that ‘Faherty refused to be measured, and the women would not even tell us their names.’ Nevertheless, they posed for two photographs and flicking between the two, one gets some sense of the nature of the engagement between the photographer and the islanders, which is very different from the sort of colonial encounter described by most historians of the history of photography in anthropology. (Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin).

My focus is on Haddon and his experimental ethnographic practice in Ireland in the first half of the 1890s. I will argue that a generation of historians of anthropology have misinterpreted Haddon’s fieldwork in Ireland, presenting as evidence an “Irish” reading of Haddon’s photographs, journals, and correspondence relating to his travels in the west of Ireland between 1890 and 1895. This is a novel vantage point from which the history of Anglo-Irish anthropology looks very, very different.

From this perspective, Haddon’s “Irish” ethnographies look like a synthesis of anarchist geography, newly developed social survey methods, and a radical attitude to village communalism: rather than the preoccupation with race, bracketed by evolution and colonialism, that sustains some well-established tropes in the historiography of anthropology.

Furthermore, I will argue that Haddon’s ethnographies have to be “seen” in the context of decolonisation in Ireland in the 1890s, making the case that Haddon’s photo-ethnographic practice was an innovative form of anti-imperial activism that emerged from a long tradition of humanitarian activism in 19th century anthropology.

That, I will propose, amounts to a more nuanced history of anthropology, which remains utterly relevant as anthropologists – practical and academic – contemplate the challenges posed by globalisation and accelerating climate change.

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skeletons in the cupboard: anthropology and the diversity debate



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



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



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