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curator.ie finds oldest surviving photo of Skellig

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on August 8, 2023 – 4:35 pm

Filed under Curatorial Projects, History of Anthropology, Photography

William Mercer, c. 1868, St Michael’s Church and Cell, digital scan of gelatine silver print. Permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.

“Skellig provided J. J. Abrams with the perfect location for the birthplace of the Jedi. The challenge of filming Star Wars on a steep rock twelve kilometres out in the Atlantic has added enormously to the mystique of a place with a long tradition of pilgrims scaling its twin peaks. 150 years before Abrams landed on Skellig, Edwin Wyndham-Quin noticed a monastic complex on the first ordnance survey map of the rock and included it in his study of pagan forts, Christian hermitages and mediaeval churches. William Mercer photographed each site between 1866 and 1869 and the discovery in April 2023 of his print of “St Michael’s Church and Cell” provides an opportunity to revisit an adventure in photography that surpasses Abrams’ determination to film on the rock.“

For more on this story go to the Irish Examiner.

Inishbofin burial: the most import anthropological event in Ireland since 1930s?

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on July 6, 2023 – 11:14 am

Filed under Advocacy and Activism, History of Anthropology, Stolen Skulls

Archaeological excavation at St Colman’s Monastery on Inishbofin in preparation for the return and burial of ancestral remains stolen in 1890 and held in the Anatomy Dept TCD since 1892 (photo: Marie Coyne)

The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy Dept at Trinity College, University of Dublin at 11am on Wednesday 12 July and, following a funeral service at noon in the college chapel, will begin the journey home. The burial will take place at 1pm on Sunday 16 July. See www.inishbofin.com for details.

Christopher Day (top) making the coffin in the same way that his great grand uncle James Cunnane (bottom) made coffins in Inishbofin in the 1960’s (photos: Marie Coyne).

This is the first repatriation project of its kind in Ireland and is probably the most important anthropological event since the Harvard Anthropological Mission to the Irish Free State in the 1930s. To begin with, the story of the ‘stolen skulls of Inishbofin’ captured the public imagination in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter Movement and generated extensive media interest in the history of anthropology in Ireland. Furthermore, the controversy triggered a critical engagement with the idea of anthropology at a community level and this will have a major impact on how institutions deal with communities in relation to colonial legacies. For instance, the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group at TCD contested the use of ‘repatriation’ to denote ‘return and burial’ because, ironically, of its unwelcome colonial connotations in an Irish context. The debate that followed clarified important aspects of the legislation governing the retention of human remains, not least (a) the distinction between archaeological and ethnological collections from the colonial era and (b) the automatic right of return for burial in the case of the latter. The controversy also raised serious questions about the ‘evidence based’ methodology employed by the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group, which ultimately had to concede the unconditional right of communities in Inishbofin, Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay to have ancestral remains returned for burial.

The Inishbofin remains will be buried as close as possible to St Colman’s Monastery, where they rested until Haddon and Dixon stole them in 1890. The site was chosen because of the low risk of disturbing earlier, unmarked burials – the source of the remains – or any settlement associated with the monastery. Nevertheless, archaeologist Franc Miles from Archaeology and Built Heritage supervised the opening of the grave by Ryan Lash, John Burke, John Cunnane, John Michael Coyne, Ryan Coyne and Máirtín Lavelle.

Marie Coyne documented the process in the following slideshow.

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

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/

Brexit & Folklore: a Conference in Derby | March 29 2019

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on January 31, 2019 – 4:07 pm

Filed under History of Anthropology

Clara Patterson’s photograph of children playing a game in Ballymiscaw, County Down, c.1894. Patterson was encouraged by Alfred Cort Haddon to document folk customs in Ireland.

Folklore, Nationalism, Home Rule, and Brexit

Ciarán Walsh will be taking part in a conference on the relation between folklore and nationalism. Folklore and the Nation is timed to coincide with the exit of the UK from the EU. It’s being organised by the Folklore Society (FLS) and hosted by the University of Derby. It kicks off on the afternoon of Friday 29 March 2019.

His paper deals with ethnicity, nationalism and folklore, drawing on a forgotten anti-imperial movement in British folklore. It begins with an anti-colonial speech delivered by Alfred Haddon in Ipswich in 1895. Haddon was aligned with the volkskunde wing of the folklore movement in Ireland and opened his speech by acknowledging nationalist efforts to disengage from political and economic union with Britain.

A family of politicians gathered around the coffin of the Home Rule Bill; a presentation cartoon from the ‘St Stephens’ Review’, 12 June 1886. Colour lithograph
© The Trustees of the British Museum.

Haddon entered anthropology through folklore, equating the destruction of native customs in subjugated territories with the loss of personal identity, ethnicity, and, ultimately, nationhood. Haddon spoke to Patrick Geddes and Havelock Ellis about reconstituting anthropology as a vehicle for radical anti-colonial activism.

They were inspired by the anarchist geography of Kropotkin, the radical ethnology of Reclus, and the “Zeitgeist” of Gomme (FLS). This conference looks like the place to remember an engagement between Irish nationalists, English folklorists and stateless anarchists /ethnologists on the brink of Ireland’s exit from Britain.

Anarchy and Ethnology at the Irish Conference of Folklore and Ethnology 2018

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on November 14, 2018 – 9:12 am

Filed under Conference Paper, History of Anthropology, Photography, Research, Science Week

The Go Between:

Alfred Cort Haddon and a forgotten engagement between Irish Folklore and Anarchist Ethnology.

Ciarán Walsh, Maynooth University in partnership with the Irish Research Council, TCD School of Medicine, and Shanahan Research Centre.

Irish Conference of Folklore and Ethnology | November 17, 2018 | Belfast

This is a short clip – in GIF format– of a minute or so of footage that was shot in the Torres Strait in 1898, three years after the invention of the cine camera. Liz McNiven, writing for the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia’s (NFSA) Australian Screen website, attributes it to Alfred Cort Haddon and explains that it is a performance the Malu-Bomai ceremony that was performed by men in the eastern Torres Straits.

This is a photograph taken by Clara Patterson. It shows a group of schoolchildren playing “Poor Mary” in the townland of Ballymiscaw in County Down. The photograph is one of a series that was shown at a meeting of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club in November 1893. J. R. R. Adams identified the game as “Poor Mary” in The Linen Hall Review [Vol. 10, No. 3 (Winter, 1993)] and described a variation of it in Ulster Folklife [Vol 37, 1991].

What is the connection between these images?

If I was to say Pyotr Kropotkin, the Russian geographer and anarchist, it might seem a bit farfetched. However, there is hard evidence to support a claim that anarchist ideas influenced Clara Patterson’s contribution to the first meetings of organised folklore collection in Ulster. That begs another question. How likely is it that Clara Patterson had met Kropotkin?

Pyotr Kropotkin (1841-1921), the anarchist prince and Russian exile in London.

Unlikely, but the influence of Kropotkin can be explained by looking at another connection, that between Haddon and Patterson. The footage of the Torres Strait islanders establishes Haddon as a pioneer of visual ethnography and illustrates his relentless advocacy of photography as a superior form of ethnographic representation. Clara Patterson’s photograph of “Poor Mary” anticipates Haddon’s film of the Malu-Bomai ceremony by 5 years.

This is not accidental. Clara Patterson studied zoology and learned fieldcraft under Haddon in Belfast in 1892. She would have been aware of the photographs he had taken in the Torres Strait in 1888 and 1889 and similar photographs of folklife that were taken in the Aran Islands one year later.

Haddon had read Kropotkin in 1890 and adopted Kropotkin’s proposition that the study of social organisation and customary practice proceeds from the simple to the complex. Patterson repeated the proposition in her presentation to the field club in 1893. Haddon, clearly, acted as go-between for Patterson and Kropotkin and, as such, between anarchist geography and folklore collection in Ulster.

That is the main claim of a paper I will be presenting at the Irish Conference of Folklore and Ethnology in Belfast on November 17, 2018. The paper takes as its starting point an entry in Haddon’s “little black book,” a notebook containing the names and addresses of his network of contacts in the 1890s.

Measuring heads in the Aran Islands, Charles R. Browne and Alfred Cort Haddon in action in September, 1892. Photo: Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

Douglas Hyde was listed and the question has to be asked: Why would the person who gave a speech “On the Need for the de-Anglicisation of the Irish Nation” in 1892 be listed among the contacts of an “Anglo-Saxon” who measured the skulls of “Celts” in the Aran Islands, also in 1892? The next question, then, is what has this got to do with Clara Patterson?

That question will be addressed in Belfast, 125 years after Patterson’s long forgotten act of solidarity with the Islanders of the Torres Strait.