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A Very English Savage | some loose ends, updates and errata etc.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on November 29, 2023 – 12:15 pm

Filed under A Very English Savage, Comment, Curatorial Projects, Photography

A Very English Savage is aimed at a general reader and, so, breaks many conventions associated with academic publishing. curator.ie goes one step further in introducing an online component on the Ballymaclinton blog site. This picks up any loose ends, errata etc in the book as well as adding additional research that followed the end of writing. It also creates an online space for engagement with readers of the book.

As far as motivation goes, lack of space combined with the complexity of the ground covered meant that I included heavily edited versions of some arguments in A Very English Savage, with the inevitable consequence of loose ends. That prompted this experiment in hybrid, interactive and engaged publishing. After all, that is what Haddon did in the 1890s when he combined journalism and slide shows as a work around to limits of the publication of his photographs and his unorthodox, anticolonial views on the nature of anthropology.

A montage of two portraits of Alfred Cort Haddon and John Millington Synge. Left. Haddon on board the S. S. Brandon in 1885 (detail), with permission Royal Irish Academy © RIA. Haddon is dressed in sailor's outfit and soft hat and stares off camera. Right. Synge in Paris in 1897 (curator.ie collection). Synge is dressed as a fashionable young man about town.

Left. Haddon on board the S. S. Brandon in 1885 (detail), with permission Royal Irish Academy © RIA. Right. Synge in Paris in 1897 (curator.ie collection).

The first ‘loose end’ on the list is, of course, Synge and his photography. That is where this whole project started way back in 2009 and, post publication, remains an active area of investigation. I propose in A Very English Savage that Haddon’s work in the Aran Islands provided an ethnographic baseline for later work by literary modernists like Synge and cultural nationalists like Hyde. However, the evidence presented was limited by space to a series of outlines and the Ballymaclinton blog provides the space to publish the notes that furnished those outlines as well additional research carried out in 2023.

A Very English Savage | ‘the head-hunter’ and ‘the playboy will be followed by updates on the importance of the field club movement as a contact point for Haddon, Synge and Hyde. The series will also include posts about the cameras used by Haddon and Synge in the field, along with separate posts on the twenty five photographs featured in the Haddon and the Aran Islands exhibition currently on show in the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Other ‘loose ends‘ include what it meant to become an anthropologist in 2020, when a stand off between a humanitarian tradition of engaged anthropology and an academic discipline of political utility achieved a level of controversy in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. This part of the series will pick up on what it means to engage with the history of anthropology at a time when the very idea of anthropology is contested and, so, add a critical and contemporary edge to the series. That strand kicks off on 4 December 2023 with the inaugural, online conference of the History of Anthropology Network.

John Millington Synge took this photograph of a young man and a boy posing alongside a drystone wall that is traditional in the Aran Islands. Both are dressed in traditional home spun vest, shirt, waist coat and trousers. The man wears rawhide sandals while the boy wears boots. Lilo Stephens identified the man as Martin McDonagh. photo credit: John Millington Synge. 1898, Digital photographs from scanned silver gelatine negatives (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton 2009). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin. Alt text by Ciarán Walsh, curator.ie.

John Millington Synge. 1898, Digital photograph from scanned silver gelatine negative (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton 2009). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.

Twenty five photographs that change the history of anthropology

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on October 30, 2023 – 1:08 pm

Filed under Anthropology, Curatorial Projects, Photography, Research

A. F. Dixon, Untitled, 1890. Digital print from scan of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Rooney, 2019). The original negative is held in in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin.
© curator.ie

‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ is an exhibition of twenty five photographs that builds on Ciarán Walsh’s newly published book on Alfred Cort Haddon’s work as a photographer and anthropologist in Ireland in the 1890s. A Very English Savage will be launched in the Royal Anthropological Institute on 31 October 2023. More at Ballymaclinton.

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‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition in Royal Anthropological Institute | London | Oct 2023

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on October 11, 2023 – 8:54 am

Filed under Anthropology, Curatorial Projects, Photography

A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Walsh and Ciarán Rooney, 2019). The original negative is held in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin. © curator.ie.

I can’t tell you all the excursions we made in Aran. it wd be as tedious for you to read as for me to write suffice it to say that Dixon & I left very little unseen & what with sketches & photographs we have a good deal on paper.

A. C. Haddon describes the beginning of visual anthropology in a journal he kept aboard the S. S. Fingal during a survey of fishing ground off the west coast of Ireland in 1890

Previously unseen photographs of the Aran Islands feature in an exhibition Ciarán Walsh and Andrei Nacu curated for the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opens on 15 October 2023 and features twenty five photographs that are organised around Haddon’s first ethnographic account of the Aran Islands, which he presented as a slideshow in Dublin at the end of 1890.

The photographs challenge the idea that anthropologists like Haddon were, by default almost, preoccupied with evolution bracketed by race and colonialism while their counterparts in cultural nationalism and literary modernism became fascinated by Island dwellers. John Millington Synge’s writing is usually presented as the antithesis of Haddon’s science but this exhibition points to a common interest in social documentary photography that manifests a deeper connection between the ‘Head-hunter’ and the ‘Playboy‘.

Haddon and Dixon spent a week in the islands in 1890 and they documented the extraordinary glaciokarst landscape, the people, their way of life, customs, folklore and numerous archaeological sites. On his return to Dublin Haddon used ten of Dixon’s photographs in a slideshow titled ‘The Aran Islands’, the first of six slideshows that included ‘Ethnographical Studies in the West of Ireland’ in the Anthropological Institute in 1894. He renamed this ‘On the People of Western Ireland and their Mode of Life’ when he showed it at a meeting of the anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science later in the year. Given the high profile this topic gained in the Home Rule crisis in 1895, the change registers a the overlap between Haddon’s photo-ethnography, his anticolonial activism and the Home rule crisis.

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 R. J. 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 here is a kit-built quarter-plate from the same period and matches the negative holders Dixon used (foreground). In 2019, Walsh commissioned Ciarán Rooney (Filmbank) to print a new set of photographs from digital scans of the negatives (photo Ciarán Walsh).

Haddon summarised his photo-ethnographic experiments in a manifesto published in 1899 and re-issued in 1912, but the document entered modern anthropology as it was becoming what Margaret Mead later called ‘a discipline of words’. Furthermore, a misplaced historiographical focus on Haddon’s career in zoology obscured his interest in art and photography and so masked the beginning of visual anthropology.

This exhibition brings us back to that beginning: Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. It features ten new prints from Dixon’s negatives of Haddon’s slideshow and these are contextualised by photographs from various archives in Dublin, Belfast and Cambridge that point to Haddon’s influences and impact, most of which have never been exhibited before. They include digital prints of the oldest surviving photograph of Skellig Michael (1868), a study of folk dance by Clara Patterson (1893) and a still from Haddon’s film of the last dance of the Malu Zogo-Le (1898). Synge first met Haddon in 1886 and and is represented by a photograph that registers the latter’s influence, which, in turn, indexes Haddon’s extraordinary modernism.

Walsh explores these developments in more detail in an RAI Research Seminar in the Royal Anthropological Institute on 31 October 2023 after which his book Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage will be launched. For details / registration see the events page on the Institute’s website.

J. M. Synge. 1898. Islanders of Inishmaan. Digital print from scan of glass plate negative (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton, Gill Whelan 2009). TCD MS11332_28_b courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin

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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

Research Update | October 2018

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on October 3, 2018 – 1:59 pm

Filed under Anthropology, Research

Reading Haddon …

Four years ago, I was given the job of finding out what exactly was going on in the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory, which was established in TCD in 1891. My research has focussed on the Laboratory’s programme of ethnographic surveys in the west of Ireland, which were conducted by “head-hunters” Alfred Cort Haddon and Charles R. Browne between 1892 and 1900.

The main question is this: what do the surveys tell us about the development of (1) social documentary photography in Ireland and (2) a western imaginary based on island life in the west of Ireland? My research also considers the ethical and practical implications of placing material from the laboratory–including anatomical specimens–into the public domain, especially in the context of debates about the relation between body, image, and identity in contemporary Ireland.

BBC Northern Ireland on location in “Old” Anatomy TCD in 2018. Brendan Holland and Martina Hennessy, TCD School of Medicine, discuss the relevance of historic anatomical/anthropological specimens to current medical research (see the Giant Gene)

Four years on the project is entering its final phase. The tricky task of converting extensive work on primary sources in Dublin and Cambridge is well underway and slowly taking shape as a text. This text is structured around the idea of murderous, little facts from the hidden spaces of anthropology in Ireland. These facts have produced some interesting results; not least the need for some radical new thinking about the history of anthropology as a whole.

Ugly Little Facts: Aidan Baker, Librarian of the Haddon Library in Cambridge, with a collection of papers relating to the Aran Islands. The documents were placed in an envelope in 1913 and “lost.” They were rediscovered in 2013 in a search for Haddon’s notes and/or other papers relating to “The Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway” (Haddon & Browne 1893).

Murderous Little Facts

The origin of this trope–ugly little facts–comes from an unlikely source. Thomas Henry Huxley is credited with coining the phrase in a conversation recalled by Francis Galton in his memoirs (1908). Herbert Spencer revealed in conversation that he once wrote a tragedy. Huxley declared that the ‘catastrophe had to be a ‘beautiful theory killed by a nasty ugly little fact.’

My theory–or historiographical framework perhaps–is that the disciplinary history of anthropology operates around a foundational trope. Haddon is represented as taking anthropology out of the armchair and into the field in 1898; after he had escaped from the Darwinian backwater that was Dublin in the 1890s. That claim is not supported by facts in the Haddon papers and related sources but, repeated often enough, it has become a form of disciplinary folklore that has compressed the history of anthropology and circumscribed narratives like that of the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory.

Reading Haddon: A small section of the Haddon Papers in Cambridge University Library.

The strategy I have adopted in response is to use overlooked primary sources as “tropocidal” facts; using ugly, little facts gleaned from the forgotten spaces of anthropology to kill off the armchair trope and suggest some alternative narratives. The Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory, in this scenario, becomes (1) the site of a struggle for disciplinary authority between conservative (biological) and radical (sociological) elements within “organised” anthropology in the 1890s, (2) an agent of the development of an equally radical, photo-ethnographic practice in fieldwork associated with the Laboratory and (3) the starting point for John Millington Synge’s exploration of peasant life in the West of Ireland.

Photography as ethnography: a photograph taken by Browne on the Great Blasket Island in 1897. The man in the middle is Tomás Ó Criomhtain, An tOileánach, one of the most celebrated figures of the Blasket Island Community and an important figure in folklore studies in Ireland. Photograph courtesy of the Board of TCD.

Forgotten Spaces

This study is grounded in the discovery of artefacts, records, and photographs associated with the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory, which prompted a new reading of Haddon’s association with it. In 2014 Siobhán Ward of TCD started unpacking tea chests containing a substantial collection of historical material from the School of Anatomy. This material included specimens, instruments, records, paper and a spectacular collection of glass plate negatives dating from 1890. This material had ‘disappeared’ in 1948 when it was placed in long-term storage under the theatre in the “Old” Anatomy Building.

Reconstruction of the anthropological collection began in February 2016 and the contents of the tea chests have since been recorded, sorted, and tallied with related material in other collections in Ireland and UK. It wasn’t long before a gap opened up between the conventional history of pre-modern anthropology in Ireland and the ugly little facts —documentary and material— that had emerged from “Old” Anatomy.

“Unpacking” the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory in 2016. An early photograph showing the anatomical and anthropological material discovered in the “Old” Anatomy building in 2014. The records of the Laboratory and associated artefacts are visible in the foreground. They include the schedules of measurements taken in the Aran Islands in 1892, Daniel J. Cunningham’s cast of the cranial topography of a chimpanzee, and some of the psychometric instruments designed by Francis Galton.

Finally …

“Unpacking” the Laboratory has become, unexpectedly, a confrontation with the historiography of anthropology. This has meant spending just over two years reading what Haddon wrote – rather than reading about what Haddon was thought to have done – and this has produced some interesting new narratives.

This part of the project will conclude in 2019 … hopefully.

Ciarán Walsh | Oct 3, 2018

Jane W. Shackleton: Pioneering Photographer and Unsung Hero of the Gaelic Revival

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on October 28, 2015 – 8:12 pm

Filed under Journalism, Photography, Research

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Jane W. Shackleton’s singular contribution to the Gaelic Revival has been seriously undervalued. Ciarán Walsh takes another look at the work of this pioneering photographer. In his latest post on the Ballymaclinton blog Walsh questions why Shackleton’s career as a pioneer of social documentary photography been seriously undervalued.

Appalling vistas: TG4 broadcasts series on social documentary photography in Ireland in the 1890s

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on October 24, 2015 – 3:37 pm

Filed under Curatorial Projects, Journalism, Photography, Research

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About 10 years go I came across this photograph. The caption suggests that it was taken during the Famine of 1845-9 in Ireland. It wasn’t. True, it is very similar to the scenes recorded in cabins throughout the west of Ireland and graphic illustrations of such scenes were published in illustrated newspapers at the time. There is no record, however, of any photograph of people dying of starvation in the 1845-9 famine. Indeed a photograph like this would have been impossible in the early stages of photography – invented less than a decade before the famine. As a result he photograph has been dismissed by some people as a fake, the harsh pool of light suggesting a studio staging.

I set out to look for the original and test its authenticity. I never found it, but I found the next best thing – the original document in which the photograph was first published. The photograph is entitled ‘A Sick Family Carraroe’ and is one of 18 photographs that were published in a pamphlet entitled ‘Relief of Distress in the West and South of Ireland, 1898.’ The photographs were taken in April during an inspection of conditions in Connemara by Thomas L. Esmonde, Inspector of the Manchester Committee. He was reacting to reports of famine in Connemara, what locals call the Second Famine or Gorta Beag. He inspected a dozen houses in which he found people lying on the floor, covered with rags and old sacks and barely able to move from a combination of influenza and hunger.

The search for the photograph became the basis of an idea for a TV series on social documentary photography or, to put it another way, a social history of documentary photography in Ireland in the 19th century. I pitched the idea to a producer and a broadcaster in 2011 and funding was eventually secured from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland in 2014 for a six part series based on my research. TG4 will begin broadcasting Trid an Lionsa or ‘Through the Lens’ tomorrow Sunday 25 October 2015.

I haven’t been involved in in the production itself, just the research into historical social documentary photography and the people who work in this area. This material has been “translated into television” by Cathal Watters (Oíche na Gaoithe Móire) and follows the TG4 controversial format of presenter driven, on-the-road info-tainment. (http://wp.me/p56Bmf-5g).

I have no idea what to expect. Like a colleague I will be watching from behind the couch … hoping! It’ll be interesting to see how the balance between a social history of documentary photography and ‘factual’ entertainment works out. I know some key “voices” were excluded but that is the unenviable task of a producer. Either way it promises be an intriguing televisual event and, at the very least, it should create an awareness of the rich resource that exists in photographic archives and collections around the country.

For more images / Comment see: Ballymaclinton, The Town that Time Forgot

‘Is oth linn an briseadh seo.’ We regret the interruption in web-posting due to storm damage

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on March 21, 2014 – 2:01 pm

Filed under Anthropology, Comment, Film, Heritage, Photography, Research

reteks.ru

Primarily, the period February / March has been taken up with two projects.

The first involves completing the second and final year of the Dioplóma sa Ghaeilge (Dioploma in Irish) with NUI Galway in partnership with Oidhdreacht Chorca Dhuibhne – final exams scheduled for 5 April. Dar fia!

The second involves development work on the ‘Haddon in Ireland’ project with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge and NUI Maynooth. This includes a paper to be given at the RAI’s conference in the British Museum in May/June.

Major feature on Anthropology by Ciarán Walsh in Irish Independent Newspaper

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on January 4, 2014 – 1:14 pm

Filed under Anthropology, Journalism

Солнечный водонагреватель своими руками

The ‘ Irish Headhunter’ exhibition organised by www.curator.ie got a remarkable response from anthropologists working in Ireland. The project was featured in the Irish Journal of Anthropology and the exhibition was shown in the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM) which has the only Anthropology Department in the state. This switched the focus from the 1890s to the present and, in this feature commissioned by the Irish independent Newspaper editor Katie Byrne, Ciarán Walsh explores the role of contemporary Irish anthropologists. It features extracts from interviews with Mark Maguire, Head of Anthropology in NUIM; Nicola Reynolds, President of the Anthropology Society NUIM; Fiona Murphy, Dublin City University School of Business and, Patrick Slevin of Applied Research for Connected Health (ARCH). Each of the contributors outlines what they see as the main challenges facing Irish society in 2014 from an anthropological perspective.

See: http://irishindependent.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx (Weekend Magazine)

Tag Archives: Aran Islands

A Very English Savage | some loose ends, updates and errata etc.

Twenty five photographs that change the history of anthropology

‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition in Royal Anthropological Institute | London | Oct 2023

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

Research Update | October 2018

Jane W. Shackleton: Pioneering Photographer and Unsung Hero of the Gaelic Revival

Appalling vistas: TG4 broadcasts series on social documentary photography in Ireland in the 1890s

‘Is oth linn an briseadh seo.’ We regret the interruption in web-posting due to storm damage

Major feature on Anthropology by Ciarán Walsh in Irish Independent Newspaper

www.curator.ie and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge agree on joint research project

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