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

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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

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.

Becoming an Anthropologist

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on January 21, 2020 – 1:37 pm

Filed under Anthropology | Curatorial Projects

Last Friday, I became an anthropologist after I successfully defended my PhD thesis at Maynooth University (MU), where I made a short presentation about my research on the skull measuring business in Ireland and answered questions from a panel of experts who were appointed to assess the quality of my research and the arguments presented in my thesis.

Dr David Shankland, Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, agreed to act as external examiner when I submitted my thesis in October 2019. He described it as an excellent piece of research, which, if grades were given for a PhD, would have achieved the grade of summa cum laude, with the highest distinction.

Prof Hana Červinková, Head of the Dept of Anthropology at MU, agreed to act as an internal examiner. She led an interesting discussion of the relationship between my work as a visual arts curator and an anthropologist, which revealed the extent to which a brief exposure to anthropology in art college in the 1980s had a profound influence on my work as a curator ever since. It was at that point in the discussion that I realised that I had become an anthropologist.

Dr. Thomas Flavin agreed to chair the examination and Dr Mark Maguire and Prof David Prendergast, my supervisors, attended as observers, as is the practice on these occasions. Prof Martina Hennessy represented TCD School of Medicine, which is a research partner in this project.

L-R: Chair **Dr. Thomas Flavin** (Associate Professor, Economics, Finance and Accounting, MU), Supervisor **Prof David Prendergast** (Dept of Anthropology MU), external examiner **Dr David Shankland** (Director, Royal Anthropological Institute, London), internal examiner Prof Hana Červinková (Head of Dept of Anthropology, MU), **Ciarán Walsh**, IRC Scholar, and supervisor **Dr Mark Maguire** (Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, MU).

The panel decided that I should be awarded a Doctorate degree without further examination, subject to making the changes specified to the satisfaction of my internal examiner, a process that should take a couple of weeks. Then I submit hardbound copies of my thesis and I become a Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) at a conferring ceremony in Maynooth University in September 2020.

Acknowledgements

My thesis represents the culmination of groundbreaking and critically acclaimed work on John Millington’s Synge’s ethnographic photography, which was developed in the “Irish Headhunter” project with co-curator Dáithí De Mórdha. This led into this study of the skull measuring business and the associated development by Alfred Cort Haddon of an early form of modern visual ethnography in the west of Ireland in the 1890s. This project was truly collaborative and would not have been possible without the support of many people in Dublin, Cambridge, London, and, of course, Ballyheigue.

There isn’t enough space to acknowledge individual contributions here, but I do want to acknowledge the support – financial and otherwise – of the Irish Research Council and Shanahan Research Group over a period of almost 5 years. With regard to the academic programme, I acknowledge the generosity of everyone in Cambridge University Library, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Haddon Library, Trinity College Dublin, and the support, hard work, patience, and perseverance of everyone in the Anthropology Department at Maynooth University.

Thank You | Míle Buíochas

The skull measuring business – Ciarán Walsh submits PhD thesis

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on November 8, 2019 – 4:35 pm

Filed under Research

L-R: Prof David Prendergast and Ciarán Walsh, Dept of Anthropology, and Dr Mark Maguire, Dean of Social Sciences, with a copy of the thesis Walsh submitted as the first stage in the completion of a 4 year research project that was funded by the Irish Research Council and Shanahan Research Group (photo: Jamie Saris)..

Ciarán Walsh|www.curator.ie has submitted a thesis in partial fulfilment of a PhD at Maynooth University, the next stage being a defence of his research and findings. The thesis represents the culmination of a ten year investigation of the photographic archive of the Irish Ethnographic Survey, which was active in the West of Ireland between 1891 and 1890.

The project took place in two phases. The first phase, the Irish “Headhunter” Project was a collaboration with Dáithí de Mórdha and involved an exhibition of photographs drawn from a set of albums that were compiled by Charles R. Browne in 1897 and donated to TCD 100 years later. The photographs had never been shown in public and attracted a lot of attention from the anthropological community in Ireland.

Mark Maguire, Ciarán Walsh , Nicola Reynolds and Steve Coleman at the launch of the Irish “Headhunter” Project in Maynooth University in 2013.

The discovery of important new material in Cambridge and Dublin in 2013 and 2014 opened the way for a second phase, an intensive four-year investigation of the skull measuring business in Ireland in the 1890s. The research was funded by the Irish Research Council and Shanahan Research Group and managed by Maynooth University in partnership with TCD School of Medicine. The focus shifted from physical anthropology–the skull measuring business–to the role of photography in a politically radical and formally innovative social documentary project launched by Alfred Cort Haddon in the Aran Islands in 1890.

A village community, the Aran Islands. Haddon & Dixon, 1890, Inishmaan (*Inis Meáin*), silver gelatine, glass-plate negative, 8 x 11 cm (©TCD).

The thesis is titled “The Skull Measuring Business,” a phrase that resonates with a particular view of Victorian anthropology as practised in Ireland in the 1890s. It captures perfectly the idea of English scientists travelling to the periphery of the United Kingdom to trace the racial origins of the “native” Irish at the height of the home rule crisis.

Indeed, Patrick Geddes, the bio-social innovator, coined the phrase to describe a restricted form of Anglo-French anthropology that has become inextricably linked to eugenics, the theoretical precursor of scientific racism. Geddes was warning Haddon that a radical approach to social organisation represented the future of anthropology. This study attempts to find out how Haddon responded, in view of the fact that he was photographed measuring skulls in the Aran Islands in 1892. It builds upon the discovery in 2013 and 2014 of “lost” documentary and photographic material in Dublin and Cambridge.

This triggered a review–an “Irish” reading–of Haddon’s papers, concentrating on mostly uncatalogued material relating to his experimental ethnographical surveys of ethnical islands in the west of Ireland. It became clear that the facts uncovered contradict conventional accounts of the skull measuring business; narratives that are usually structured around evolution, race, and imperialism. Instead, Haddon emerges as an English radical and supporter of home rule. He built a network of folklore collectors that constituted an anti-imperial, Anglo-Irish folklore movement, which was aligned with the cultural programme of Douglas Hyde. That has been forgotten, overlooked, or misinterpreted.

Furthermore, Haddon preferred photography to text and his use of the magic lantern as an instrument of anti-colonial activism represents a singular modernist achievement in anthropology. Ironically, this has remained invisible to many historians of disciplinary anthropology. This thesis attempts to correct this by killing some anthropological tropes and creating space for alternative narratives.

Vanished Knowledge: turning research into activism and advocacy

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on September 25, 2019 – 11:46 am

Filed under Curatorial Projects

*The burning of the Amazon rainforest in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photo: Mayke Toscano/AFP/Getty Images &* *The Guardian*

curator.ie is working with a group of activists and scholars to organise a debate about the capacity of anthropologists and geographers to confront genocide. We are putting together a panel for a major conference on anthropology and geography, which is scheduled to take place in London in June 2020.

Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future is being jointly organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), the Royal Geographical Society, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS (University of London), and the Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the British Museum. It will run from 4 – 7 JUNE 2020.

The debate has been triggered by the current crisis in the Amazon, but the issue is as old as anthropology itself. That is where Dialogues Past, Present and Future come into play. We are asking people to consider the following:

40,000 fires burn in the Amazon, threatening the homeland of the Awá people. In the 1890s, anarcho-Solidarists demanded a radical political response from anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists to the threat of genocide through habitat destruction by colonists.

Was anyone listening?

The debate will be framed by an historical precedent from the 1890s, when Alfred Cort Haddon called on the anthropological community to stand in solidarity with the victims of imperialism. The call was taken up by a small group of humanitarians within organised anthropology, but they were forced underground.

Michael Faherty, Inis Meain, 1890-1, from the archive of the Irish Ethnographic Survey (1891-1903). The photograph shows a group of islanders in traditional homespuns. — Alfred Cort Haddon, 1892, Michael Faherty, and two women, Inishmaan. The photograph was taken during an ethnographic survey of the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland. Haddon commented that ‘Faherty refused to be measured, and the women would not even tell us their names.’ (Photo: Trinity College Dublin).

Haddon, undeterred, devised the phrase “vanishing knowledge” as code for the cultural consequences of genocide. The phrase has been resurrected here as a slightly ironic reminder of a time when anthropologists and geographers stood against genocide; a humanitarian insurgency that has been written out of the history of the discipline of anthropology.

Mohammad Salas, a 51-year-old man from Iran’s largest Sufi order, the Gonabadi Dervish religious minority. Salas was executed by the Iranian authorities after a trial that was widely condemned as a miscarriage of justice. *Amnesty International*.

The plight of the Awá is desperately topical, but it is not unique. There are many other groups whose way of life is threatened by economic, political, and cultural forces. The question here is whether anthropologists and geographers have the capacity to make a difference. That question will, in many ways, frame a debate about the future relevance of anthropology and geography.

If people want to get involved in this debate, the RAI and has issued a call for papers.

Brexit and Folklore ?

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on April 7, 2019 – 8:23 am

Filed under Curatorial Projects

*Prof David Hopkin at the* ***Folklore and the Nation*** *conference organised by the Folklore Society in Derby on the weekend that the UK was due to leave the EU. Photo: Ciarán Walsh.*

What has folklore got to do with Brexit? That was one of the themes explored at the recent Folklore and the Nation conference in Derby, which opened on the day that the UK was due to leave the EU. The conference was convened with one eye on Brexit and the other on wider nationalist movements. It asked ‘how, why and when folklore has been deployed in the context of national ideologies and ideas of nationhood.’

I made a twenty minute presentation entitled “Leaving the Union: Haddon, Home Rule and the Anti-Imperial Agenda in Anglo-Irish Folklore.” It represented, as Haddon would said, the ‘first fruits” of a six year investigation of “the skull Measuring business” in Ireland in the 1890s.

Charles R. Browne and Alfred Cort Haddon measuring Tom Connelly during field work undertaken by the Dublin Anthropometry Laboratory in the Aran islands in 1892. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

My research was funded by the Irish Research Council in partnership with Shanahan research Group, Maynooth University, and the School of Medicine TCD. It represents a major re-assessment of Haddon’s contribution to anthropology, focussing on the politically radical and formally revolutionary fieldwork undertaken by him in Ireland between 1890 and 1895.

“Leaving the Union”explored the role that folklore played in the political and cultural arguments that were generated by home rule; the campaign to take Ireland out of political and economic union with Great Britain, which dominated Anglo-Irish relations in the the 1880s and 1890s.

*The White Horse in Derby 29, March 2019. Photo: Ciarán Walsh*

There are some obvious parallels with Brexit. The Customs Union and a backstop for the Protestant minority [1] in Ireland featured in the first Government of Ireland or Home Rule Bill of 1886. The bill was defeated by the Conservatives supported by Unionists.

The differences are far more significant.

Ireland was a colony and the intertwined campaigns for home rule and land reform were confronted with “coercion” legislation[2] and the mobilisation of imperial forces. Cultural forces were also mobilised in a debate about the compatibility of the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon in relation to nationality and governance.

*Victoria Square, Birmingham. Photo: Ciarán Walsh*

Folklore collectors – the practical wing of domestic ethnology – provided evidence of a pre-conquest nation that survived in the edgelands of Empire in Ireland. This is generally treated as a resource for cultural nationalism and I was not arguing with that.

What I proposed was that there was a far more radical, anti-Imperial movement in Anglo-Irish folklore and that it was led by Haddon, the head-hunter. I presented evidence that Haddon was influenced by stateless anarchists and other radicals and that this influence shaped his approach to fieldwork in Ireland.

This turns the history of anthropology in Ireland and England on its head.

A FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRESENTATION IS AVAILABLE HERE

NOTES

[1] The backstop consisted of a ban ‘on the establishment or endowment of any religious denomination’ (Shepard 1912: 565).

[2] Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act 1887 was introduced by Arthur “Bloody” Balfour, the political leader of the British Administration in Ireland.

This research was funded by the Irish Research Council in partnership with Shanahan research Group, Maynooth University, and the School of Medicine TCD

The Skeleton of the Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on March 3, 2017 – 12:00 pm

Filed under Anthropology, Comment, Heritage, Research

A reproduction of the portrait of the Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath. The portrait was painted in Venice in 1757 by the Italian artist Pietro Longhi, when Magrath was 20 years of age. It shows Magrath being viewed by a group of Venetians in carnival bauta costumes, one of whom is wearing a mask called a larva. A man walks under Migrates outstretched arm.He is much taller than any one else in the room and, yet, Margate towers over him. Magarth died three years later and his body was sold to the School of Anatomy in Dublin University, Trinity College. It was dissected and the articulated skeleton remains as part of an historic collection of anatomy specimens, which is currently being curated by Ciarán Walsh of curator.ie.

Pietro Longhi, 1757, “True portrait of the Giant Cornelio Magrat the Irishman; he came to Venice in the year 1757; born 1st January 1737, he is 7 feet tall and weighs 420 pounds. Painted on commission from the Noble Gentleman Giovanni Grimani dei Servi, Patrician of Venice.” Museo di Rezzonico, Venice. Photograph: Osvaldo Böhm.

The Skeleton of The Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath is held by the School of Anatomy in Dublin University, Trinity College (TCD). It is the most famous item in a historic collection of anatomy specimens, records, and instruments that is held in the ‘Old’ Anatomy Building. The building was decommissioned in 2014 and the collection is being resolved as part of post-grad research programme managed jointly by the School of Medicine TCD, Maynooth University, Kimmage Development Studies Centre, and funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC).

I am employed as a full-time researcher on the project and resolving ethical issues relating to the retention of human remains is a major part of the work in hand. Indeed, the research proposal had to pass rigorous ethical approval procedures in Maynooth University, the School of Medicine TCD, and the IRC before I could get access to the ‘old’ Anatomy building and the collections held therein, which include the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath.

The skeleton is “in the news” following calls for Magrath’s remains to be buried. The controversy kicked off on the History Show on RTE Radio 1. It was picked up by chat show host Joe Duffy on Monday. Duffy argued that TCD should bury the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath because it was taken in a ‘body snatching’ raid on Magrath’s wake. Since then a debate of sorts has been taking place on the show.

The problem here is that there is no evidence that the body snatching story, however entertaining, is true. Magrath died on 16th May 1760 but the only contemporary account of his death was most likely written by either Robert Robinson, Professor of Anatomy in TCD, or Dr. George Cleghorn, the University anatomist. It is a rather enigmatic account, stating only that “Upon death, his body was carried to the Dissecting House.” (see Daniel J. Cunningham’s 1891 report to the Royal Irish Academy).

Magrath was dying of a wasting disease and it is clear from the Robinson/Cleghorn account that he was receiving medical attention at the time of his death. It records that Magrath’s “complexion was miserably pale and sallow; his pulses very quick at times for a man of his extraordinary height; and his legs were swollen.” Elsewhere, it states that his pulse beat almost sixty times a minutes “on his arrival here.” It sounds like Magrath was being cared for in the School of Medicine TCD when he died.

The body snatching legend has it that Magrath was being waked when medical students spiked the porter and made off with his body, which was immediately dissected in secret. Such a sensational body snatching could not have escaped notice and, furthermore, the dissection was both public knowledge and uncontroversial. Historians of anatomy in TCD have always believed that the body was paid for by Cleghorn and that the acquisition of the body was legitimate and ethical by the standards of the day. The problem here is that there is no documentary evidence of Magrath having consented to dissection or the permanent display of his skeleton.

That brings us to the contemporary issue of retention or burial. The report of the Working Group on Human Remains in Museum Collections (WGHR), published in the UK in 2003, acknowledged that human remains in collections “represent a unique and irreplaceable resource for the legitimate pursuance of scientific and other research” (p. 28) and concludes: “The Working Group feels that there is much merit in including museum collections of human remains within the regulatory structure proposed by the DH for health authorities and hospitals.” (p. 81).

Supervision by the Inspector of Anatomy of the ‘Old’ Anatomy collections in TCD covers the issue of regulation in Ireland in terms of the retention of Magrath’s skeleton as part of a historical scientific collection. This leaves the burial of Magrath’s remains at the discretion of the college authorities; which means that any decision will have to deal with public perception as to the “morality” of retaining identifiable human remains in collections of scientific material. That is deeply problematic, and Duffy’s attempt to frame the issue in body snatching folklore is distorting what should be a valuable and timely debate.

For more see: http://wp.me/p56Bmf-eP

IRC confirms award of €96,000 for postgrad research project by Ciarán Walsh

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on December 9, 2014 – 4:34 pm

Filed under Heritage, Research

The photographs is a midshot of two people: on the left is Andrea Valova (Maynooth University) and beside her is Ciarán Walsh (www.curator.ie) at the launch of the 2014 Emplyment Based Postgrad Programme, an event held during the Innovation Showcase in Dublin on 2 December 2014

Andrea Valova (Maynooth University) and Ciarán Walsh (www.curator.ie) at the launch of the 2014 Emplyment Based Postgrad Programme, an event held during the Innovation Showcase in Dublin on 2 December 2014

Ciarán Walsh was among the ‘top postgraduate researchers’ who received funding from the Irish Research Council last week. The award was announced at a ceremony which took place in Dublin as part of the Innovation Showcase. Walsh is one 0f 17 researchers who secured funding for a structured PhD Programme that is based on research in a business, not-for-profit, NGO or public sector organisation. The award, worth up to €96,0000, was one of 48 in total representing an investment of ‘€4.5 million in funding to enable some of Ireland’s top postgraduate researchers to work with leading companies around the country’ according to the Irish Research Council.

Professor Orla Feely, Chair of the Irish Research Council, highlighted ‘the benefits for companies of working with researchers and what can be achieved when industry and academia join forces to engage in cutting-edge research that is demand-led and enterprise oriented. Industry-academia partnerships have resulted in the development of products that impact on our day-to-day lives, such as internet search technology, cancer treatments, weather prediction software…the list is endless’

Walsh will be working on 4 year research project which looks at the development of ethnographic survey techniques in Ireland and incorporates the development of innovative interactive systems for multi-site archives and heritage sites. The project is being developed with Maynooth University (Graduate Studies Office and Anthropology Department) in partnership with Abarta Audio Guides. Abarta is run by Neil Jackman and Róisín Burke and is based in Clonmel. It’s an SME that specialises in developing interpretative apps for heritage sites and other applications.

This project builds on innovative research into the Irish ‘Headhunters’ carried out by Walsh in the context of an exhibition of ethnographic photography that was curated with Dáithí de Mórdha of Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir in 2012, in association with TCD and the OPW. This has already thrown new light on the role of Irish scientists/researchers in the development of both anthropology and social policy in the 1890s. This attracted the attention of Maynooth and Cambridge Universities but the involvement of Abarta Audio Guides as enterprise partners means that the project has been able to access significant funding and undertake further research. The project can now tackle really interesting aspects of placing publicly funded research into the public domain in an environment that is increasingly dominated by online systems and tablet devices.

The project kicks off in February 2015.

Major research proposal endorsed by NUI Maynooth

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on August 9, 2014 – 4:37 pm

Filed under Anthropology, Education, Heritage, Research

Mark Maguire, Ciarán Walsh , Nicola Reynolds and Steve Coleman

Mark Maguire, Head of Anthropology NUI Maynooth, Ciarán Walsh , Nicola Reynolds, President of thr Anthropological Society NUIM and Steve Coleman, NUIM at the opening of the Headhunter exhibition in NUI Maynooth in October 2013.

A major research proposal prepared by Ciarán Walsh for the Irish Research Council’s (IRC) Employment Based Post-graduate Programme has been endorsed by the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM) and now proceeds to the IRC for evaluation and adjudication. The proposal builds on the work that Walsh has been doing on the ‘Haddon in Ireland Project’ and involves a 4 year post-graduate research project supervised by Mark Maguire of NUIM in partnership with Abarta Audio Guides, a small heritage services company operated by Neil Jackman and Róisín Burke.

Neil Jackman of Abarta Audio Guides: http://abartaaudioguides.com/about-us

The ‘Haddon in Ireland’ research project brings together public research (NUI Maynooth), private sector innovation (Abarta Audio, Clonmel) and a researcher with a proven track record (Ciaran Walsh) to reopen and reexamine the history of human science in the British isles.

Anthropometry Inisbofin 6007

This project aims to explore the Irish Ethnographic Survey, an attempt to reveal the origins of the Irish ‘race’ undertaken by scientists from Ireland and the UK between 1891 and 1903. Among them was the famous AC Haddon. This was the beginning of ‘scientific’ Anthropology but it was overshadowed by subsequent developments in Cambridge. The records were ‘lost,’ dispersed over collections in Ireland and the UK where they have remained uncatalogued and largely overlooked for 120 years.

The primary aim to reconstruct that archive and place it in the public domain. The central question is how that can be achieved, given that the material is spread over a dozen institutions in 4 jurisdictions. We will look to the latest interactive technology for solutions.

We propose to create a transnational network that digitally links collections Dublin, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and Belfast. We will develop interactive tools that will provide access to it and enhance the users experience of our anthropological heritage. The contemporary significance of this is enormous. The Survey’s attempts to trace the origins of the Irish people continues with the genetic study of populations.

This project will reconnect both and the transnational component will add enormously to the impact of the project on the public construction of Anthropological knowledge.

Tag Archives: Irish Research Council