In Search of Ireland

A Cultural Geography

Brian Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134749171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

In Search of Ireland argues that Ireland's political problems are created by conflicts and confusions of identity. It brings together a number of distinguished contributors, each of whom examines a particular aspect of Ireland's diverse cultural geography and history. Issues covered include: the changing definitions of Irishness the roles of class and gender in constructing traditional alignments of identity the role of ethnicity in Irish society the invention and imagining of Irish 'place' the political implications of a pluralistic Ireland The contributors demonstrate that many people both inside and outside of Ireland continue to define themselves and their conflicts through simple sectarian stereotypes. The authors argue that politicians and others must reject these outdated either/or representations and accommodate instead the fluidity of Irish identity. James Anderson, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne S.J. Connolly, Queens's University, Belfast Neville Douglas, Queen's University, Belfast Brian Graham, University of Ulste

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IRELAND AND IRISHNESS

Place, culture and identity

Brian Graham

INTRODUCTION

[The country is] like that. Attachment to the soil and aspiration towards departure. Place of refuge, place of passage. Land of milk and honey and of blood. Neither paradise nor hell. Purgatory.

(Amin Maalouf, The Rock of Tanios)

In 1930, the travel writer, H.V.Morton, published a book called In Search of Ireland. Unlike so many other outsiders, Morton was not beguiled by Ireland of the Sorrows but concluded his account with the optimistic hope that ‘Ireland had emerged from the Celtic twilight into the blaze of day’, its romantic nationalism gone, it was to be hoped, for ever. Nevertheless, despite such protestations of modernity, his farewell of Ireland, taken on the Hill of Tara— symbolic centre of the enchanted isle—was redolent of the stereotypical mysticism that continues to characterise so many renditions of Ireland and Irishness. For Morton (1930:273), Ireland was a country yet to be dehumanised by industrialisation, its typical inhabitant the ‘only eternal figure the world has known; the man who guides a plough’. Ignoring the industrial heartland of east Ulster only a little to the north of Tara, Morton’s bucolic vision was of an Ireland in which past, present and future might be harnessed to allow ‘a blend of north and south, a mingling of Catholic and Protestant’. As the millennium approaches, his hopes have yet to be realised.

This present Search for Ireland takes place in a very different world. The ‘eternal figure’ has long departed to the employment exchange and the suburban housing estate, while his plough has become an artefact in some museum or heritage centre. Both parts of the island are minor and peripheral locales within a post-industrial globalised economy, dominated by the new hegemony of capitalism and its dogma of free trade and competition, by supra-national political organisations such as the European Union (EU) and by the unchallenged military power of the United States of America. Paradoxically, however, beneath this veneer of an ascendant global order, nationalism and the nation-state survive, together with the bitter, fratricidal contestations of place that they so often engender. In many consequential ways, Ireland can be included among the numerous examples of failed nation-state building that litter Europe. On the one hand, people who claim a cultural Irishness live under many political jurisdictions but—most significantly—do so within the island itself. On the other, Irish nationalism has failed to be inclusive of all the inhabitants of the territory which is claimed as congruent with its cultural aspirations. This book approaches contemporary Ireland in the belief that the relationships between the island’s geography and culture are fundamental to understanding the confusions and contestations of identity that fracture its peoples. These relationships are equally critical to the formulation of any structures that might lead to an eventual resolution of the conflict.

While the book addresses the dichotomy between North and South, unionist and nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, it is also concerned with several other axes of differentiation that cleave Irish society, even though their significance has often been subsumed within the national conflict. These include class, gender and various manifestations of ethnicity, together with the long-standing but ill-researched schism between urban and rural. In combination with constructs of national identity and spatial patterns of material welfare, such characteristics delineate clearly demarcated social groups. Their implications for identity are rendered more complex, however, by the recognition that any one individual can simultaneously belong to a number of groups. Nationality does not fix class; class does not define gender; gender does not assign ethnicity. Furthermore, the complexity of the social location occupied by any single individual will change through time and vary from circumstance to circumstance. Thus an individual may at one moment be identified as being a Catholic, at another as a woman, elsewhere as middle class, sometimes as Irish, on occasion British and perhaps even European.

The subject-matter may reflect recent ideas put forward within the broad field of cultural geography, but it also responds to the immediacy which these ideas have in any understanding of the axes of conflict and unagreed alignments of identity that split contemporary Irish society. Culture is a notoriously elastic concept but is best regarded here as a signifying system through which ‘a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored’ (Williams 1982:13). It involves the conscious and unconscious processes through which people live in—and make—places, while giving meaning to their lives and communicating that meaning to themselves, each other and to the world beyond (Cosgrove 1993). As Gibbons (1996) forcefully argues, negotiated representations of culture have been at the centre of successive waves of social change in Ireland, not simply reflecting but actively helping to create and transform social experience. While the ideas that will be encountered here are often by no means unique to geography, it is the geographer’s concern with place and the often-contested meanings attached to it, which provide the book with its particular focus.

PLACE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

Like any other knowledge, geography is created within specific social, economic and political circumstances. Because it must be situated in this way, the nature of geography is always negotiable, subject to change through time and across space as social and intellectual circumstances alter (Livingstone 1992). Geographical texts and contexts exist in a reciprocal relationship. Regions may have no existence outside the consciousness of geographers ‘who, by their eloquence, are able to create place’ (Tuan 1991:693) but, in turn, geographers and their geographies are products of particular social conditions and times. As is the nature of things, these circumstances are unlikely to be agreed, any society being characterised by axes of ideological discord, which may—or may not—be contained by the structures of government and social control.

Contemporary human geography is much concerned with the manipulation of cultural landscape, a complex social construction (Cosgrove 1993) contested along the multiple and overlapping axes of social differentiation. This book addresses four manifestations of the social elaboration of place, all places being imaginary in this sense because they cannot exist for us beyond the socially constructed images which we form of them in our minds (Shurmer- Smith and Hannam 1994:59). First, it addresses the implications of the notion of contestation of place, most notably the idea that cultural landscapes as allegories of meaning are multivocal and multicultural texts, implicated in the construction of power within a society and capable of being read in a variety of conflicting ways (Cosgrove 1984). These texts interact with social, economic and political institutions and can be regarded as signifying practices ‘that are read, not passively, but, as it were, rewritten as they are read’ (Barnes and Duncan 1992:5). Secondly, the concept of socially constructed place is intrinsic to renditions of individual and group identity, which often embody particular readings or narratives of a people’s interaction with their cultural landscape. Thirdly, one of the most potent realisations of this process is provided by the formulation of nationalist ideologies, which depend on simplifying synecdoches of particularity, vested in place, in order to summarise and signify very much more complex social structures and to erect criteria of social inclusion and exclusion. Finally, symbolic geographies are also defined by other dimensions of personal and group identity, reflecting the contestation of societies along axes that include class, gender and ethnicity. These, too, are concerned with further criteria of inclusion and exclusion, which interact in complex and diverse ways with nationalistic tropes of identity.

Empowerment and the contestation of places

Because political activity often—if not necessarily—depends on concepts of territoriality, validated through legitimising images of place, landscape texts are frequently central to processes of empowerment. Baker (1992:4–5) identifies two essential ways in which cultural landscape becomes a framework through which ideologies and discourses can be constructed and contested. First, manipulated depictions of landscape offer an ordered, simplified vision of the world. Secondly, the sacred symbols of a landscape, rich in signs of identity and social codes, act as a system of signification supporting the authority of an ideology and emphasising its holistic character. As Ireland profoundly demonstrates, power cannot be conceived outside a geographical context; social power requires space, its exercise shapes space, and this in turn shapes social power (Harris 1991:678).

Place therefore forms part of the individual and social practices which people continuously use to transform the natural world into cultural realms of meaning and lived experience. As such, a cultural landscape can be visualised as a powerful medium in expressing feelings, ideas and values, while simultaneously being an arena of political discourse and action in which cultures are continuously reproduced and contested. In one way, landscapes, whether depicted in literature, art, maps and even wall murals, or viewed on the ground, are signifiers of the cultures of those who have made them. They can be regarded as vital texts that mesh with social, economic and political institutions to underpin the coherence of any society. However, because they can be read in different ways by competing social actors involved in the continuous transformation of societies, the meanings attached to these texts remain negotiable. As narratives, they are ‘culturally and historically, and sometimes even individually and momentarily, variable’ (Barnes and Duncan 1992:6). Endlessly contested along a multiplicity of dimensions, cultural landscape is thus subject to unrelenting modifications of meaning through time, while remaining an intrinsic quality of the prevailing but transient political economy and its infrastructure of authority. It follows that any landscape signifying the cultural and political values of a dominant group can be viewed as symbolic of oppression by those subservient to—or excluded from—these hegemonic values. For example, the eighteenth-century estate landscapes of Ireland—with their diagnostic triad of features, the demesne, big house and improved town or village—were developed by a largely Anglican arriviste landowning élite to place its imprint on an Ireland ‘only recently won and insecurely held’ (Foster 1988:192). Later, however, these landscapes came to symbolise English exploitation of Ireland and were excluded from the iconography of the newly ascendant narratives of nationalism that were created in the late nineteenth century.

Identity

If landscape can be depicted as a contested text or narrative, it is clearly implicated in a people’s identity, itself embedded in particular intellectual, institutional and temporal contexts. Identity is about discourses of inclusion and exclusion—who qualifies and who does not—and is generally articulated by its contradistinction to a (preferably) hostile Other (Said 1978, 1993). Nationalist identity in Ireland, for example, has been profoundly shaped by presuppositions of malignant Britishness, constructed and presented as ‘a collective social fact’ that wilfully denies the complexity of that culture (Duncan and Ley 1993:6). Equally, the very essence of unionism is vested in the assumption of Irish Catholic republicanism as Other, a supposition of timeless uniformity of purpose, people and place that negates the complex diversity of Irish society, geography and history.

These more general ideas can be further refined to focus on the specific context of place, which can be studied in the same socio-psychological manner as concepts such as ethnicity (Entrekin 1991:54). To Duncan (1990:17), a cultural—or iconic—landscape is a collage encapsulating a people’s image of itself. It symbolises the particularity of territory and a shared past which helps define communal identity, and plays an active part in the reproduction and transformation of any society in time and space. History and heritage— that which we opt to select from the past—are used everywhere to shape these emblematic place identities and support particular political ideologies (Ashworth and Larkham 1994). If it is accepted that the past in this sense is a relative set of contested values, the meanings of which are defined in the present, it follows that a cultural landscape must be negotiable: ‘We rewrite history selectively and embed the myth in the landscape’ (Smyth 1985:6). Nevertheless, significant elements of any cultural landscape will be rendered timeless because of the importance—in perceptions of contemporary communality—of deep-rooted continuities with the past which bring about the seeming collapse or foreshortening of time.

Nationalism

Nowhere is this compression of time and space more apparent than in nationalist ideologies and movements which politicise space by treating it as distinctive and historic territory, ‘the receptacle of the past in the present, a unique region in which the nation has its homeland’ (Anderson 1988:24). In his influential book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1991), Benedict Anderson argues that any nationalist ideology is the work of the imagination, its communality in large measure self-delusory. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, it is imagined as a limited but sovereign entity but, perhaps above all, it is:

imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that might prevail…the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

(Anderson 1991:7)

But that is not to deny the reality of the discourse, nor the fundamental contribution that significations of place contribute to this perception of social order. Nor are such relationships confined to nationalism alone. Both cultural nation and territorial state claim exclusive sovereign rights over, and access to, territory. Consequently, all states—whether nation-states or not—sponsor intensely territorial official state-ideas. This politicisation of territory is achieved through its treatment as a distinct and historic land, nationalism and the state-idea always looking back in order to look ahead (Agnew 1987:39–40). The very ubiquity of this relationship between politico-cultural institutions and territoriality suggests that a representation of place is a key component in communal identity, whatever the scale. As one mechanism in the processes that impose homogeneity upon diversity, cultural landscape is fundamental in validating the legitimacy of contemporary structures of authority, structures which are derived, not from the support of a numerical majority alone, but through renditions of plurality—largely fixed in the past— that transcend other social divisions and fix that imagined communality.

Class, gender and ethnicity

Neither group nor individual identity is defined by criteria of nationalism alone. Other criteria of exclusion and inclusion are also implicated in the social construction of a people and its place. In the efforts to impose the homogeneity that constitutes their principal raison d’être, however, official renditions of cultural landscape may attempt to elide many of the social complexities emanating from class, gender and ethnicity. These authorised landscapes and places can be viewed as cultural capital—expressions of dominant ideologies (Ashworth 1993) which embody the values and aspirations of that ideology. Officially defined cultural landscapes are therefore directly implicated in the processes which validate and legitimate power structures. Official discourses of place often represent the values of a dominant ethnic group at the expense of minority interests, and promote the interests of social élites while concealing class and gender inequities. However, the very complexity of social divisions in society ensures that even a dominant or hegemonic national landscape (Johnson 1993) may be no more than a transitory representation of place, the ever-present processes ofcontestation ensuring its continual renegotiation and transformation through time. The parallel existence of other dimensions to identity also produces unofficial representations of place that subvert or challenge state-sponsored nationalism and its narrative of homogeneity.

PLACE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN IRELAND

It is apparent, therefore, that identity is defined by a multiplicity of often conflicting and variable criteria. National identity is created in particular social, historical and political contexts and, as such, cannot be interpreted as a fixed entity; rather, it is a situated, socially constructed narrative capable both of being read in conflicting ways at any one time and of being transformed through time. The power of a narrative rests on its ability to evoke the accustomed, a trope that works by appealing to ‘our desire to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar’ (Barnes and Duncan 1992:11–12). The creation of hegemonic landscape narratives facilitates this process by denoting particular places as centres of collective cultural consciousness. As Johnson (1993) argues, the hegemonic image of the West of Ireland as the cultural heartland of the country was an essential component of the late nineteenth-century construct...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1: Ireland and Irishness
• Part I: A Multifaceted Ireland
• Part II: Axes of Division and Integration
• Part III: Territory, Nationalism and the Contestation of Identity
• Part IV: Place, Identity and Politics