In 2018, the Irish public voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which since 1983 banned abortion in the country. While this was a watershed moment in Irish history, it was not unconnected to wider discussions now taking place around the world concerning gender, reproductive rights, the future of religion, Church–State relationships, democracy and social movements. With this Forum, we want to prompt some anthropological interpretations of Ireland's repeal of the Eighth Amendment as a matter concerning not only reproductive rights, but also questions of life and death, faith and shame, women and men, state power and individual liberty, and more. We also ask what this event might mean (if anything) for other societies dealing with similar issues?
Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange.
As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the one-sided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market.
How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values?
Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.
Dance as a topic for systematic anthropological investigation was established in the 1960s. As the Western category of dance did not always work in a cross-cultural perspective, bounded rhythmical movements were identified, as well as dance events. Dance is an expression of wider social and cultural situations, often indicating transition or conflict, as well as unity. Dance anthropologists study all forms of dance, Western and non-Western, ranging from ritual dance and social dance to streetdance and staged dance performance. Dance and movement are understood in relation to theories of the body and gender, and to ethnicity, nationalism, and transnationality.
"Dancing at the crossroads" used to be an opportunity for young people to meet and enjoy themselves on mild summer evenings in the Irish countryside until this practice was banned by the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935. Now a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life, "dancing at the crossroads" also crystallizes the argument of this book: Irish dance, from Riverdance (the commericial show) to competitive dancing and dance theatre, conveys that Ireland is in a crossroads situations. Irish dance, with a firm base in a distinctly Irish tradition, is becoming a prominent part of European modernity. While this book highlights the captivating tensions and ties surrounding debates on Irish dance, it also aims to extend broader understandings of place, mobility and rooted cosmopolitanism.
This chapter draws on a literary anthropological project which explores the social world of the young generation of diaspora writers and their work (fiction, plays, journalism) in Sweden. It uncovers experiences of racism in a country which boasts an ethnically inclusive policy while identifying instances of literary cosmopolitanism from within. Pooneh Rohi´s novel The Arab (2013) circles around the idea of home in terms of homelessness, and the designation “stranger” as the protagonist leads his lonely life in snow-covered Stockholm where he moved decades ago from Iran. For “the Arab” is actually Persian, but is taken to be an Arab in the Swedish context. Sweden is not home to him, he is homeless in his heart. A young woman in the novel is also from Iran, but she is so well integrated that people think she was adopted. Her childhood memories from Iran are now a mirage from the past, a fading scent of salt from the sea. Later, her longing for “that part of the room that is invisible in the mirror” gets stronger.
Helena Wulff´s chapter begins with an essay drawing on her ongoing literary anthropological study of diaspora fiction writers and their work in Sweden who, she argues, are diversifying the country from within. The essay engages with the work of Pooneh Rohi born in Iran, who is a new voice while Jonas Hassen Khemiri, of Tunisian background, is an established writer. In addition to writing fiction, they sometimes do journalism. By uncovering often cruel experiences of racism in a country which boasts an inclusive policy, yet has an expanding anti-immigration party (the Sweden Democrats) diaspora writers have an impact on political and cultural debate in Sweden, also because they take on the role as public intellectuals. In her Commentary, Wulff explains how Text came about, how it goes back to her intellectual history that was founded during her upbringing when she first became a habitual reader, and later with her education in comparative literature and anthropology that eventually would make her an anthropological writer. Inspired by her research on the ballet world where desire and technique are key for creativity to spring up, Wulff suggests that this is the case in anthropological writing, as well. As to the recent genealogy of the essay, it is an account of preparations for a major multi-disciplinary research program on world literatures which was funded in 2016.
Against a backdrop of gift-giving and reciprocity as keys in building and confirming social relationships in the field, this fictional narrative reveals a string of gift-giving events that did not work out. This outcome is rarely reported on in anthropology, but here one gift was returned immediately, another promised but never produced. There is also the anti-climactic nature of a parting gift when it is time for the fieldworker to exit the field. The setting is Dublin’s literary world, and the fieldwork includes a number of appreciated gifts, though not always in the form of an equal exchange of objects. The occurrence of unwanted and ungiven gifts that recur through the narrative are thorny reminders of the fragility of friendship in the field. The characters in the narrative are composite except for cameo appearances of named writers.
In her memoir Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (2006), Patricia Hampl describes how she was late to a meeting with a friend in the cafeteria of the Chicago Art Institute, running through gallery after gallery without looking at the paintings: ”Then, unexpectedly, several galleries shy of my destination, I came to a halt before a large, rather muddy painting in a heavy gold-colored frame, a Matisse labeled Femme et poissons rouges, rendered in English, Woman Before an Aquarium. But that’s wrong: I didn’t halt, didn’t stop. I was stopped. Apprehended, even.” Hampl did not have an interest in the arts. Yet there she was, ”hammered by the image.” How did this happen? This paper explores transformative exceptional experiences of art. As such experiences are affective, I suggest that two qualities are necessary for them to take place: recognition in the story of a piece of art and discovery in its form such as a new colour or surface. There was a recognition for Hampl in the gaze of the woman in the painting. The story of the image made Hampl aware of her unsettled status as a recent college graduate, but it was the special blue colour of the screen that suggested a world behind it, one of splendour. This was a liberation for her, indicating her way forward as a creative writer. An anthropological understanding of exceptional experiences of art accentuates different anthropological writing genres, methodological eclecticism, and the role of serendipity in social life and anthropology.
Taking existing conversations in anthropology as a point of departure, the mission of this volume is twofold: first, to identify different writing genres that anthropologists actually engage with; second, to argue for the usefulness and necessity for anthropologists of taking writing as a craft seriously and of writing across and within genres in new ways. This introductory chapter contextualizes anthropological writing historically and theoretically, moves on to my own experience of writing cultural (dance) journalism as one instance of broadening anthropological writing, and concludes by offering an overview of ways of writing anthropology as discussed in the following chapters: in relation to the making of an anthropological career, ethnographic writing, journalistic and popular writing, and writing across genres.
This introductory chapter provides a critical review of the study of emotions in anthropology, sociology, psychology and cultural studies. It discusss cultural and social science research on emotions in relation to the major topics of the Reader: opening with the study of emotions in terms of culture, biology and ecology, and moving on to captivating cases of happiness, fear and envy, as well as to investigations into love and hate; anger, shame and grief, desire and expectations, and the emotional self and identity. Based on classic articles on emotions, the Reader applies a cross-cultural perspective which reveals a whole range of new issues in the study of emotions brought out in commissioned articles. This chapter offers an analytical synthesis of the study of emotions, which will show the force, richness and omnipresence of emotions in modern social life.
Drawing on an anthropological study of the social organisation of the world of Irish writers, this article investigates the literary reading as performance which has become central for the career and promotion of contemporary writers. How is the reading - live as well as recorded - constituted, and how is it experienced from the writer's point of view? The data are derived from participant observation and interviews at literary festivals and conferences, writers' retreats, book launches and more informal situations with writers, as well as from fiction and essays by the writers. For this article, I asked some of the writers to write short texts on the reading. It turned out that the frames of the reading as performance reach beyond the reading event, and also that a reading includes elements of risk, such as not attracting a big enough audience or performing badly. Finally, the article considers the changing role of the ethnographer.
With its large diaspora, Ireland has a long tradition of travel ranging from emigration to return migration, expatriate visits as well as tourism. Although Irish tourism increased substantially with the climax of the so-called Celtic Tiger in the early 1990s, Ireland was a major tourist destination even before that. This article explores emotions, memory and nature in images (in travel catalogues and on the Internet) advertising Ireland in a global context. The images target Irish expatriates, indigenous tourists and non-Irish tourists in Europe, the United States and Australia. Images featuring pastoral landscapes, rural harmony and dramatic cliffs can be emotionally evocative in different ways, exemplifying people’s social relationships to their environment. Central themes in the images are expatriate emotions of displacement, longing and nostalgia often connected with Irish nationalism while at the same time managing to include non-Irish people. This confirms the notion of images as ambiguous, yet points at the possibility of steering the viewer’s attention through a caption including “home” and “our land”. The article also focuses on expatriare emotions that recur in the narrative of Irish travel advertisements in an increasingly globalized world.