Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border , livre ebook

Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border
Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border
Characters and Community
Ray Cashman
Indiana University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA

http://iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail iuporder@indiana.edu

2008 by Ray Cashman
All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cashman, Ray.
Storytelling on the northern Irish border: characters and community / Ray Cashman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35252-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Storytelling-Northern Ireland -Castlederg. 2. Aghyaran (Castlederg, Northern Ireland)-Folklore. I. Title.
GR148.A45C37 2008
398.209416 4-dc22
2008015964

1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09 08
For my mother and in memory of my father
Contents
Preface: The Road to Ballymongan
Acknowledgments

1 Goals and Orientations
2 Aghyaran: A Sense of Place and History
3 Ceilis as Storytelling Contexts
4 Wakes as Storytelling Contexts
5 Local Character Anecdotes
6 The Wider Range of Storytelling Genres
7 Anecdotes and the Literary Character
8 Anecdotes and the Local Character
9 Anecdote Cycles and Personality Traits
10 Patterns and Implications
11 Storytelling, Commemoration, and Identity

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface: The Road to Ballymongan
As a folklorist I consider the stories that people tell each other to be eloquent of culture, a window into the shared beliefs, values, and worldview of a given group. Moreover, oral narratives-from personal experience narratives to myths, from anecdotes to legends, from jokes to tall tales-perform important social work in human interaction. The following chapters delve into details, identify patterns, and present a case study of how stories enable people to do important, recurring things with language-entertain, persuade, evaluate one s self and one s social environment, establish and revise identity, imagine and enact community.
My first task, however, is to explain why I chose to study these issues in one particular place in Ireland. Answering Why Ireland? is relatively easy. Previous research and fieldwork in Counties Cork, Kerry, and Galway had convinced me that Ireland s long association with folklore-traditional, vernacular expressive and material culture-is well-deserved and not simply the concoction of a long line of romantic nationalists bearing witness to a distinct Irish culture to bolster the cause for an Ireland independent of Britain. Of course, folklore studies-no less than much of Irish folklore-continue to be politically inflected, but I am persuaded that in Ireland people of diverse backgrounds have long privileged and cultivated verbal art in particular-written and oral. Here is a place and society that promises rich materials for study.
Answering the question of how I came to settle in Aghyaran (roughly pronounced Aw-hee-ARN ), a mixed Catholic-Protestant 1 community in Northern Ireland on the border with the Republic of Ireland, requires a little more effort, and it was a question people there never failed to ask. As one young man asked me early on, What, have you shot someone? Are you on the run? What could bring you to such a backwards place? A little taken aback, I began an overly defensive and ultimately futile characterization of his home place as no less a part of this era, no less connected to the rest of the world, than any other part of Ireland. Something along the lines of, Why, here we are in the townland of Ballymongan, near the village of Killeter, not far from the town of Castlederg, about thirty miles from County Tyrone s commercial and administrative hub in Omagh, suspended between Derry and Belfast, at the heart of an emerging cultural and economic corridor between Ireland and Britain, part and parcel of the new Europe and a global economy. . . . (Oh, the foot bone s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone s connected to the knee bone, the knee bone s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone s. . . .) Neither of us was satisfied.
Although few people were as incredulous as he, many asked me this question-why here?-several times in many ways. My answers varied with my audience and rarely felt complete. One honest, unspoken answer was that I could have conducted fieldwork just about anywhere in Ireland (or elsewhere) and found something worthwhile to report, but people were awfully good to me in Aghyaran. I also came to the field with both conscious convictions and previously unexamined inclinations that guided initial choices.
Grounded in fieldwork, generalizing from particulars, folklore studies is uniquely situated to offer an entry into vernacular Irish life. After a few years experience in the Republic, however, I found my folkloric interests shifting north of the border that splits the island. Folklore need not be a matter of life and death or even politically charged for it to be worthy of study. Yet north of the border many people invest so much energy into public, identity-touting expressive forms-parades, murals, song-that some are willing to commit violence defending or imposing the positions communicated. Here is a case study in the politics of culture, featuring folklore, where the stakes are high.
Deciding to conduct fieldwork for this study in Tyrone, the largest of the six counties of Northern Ireland, was admittedly somewhat arbitrary. There was a written record that attracted me. Michael J. Murphy s accounts of collecting folklore in Tyrone s Sperrin Mountains for the Irish Folklore Commission fired my imagination, and I admire and enjoy the fiction of Tyrone writers William Carleton, Benedict Kiely, and Flann O Brien, though for different reasons with each one. In addition, judging from government records and sociological research, demographics and community relations in Tyrone seemed relatively balanced, at least on paper. I was not interested in my presence potentially aggravating an already tense situation in one of the more traditional flash points for political violence, and most of Tyrone seemed less fraught than, for instance, south Armagh, and more mixed in population than, for instance, the north coast of Antrim.
My interest in conducting fieldwork in a rural area of Tyrone was not motivated by an outdated romantic conviction that true folklore can be found only in agrarian settings. Whether viewed as cultural forms enacting tradition or as shared modes of aesthetically marked communication, folklore abounds in cities as elsewhere, and investigating the urban experience is of course relevant in our increasingly urbanized world. I remain unconvinced, however, by reactionary calls in anthropological circles to privilege urban Ireland as somehow more relevant for study and less encumbered with previous scholarly ideological baggage. 2 In part, I was conditioned by Estyn Evans s and others characterization of the Northern Irish countryside as a place often more socially integrated than the cities, a place where Catholics and Protestants may develop more complicated notions of us and them through interaction, and a place where neighborliness and shared regional culture have at least the potential to undermine sectarian division. Belfast, for instance, certainly would have been foreign enough for me to perceive readily the contrasts with my own experience, but I admit that having been raised in a city, I wanted to know something entirely different, something about country life. Reports of mumming thriving in west Tyrone also caught my attention. If in Tyrone an ancient form of folk drama found a place in the lives of television viewers and Internet surfers, I reckoned that here was a place that would hold my interest.
Having narrowed the field to Tyrone was enough, and I began fieldwork content-well, OK, mostly content-to be guided by events and strangers, whether agents of providence or of chance. What I have to offer first, then, is a personal account of how and why I came to settle in Aghyaran, conducting fieldwork there from August of 1998 to August of 1999 and during shorter stays in 2000, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007. Along the way my methodology for beginning fieldwork will become clear, as will many of my predispositions.
I am far from the most interesting character in this study, which will focus on the actions and words of others. My excuse for beginning in personal narrative is, in part, a felt need to answer more fully the question, why here? I have also benefited from contemporary calls for reflexivity in ethnographic practice. On the one hand, I am loath to carry self-revelatory personal narrative as a rhetorical strategy or authorial voice to the point of self-absorption, allowing little room for others to have a voice. On the other hand, self-revelation has a place insofar as it allows, to some extent, readers to judge for themselves the influence of my own subjectivity in what I write about that of others. For this reason, I will occasionally revert to personal narrative as it seems appropriate throughout this book. As a whole, what I have to offer is observation and interpretation, but it is only one perspective and far from the last word.