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 UniversityMuseum 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.
“They didn’t manage to kill us all at the time of colonization” says Celia Xakriabá “but we are living through a moment of legislated genocide.” Xakriabá is an activist who is featured in Tribal Voice,an online campaign that is organised by Survival International.
Confronting Genocide
Anthropology and Geography Conference, London June 4-7, 2020.
How do we deal with the threat of genocide in 2020?
“We” are a group of researchers, academics, and environmental activists who are responding to the humanitarian consequences of unprecedented and accelerated deforestation in the Amazon, which raises the issue of genocide in Brazil and other countries across the globe.
The burning of the Amazon rainforest in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photo: Mayke Toscano/AFP/Getty Images & The Guardian
In keeping with the conference theme of “dialogues past, present and future,” we are asking if we have learned anything from over 150 years of genocide and humanitarian activism in response to it. For instance, in the 1890s, a small group of anthropologists and geographers went against the colonial mainstream and demanded a radical political response from the scientific community and the public to the threat of genocide created by habitat destruction by colonists.
It sounds very historical, but Celia Xakriabá (see above ) makes it clear that the threat of genocide is very real, very current and the call to action is even more urgent today given the situation that is developing in the Amazon under Bolsonaro, whose policies have been described as “legislated genocide.”
The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are not the only populations under threat and Brazil is not the only place where a combination of globalisation and habitat destruction is leading to “legislated genocide”-–the deliberate destruction of livelihoods and the legalised murder of indigenous peoples. Genocide is happening now in Turkey, the Kalahari, the Congo Basin, the jungles of India, the Andaman Islands, Australasia.
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.
Much of this genocide has remained hidden and we hope that our research and activism will start a debate about “legislated genocide,” a combination of advocacy and activism that will encourage further action in solidarity with the victims of habitat destruction, forced migration, and genocide, whether the causes are cultural, political, economic, or environmental.
The Contributors
The debate will be chaired by DrEve Bratman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. She will give a paper on “The Lives and Landscapes of Sustainable Development in the Xingu River Basin of the Brazilian Amazon.” She asks how the discourse of sustainable development legitimates and privileges certain interests, and how it comes to be manifested – and resisted. She will present as a case study the geographic and social terrain of the Xingu river basin in the state of Pará. Oxford University Press has just published her book Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Brazilian Amazon.
Representatives of the local indigenous communities and environmental activists demonstrate in Sao Paulo against the construction of Belo Monte dam at Xingu river in the Brazilian state of Para. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images (The Guardian).
Fiona Watson, Advocacy and Research Director with Survival international, will present Tribal Voice, a series of hard-hitting videos that provide an online platform for tribal peoples living in an age of legislated genocide. These videos expose hidden genocides and support tribal peoples in their fight against genocide. Tribal Voice represents a significant development in the nature and direction of humanitarian activism and has profound implications for the idea of engaged practices in a multi-agency fight against legislated genocide in 2020 and beyond. Watson is a regular contributor to The Guardian.
Dr Raúl Acosta-Garcia, Institut für Ethnologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, will deal with advocacy networks that have sought to protect the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants, creating associations that have become laboratories for political experimentation. His analysis builds on arguments presented in his new book Civil becomings: performative politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean, the first monograph of the series NGOgraphies (University of Alabama Press).
Top: An aerial view of the road BR-319 highway near city of Humaita, Amazonas state, Brazil (Irish Examiner). Bottom: A paved section of the BR-163 highway in Brazil. (Photo by Jeso Carneiro/Flickr / Eve Bratman & NACLA)
Dr Federico Ferretti,Associate Professor, University College Dublin, School of Geography, will present a paper on “Savage anarchy’ between geography and anthropology”, which deals with early forms of collaboration that occurred between geographical and anthropological (or ethnographical) knowledge around the circuits of anarchist geographers between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Ferretti is the invited author for the Progress in Human Geography report series on ‘History and Philosophy of Geography‘ from 2020 to 2022 (3 papers).
A detail of a photograph taken by Alfred Cort Haddon in the Torres Strait in 1888 and a detail from a Tribal Voice video released by Survival International in 2019
Ciarán Walsh, freelance curator, will deal with the emergence of social anthropology from radical geography in Ireland in the 1890s, using the photo-ethnographic practice of Alfred Cort Haddon as a novel vantage point from which to see how anthropology is positioned to deal with climate change, the destruction of habitats, and hostile borders in the present and assess the future relevance of the discipline in this context.His essay on “Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement” is about to go to press (Routledge).
The discussant isDr Matthew Cheeseman,Associate Professor of Creative Writing, College of Arts, Humanities and Education, University of Derby, who is working with Carina Hart of the University of Nottingham on a collection of essays (Routledge) dealing with the relationship between nationality, identity, and folklore movements in the context of Brexit and the rise of the alt right in Europe.
The Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference is jointly organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Royal Geographical Society, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS (The School of Oriental & African Studies), and the British Museum’s Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The conference will be held in SOAS, Senate House, and the Clore Centre of the British Museum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Clara Patterson’s photograph of children playing a game in Ballymiscaw, County Down, c.1894. Patterson was encouraged by Alfred Cort Haddon to document folk customs in Ireland.
Folklore, Nationalism, Home Rule, and Brexit
Ciarán Walsh will be taking part in a conference on the relation between folklore and nationalism. Folklore and the Nation is timed to coincide with the exit of the UK from the EU. It’s being organised by the Folklore Society (FLS) and hosted by the University of Derby. It kicks off on the afternoon of Friday 29 March 2019.
His paper deals with ethnicity, nationalism and folklore, drawing on a forgotten anti-imperial movement in British folklore. It begins with an anti-colonial speech delivered by Alfred Haddon in Ipswich in 1895. Haddon was aligned with the volkskunde wing of the folklore movement in Ireland and opened his speech by acknowledging nationalist efforts to disengage from political and economic union with Britain.
Haddon entered anthropology through folklore, equating the destruction of native customs in subjugated territories with the loss of personal identity, ethnicity, and, ultimately, nationhood. Haddon spoke to Patrick Geddes and Havelock Ellis about reconstituting anthropology as a vehicle for radical anti-colonial activism.
They were inspired by the anarchist geography of Kropotkin, the radical ethnology of Reclus, and the “Zeitgeist” of Gomme (FLS). This conference looks like the place to remember an engagement between Irish nationalists, English folklorists and stateless anarchists /ethnologists on the brink of Ireland’s exit from Britain.
