Donegal County Council Archives Service acquired a collection of photographs by Ann Doherty in 2018. Doherty worked as a photojournalist with the Sunday Times Magazine between 1994 and 2005 and documented ordinary people living in extraordinary situations across the world. The Heritage Council awarded Donegal County Archives Service a Heritage Stewardship grant to employ an archivist / curator to work with County Archivist Niamh Brennan and catalogue, digitise, and prepare the collection for exhibition in partnership with Caroline Carr and Judith McCarthy in the County Museum.
Ciarán Walsh began work on the project in July, working alongside Niamh Brennan and Ann Doherty on the selection and digitising of 75 images for exhibition. The second phase of the project gets underway in September when the collection will be catalogued and integrated with six other photographic collections in the archives.
With permission of Donegal County Council Archive Services
An exhibition of Ann Doherty’s photographs titled A Common Humanity is scheduled to open in Donegal County Museum in Letterkenny on September 22.
Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement
Ciarán Walsh
Abstract
The mobilisation of tradition by separatists in the Brexit movement has revived the spectre of folklore studies constituting a resource for ethnocentric nationalism and Nazism. There is––almost––an inevitability about the coupling of ethnical authenticity and genocidal xenophobia, but there is another, long-forgotten history of folklore studies in Europe. This tells the story of utopians and revolutionaries who used the study of traditional communities as a resource for the reconstruction of modern European societies, guided by socialised anthropology and calling for anarchy in the UK. Alfred Cort Haddon, Patrick Geddes, and Henry “Havelock” Ellis began reconstructing anthropology in 1890 with reformist experiments that form the core of this chapter, which draws on an unprecedented ‘Irish’ reading of Haddon’s papers and related records. It focuses on Haddon’s use of photo-ethnographic performance to mobilise an anti-colonial, Anglo-Irish folklore movement: a ‘savage-lives-matter’ campaign that confronted Eurocentric racism and genocide in the colonies.
Citation:
Walsh, Ciarán. 2021. “Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement.” In Folklore and nation in Britain and Ireland edited by Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart. London: Routledge Taylor Francis.
Keywords: art | dance | photo-ethnography | ethnology | post-evolutionism | anti-colonial | anarcho-utopian theories | social reform | insurrection | Anti-slavery movement | Ireland | Aran Islands | modernism | traditional versus practical debate.
I walked into the Anthropology Dept in Maynooth University at 9am on February 2, 2015 to begin a PhD and at 4.31pm yesterday afternoon Mark, the postman, delivered a letter confirming that I had been awarded the Doctoral Degree by the Academic Council of the University.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the support of Nuala Finn, who, apart from emotional and intellectual support, carried the financial burden of five years of full-time research on my part. Brendan Finn and Claire Comerford provided accommodation and company in Dublin. Clodagh Finn and Douglas Smyth did likewise and all four provided invaluable encouragement to Nuala and I.
This project is, in many ways, a continuation of the “Irish Headhunter” project, which I developed between 2010 and 2015 in partnership with Dáithí De Mórdha of Ionad an Bhlascaod Mhór (The Great Blasket Centre) and the Office of Public Works (OPW). The “Irish Headhunter” project was a truly collaborative enterprise that involved many people. I acknowledge especially the contribution made by Felicity O’Mahony, Bernard Meehan, Jane Maxwell and Tim Keefe (TCD); Amanda Ryan (The Heritage Council); Justin Carville (Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology); Aidan Baker (Haddon Library) and his wife Clare Sansom, Margaret Risbeth (the Haddon family); John D. Pickles (Cambridge Antiquarian Society); Jocelyne Dudding (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology); the late Seamás Mac Philbin (National Museum of Ireland, Country Life); Liam Ó Maoladha (Oireachtas na Gaeilge); Padraig Ó Direan and Padraig O’Tuairisc (Oileáin Árann); Nicola Reynolds, Mark Maguire, Seamás Ó Suíocháin, and Abdullahi El-Tom (MU Dept of Anthropology); Fiona Murphy (DCU School of Business), Seán Mac An tSíthigh (RTE), Chris Rodmell (photographer & film maker) and Ciarán Rooney (Film Bank). Each in their own way supported the “Irish Headhunter” project and helped lay the foundation for “The Skull Measuring Business.”
The transition to full-time research was made possible by the generosity of Siobhán Ward, Davis Coakley, and Martina Hennessy (School of Medicine, TCD), who gave me unprecedented access to the treasure trove that is “Old” Anatomy in TCD. Opening that door opened the way to an application to the Irish Research Council (IRC). Securing IRC funding was a project in itself and was achieved through intensive teamwork. The team included Mark Maguire and Andrea Valova (MU), Róisín Burke & Ian Jackman (Abarta Audio Guides), Ciara Breathnach (UL), and Justin Carville (DLIADT). The IRC agreed to fund the project in 2015. In 2016, Rob Kevlihan (Shanahan Research Group, formerly Kimmage Development Studies Centre) rescued the project by becoming a new enterprise partner after Abarta had to pull out of it and, furthermore, ensured that the funding for the project was secured until completion in February 2019. Mark Maguire’s leadership during the various twists-and-turns and ups-and-downs kept the whole project on track and moving forward. I take this opportunity to acknowledge his practical support for and intellectual engagement with the “Skull Measuring Business.”
The vital financial support of the Irish Research Council and Shanahan Research Group is hereby acknowledged.
Translating IRC funding into a viable thesis was only possible with the assistance of Research Supervisors Mark Maguire, David Prendergast, and Martina Hennessy, who worked alongside my enterprise mentor Rob Kevlihan. I had no background in academic anthropology and I am indebted to the teaching staff of the Dept of Anthropology for developing my understanding of the discipline. These include Steve Coleman, Abdullahi El-Tom, Pauline Garvey, Jamie Saris, and Tom Strong. I am especially grateful to Jacqui Mulally, Denise Erdmann (MU Anthropology Office), and Conor Wilkinson (MU Post Grad Office) for their support. Hana Červinková (Head of Department) joined MU Anthropology in 2019 and guided this project through its final stages.
This is an Anglo-Irish project and, from the outset, was supported by Cambridge University Library (CUL), Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMAA), and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI). I am very grateful to Frank Bowles and Katrina Dean (CUL); David Shankland and Amanda Vinson (RAI); Jocelyne Dudding and Anita Herle (CUMAA). I am especially grateful to Aidan Baker and Clare Sansom, who provided a home from home in Cambridge. Likewise Jimmy MacSweeny, who provided a base for my researches in London.
I also acknowledge the contribution of Matthew Cheeseman, Caroline Oates, Carina Hart (The Folklore Society); Maxim Fomin (Irish Conference of Folklore and Ethnology); and Ciarán Rooney (Film Bank).
Pat Togher’s great-grandparents emigrated from Mayo as part of the assisted emigration scheme Tuke devised to clear impoverished districts in the county. Togher came to the exhibition of photographs taken by Charles R. Browne in the west of Ireland to see his great-grandparents featured in photographs not included in the reports Browne published. Those encounters happened every time the exhibition was shown and they demonstrate that translation of little known archives into public histories. That became the governing principal of every curatorial project that followed.
The Irish Head-hunter project has a complex history and further work is need before its archive can be linked to this page.
The Irish ‘Head-hunter’ project commenced life in 2010 as a photographic exhibition focussed on an ethnographic archive Charles R. Browne assembled in 1897. The project has its origins in Ciarán Walsh’s critically acclaimed 2009 exhibition John Millington Synge Photographer, which included photographs taken in the Aran Islands in 1898. Felicity O’Mahony managed the Synge collection for the Manuscripts Library at TCD and drew Walsh’s attention to an earlier collection of photographs that record the work the Irish Ethnographic Survey, which operated in the west of Ireland between 1892 and 1897. That was the beginning of a community engagement process that curator.ie developed in collaboration Dáithí De Mórdha, Ionad an Bhlascaoid and Jane Maxwell, the Manuscripts Library TCD.
The project went public in 2012 with the ‘Irish Head-hunter’ exhibition and developed into a long-term colonial legacies project that reached a conclusion of sorts in 2023 with the return and burial of the remains of thirteen individuals that A. C. Haddon stole in 1890. Along the way, the project the became a critical review of the history of Anglo-Irish anthropology in the colonial era and that strand culminates in two events in 2023. The first is an exhibition titled ’Haddon and the Aran Islands: the beginning of visual anthropology’ which opens in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London on 15 October 2023, which features the photography of John Millington Synge. The exhibition frames the publication of Walsh’s book Alfred Cort Haddon; A Very English Savage, which will be launched in the RAI on 31 October 2023. This post revisits and updates the original material published online as the project developed. Some of it is very naive in terms of understanding the complexity of the relationship between Browne and Haddon but, as such, record he evolution of the The Irish ‘Head-hunter’ project.
Charles R. Browne
In 1891 Charles R. Browne and his colleagues went headhunting in the Aran Islands. They robbed the graves of dead islanders and took the heads of the living with a camera. The skulls were put in a display case in the Anthropological Museum in Trinity College, University of Dublin (TCD) and the photographs were pasted into a series of albums, six of which survive and are held in the Manuscript Library of Trinity College. These men were academically trained scientists, Browne being the first graduate of a form of academic anthropology developed in TCD in the early 1890s . A. C. Haddon, Browne’s English counterpart, operated out of an anthropometric laboratory in TCD, which the mobilised in 1892 and went searching for evolutionary traces that would reveal the origins of the Irish race. The search commenced in the Aran Islands. Haddon was dropped from fileldwork in 1893 but Browne continued head-hunting until 1900. During that time he ‘surveyed’ districts in Kerry, Connemara and Mayo.
TOP: mobile box cameras Browne used in the field and discovered in the Anatomy Museum in TCD in 2014 (photo: curator.ie, 2014). The camera on the right is a kit-built version of Murer and Duroni’s falling plate camera.’s BOTTOM: C. R. Browne. c. 1897. The Aran Islands / The People. Silver gelatine photographic prints pasted into an album. (Tim Keefe, Sharon Sutton, 2012). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin. Browne collected photographs from several people who photographed the Aran islands between 1890 and 1892, including A. C. Haddon, A. F. Dixon, J. M. Browne (his brother) and Jane Shackleton, who, having seen Haddon’s work, photographed to the islands in 1891.
‘The Irish Headhunter: The Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne’ was a touring exhibition that featured sixty photographs selected by Ciarán Walsh and Dáithí de Mórdha. The project was a collaboration between Ionad an Bhlascaoid, the Manuscript Library, TCD, the Heritage Council and the OPW. The exhibition opened in the Blasket Centre in Dun Chaoin – the location of Browne’s 1897 photographic survey – in May 2012. It travelled to Aran, Connemara and the Museum of Country life in Mayo, visiting most of the places Browne surveyed. In September 2013 it was shown in the Haddon Library in Cambridge followed by National University of Ireland (NUI) Maynooth, now Maynooth University, where it was hosted by the Anthropology Society.
Ten years on, Browne’s photographs of Inishbofin feature in exhibition on the old pier on Inishbofin, at the site where Browne measured islanders in 1893. Ciarán Walsh and Marie Coyne, Inishbofin Heritage Museum, curated the exhibition as part of the return and burial of the remains of thirteen individuals A. C. Haddon stole from the community burial in 1890.
Michael Gibbons, archaeologist, guides a group of Notre Dame University scholars through Charles R. Browne’s photographs of Inishbofin in August 2023 (photo: Ciarán Walsh).
Browne’s survey of the communities living on the islands and remote headlands of the west of Ireland in the 1890s, the edge of the western world, is unmatched because of his attention to detail, his interest in social conditions, his naming of subjects and, ultimately, his fascination with the western ‘peasant’ at a time when the integrity of the United Kingdom was under threat because the appalling social and economic conditions he documented triggered land wars and fuelled the Home Rule movement movement.
