A miscellany of murderous little facts from the hidden spaces of anthropology in Ireland:Some Background
Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 following the international success of his exhibition “John Millington, Photographer.” His followed this with the ground-breaking “Headhunter” project in 2012 and developed it into a four-year investigation of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory between 1891 and 1900.
His research was funded by the Irish Research Council and the Shanahan Research Centre (formerly Kimmage Development Studies Centre). The academic programme was managed by Maynooth University in association with the School of Medicine TCD. The research phase of the project concluded in January 2019 and Walsh was awarded a PhD (Arts) in June 2002.
The Skull Measuring Business
The Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory Laboratory remained something of a mystery to the historians who rewrote the history of of anthropology in the 1890s and still influence accounts of what Haddon was doing in Ireland. Haddon’s story is complicated his involvement in craniology, which his friend and mentor Patrick Geddes derided as the ‘skull measuring business’ in a letter written at the end of 1889.
The Irish Headhunters in action, Charles R. Browne (left) and Alfred Cort Haddon measuring Tom Connelly’s skull in 1892. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.
Three years later Haddon took a selfie of himself and Charles R. Browne measuring Tom Connelly’s skull in the Aran Island and explaining that photograph has generated a ground breaking history of Anglo-Irish anthropology in the context of home rule and a wider anti-imperial movement.
Murderous Little Facts
Francis Galton recalled a conversation with Herbert Spencer about the relation between theory and fact.
He [Spencer] burst into a good-humoured and uproarious laugh, and told me the famous story which I have heard from each of the other two who were present on the occurrence. Huxley was one of them. Spencer, during a pause in conversation at dinner at the Athenaeum, said, “You would little think it, but I once wrote a tragedy.” Huxley answered promptly, “I know the catastrophe.” Spencer declared it was impossible for he had never spoken about it before then. Huxley insisted. Spencer asked what it was. Huxley relied, “A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.”
Francis Galton, 1908, Memories of My Life, p. 258).
I came across this quite late in my research, but it neatly summarised what I was finding. Unpacking the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory – literally and metaphorically – produced a lot of facts that did not fit well established historical narratives of anthropology in Ireland and England in the 1890s. It became clear that some of those narratives needed to be killed off and significant elements of the history of anthropology re-written. The history of the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory and its programme of ethnographic fieldwork in the West of Ireland is a case in point.
Anthropology’s Forgotten Spaces in Ireland
The Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory is a largely forgotten space. It usually warrants little more than a footnote in the history of anthropology, usually in the context of the career of Haddon.
The Laboratory opened in TCD in June 1891 and, when it ceased ceased operation in 1903, its collection of anatomical specimens were put into storage in the Department of Anatomy. Andrew Francis Dixon, who replaced Cunningham as Professor of Anatomy in 1903, kept some records but these were put into long term storage – in a tea-chest under the anatomy theatre – in 1948, along with the collections of the Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy Museums. In 1986 Forrest (1986: 1384) found no trace of the original records of the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory. All that was left was a considerable collection of human remains that were hidden away in the “skulls passage” behind the anatomy theatre.
Legacies
These skulls are the subject of a repatriation claim by communities in Inishbofin, Aran, and The Glen (St Finian’s Bay) in Kerry. Provost Paddy Prendergast supported the claiming 2021, TCD did a u-turn when the “Old” Anatomy Working Group objected to repatriation shortly afterward. Negotiations entered a new phase in July 2020 when Provost Linda Doyle agreed to meet community representatives on September 1, 2022 to discuss the repatriation claim.
A photograph of rye fields on Inis Meáin, the middle island of the Aran Island, Co Galway, Ireland. It shows two men taking a break whilst cutting rye which was used to make the distinctive thatched roofs on cottages on the island. It is included in an exhibition of photographs entitled ‘Inis Meáin August 1973’ An exhibition of photographs by Chris Rodmell that has just gone on show on the island. Curated by Ciarán Walsh,www.curator.ie
There was a big turn out for the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Charles Lamb (1893–1964) in Aras Éanna, the arts centre on Inis Oírr in the Aran Islands. Lamb was from Northern Ireland. He was born in County Armagh and attended evening classes at the Belfast School of Art before he gained a scholarship to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin where he studied from 1917 to 21. Like so many Irish painters of the time, Lamb was attracted to the West of Ireland where he focused on studies of peasant life in Conomara. He painted on the Aran Islands in 1928 and he settled in An Ceathrú Rua (Carraroe), where he the built a house in the Breton style in the he mid-1930s.
The paintings are part of a private collection that is owned by Laillí Lamb de Buitléar and the exhibition was curated by the contemporary glass artist Róisín de Buitléar. It was hung by Ciarán Ciarán Walsh of www.curator.ie. The exhibition is the highlight of an arts programme (presented by Maighread Ní Ghallchóir and Danny Kirrane in Aras Éanna) that is dedicated to the memory of Laillí’s husband Eamon de Buitléar – the writer, musician and film maker who died in January 2013.
Opening of an exhibition of paintings by Charles Lamb (1893–1964) in Aras Éanna, the arts centre on Inis Oírr in the Aran Islands.
“The older shop fronts of the Irish towns I sometimes see as the armorial bearings of imaginative knights forced by circumstance to don economic strait jackets!”
A public art project by Sean Lynch Listowel, County Kerry 3rd June – 27th August 2011
curated by Ciarán Walsh / www.cuator.ie
In the summer of 2011 The Maid of Erin bar re-opened (it had been closed for 5 years) in Listowel, Co Kerry, as a centre for the study of the artworks of Pat McAuliffe. The centre consisted of a collection of published material, a reading area, a photographic display, artefacts from McAuliffe’s workshop and an audio-visual presentation on McAuliffe’s work in North Kerry and West Limerick. During the project, local painter and sign writer Freddy Chute restored and repainted McAuliffe’s most famous artwork, ‘The Maid of Erin.’ The project was managed by Ciarán Walsh / www.curator.ie.
Pat McAuliffe lived and worked in Listowel from 1846 to 1921. In a career as a builder he applied exterior plaster, or stucco, upon shopfronts and townhouses. From the 1870s onwards he began to develop an ambitious and often exuberant style within the compositional framing of facades of everyday buildings in the region. In the streets of Listowel and Abbeyfeale, one can still a broad range of elements culled from the vocabulary of classical architecture and ornament along with an eclectic mix of art nouveau, Celtic and Byzantine styles. Over 35 buildings can be attributed to McAuliffe. MacMahon, in typically poetic fashion, described him thus:
In retrospect I see him quite clearly, great and black-bearded, his dark eyes alive under a cream-coloured straw hat. He came of an old-established family in the town. As a young man, Pat McAuliffe had in him a restless, imaginative streak that left him dissatisfied with the chores of plastering in an average Irish country town. After a span of run-of-the-mill work, he began, without any formal training in art, to experiment in casting in concrete in his little yard. These experiments gave him a new sense of power. Subsequently, when engaged to plaster the front of a house, he demanded a free hand with the design or else refused to execute the work.
The project is funded by the Percent for Art Scheme, Department of Environment,
Heritage and Local Government and Kerry County Council
The Story of Pat McAuliffe and ‘The Maid of Erin’
Mary Potter and Jeremiah Galvin were nervous as they waited for Pat McAuliffe of Listowel to remove the tarpaulin that covered the front of their premises. They had commissioned a shopfront from McAuliffe, a local builder who specialised in external plaster decoration or stucco. Nobody knew what to expect. Mc Auliffe, a taciturn widower in his mid-sixties, had as usual demanded a free hand with the design. He had a reputation for elaborate ornamentation but this job was different. He had been seen carting a sculpture of a naked lady to the building. No one knew what was going on. He worked in secret, hidden behind a screen until the job was finished.
McAuliffe was late. He was making his way down Church St. in a donkey cart when he passed a young woman. The donkey had stopped out of habit, knowing well that McAuliffe would want to chat to her. Eventually he arrived on Main Street ‘great and blackbearded, his dark eyes alive under a cream coloured hat’ as described by Bryan ‘The Master’ MacMahon. He climbed the scaffold and unveiled his scheme for ‘The Central Hotel.’ It was a larger than life sculpture of a bare breasted Mother Ireland, hand on harp, wolfhound at her feet and round tower by her side. She was enthroned on a large rock garlanded with shamrocks and framed by a scroll declaring “Erin Go Bragh.” She was crowned with a ‘Fenian’ sunburst. The townspeople held heir breath. It was 1912 and the Catholic Church was consolidating its control over Irish Ireland. The local priest demured, pronouncing that “if famine were to happen again, sure she would feed half the nation.”
It was a close call. In Abbeyfeale a naked ‘Angel’ was removed from O’Connor’s at the ‘request’ of a priest. It was the centrepiece of McAuliffe’s most elaborate and and eclectic work , a sculpted building that stands as a remarkable testament to a man who set about transforming the streetscapes of Listowel and Abbeyfeale. McAuliffe was born in 1846 in Lixnaw we think. He died in 1921. There is a death certificate but no birth certificate. He married Catherine Gleason and had 15 children, eight of whom were living when the 1901 census was taken. By 1911 Catherine had died and McAuliffe was living alone. It was around then that McAuliffe underwent a transformation. Since the 1870s he had developed an ambitious style of stuccowork but he now began adding sculptural elements and complex symbolic references to his facades.
‘The Maid of Erin’ is the best known of these. It is a gem of the Gaelic Revival and badly underrated. Art historians have shown some interest in terms of a ‘native’ element within the revival but McAuliffe is regarded more as an eccentric builder than an artist. He did catch the attention of Frank O’Connor in 1950. He used McAulliffe’s deisgn for J. M. Keane’s public house to comment on the eloquent and ornate quality of Kerry English. “In Listowel you can drink in a pub which has inscriptions in three languages: “Erin Go Bragh,” “Maison de Ville” and “Spes Mea in Deo.”
Architectural interest has been negligible probably because McAuliffe’s canvas was the standard townhouse of the time. Interest has focussed on individual shopfronts -missing the big picture that is the scope and complexity of the man’s work. This has not been listed. Its survival is down to the people of Listowel and the pride they take in their town. Listowel is a compact and prosperous market town that still has the imprint of its anglo-Norman origins Built on a bend in the River Feale, it fans out from its Norman keep, through the market Square and along tidy streets of family businesses to rows of neat artisan cottages at the other end of the town. Around this core is ‘Irishtown’ and beyond that the milk rich plains of North Kerry and the Shannon strip.
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.
