De Valera's Irelands (32 page)

Dangers threaten the population when it migrates to the cities. It withers away in a few generations, because it lacks the vital bond with the earth. The German nation must be rooted in the soil if it wants to remain alive.
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In the previous year, 1934, the director of the Working Group for German Folklore had asserted:

German folklore is the study of the racial and traditional world of the Ger­man people which is purest and most alive in those communities which have experienced the most eternal contact with blood and soil.
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Here in Ireland the anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan bias of earlier twentieth century folklore studies amounted in effect to little more than neglect of the popular culture of the contemporary urbanising world – as evidenced in the exclusion of city schools from the Commission's 1937/8 Schools' Folklore Collection project (whereby the pupils of all primary schools in the state – barring the cities ­– were set to work to write down the folklore and traditions remembered by their elders). When, in 1938, de Valera greet­­ed Douglas Hyde's accession to the pres­idency as that of a ‘rightful prince' and hailed it as closing, in his (de Valera's) perspective, a symbolic breach that had existed since ‘the undoing of our nation at Kinsale'.
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His words remained at the level of rhetoric and cultural ideology fuelling, not social and political hatred, but rather the antiquarian and traditional construc­tion put officially on Irish cultural identity – surely one of the abstractions against which Seán Ó Faoláin set his sights in
The Bell
.

That continuing antiquarian/traditional construction of what con­stituted Irish folklore or popular culture was effected by folklorists and cultural nationalists on the basis of traditional materials gathered more from the memories, than from the living, behaviour of informants and culture bearers, who were themselves of course living in a society and a culture deeply transformed by the technology and social organisation of the contemporary modern world.

Today, historians and ethnologists alike would question whether the concepts of an exclusive ‘folklore' and an exclusive ‘folk tradition' can be historically or ethnographically meaningful – given the artificial nature of the distinctions they imply in social reality and cultural experience. Is there any meaningful way in which ‘folklore' can be separated off from the totality of a society's or an individual's production of and participa­tion in cultural knowledge and cultural forms – material, social or sym­bolic? The fullest, most recent, Irish discussion relevant to this question is that of the historian, Seán Connolly, who attempts to outline and analyse the history of the idea of popular culture as addressed in historical writ­ing about Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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At least two separate issues arise from Connolly's treatment of the hist­oriography of Irish pre-twentieth century popular culture, that are relevant to a consideration of the neglect of the actual popular culture of de Valera's Ireland by folklorist and historian alike. The first of these has to do with the very idea of a popular culture that is in some way detach­ed or detachable from the overall picture of cultural activity in the case of any society. Citing examples from the culture of the eighteenth and nine­teenth centuries in Ireland – such matters as card-playing, dancing and hurling in the domain of recreation or beliefs and practices assoc­iated with the fairy faith in the domain of religion, Connolly is able to argue con­vincingly for a flow of cultural transmission, a sharing and a spreading out of cultural knowledge and patterns of behaviour within the social world that defies the setting of boundaries between folk and non-folk. The cultural reality of that world is, instead, best thought of in holistic terms as comprising an unbounded and unstructured flow of ideas, be­haviours, institutions and material artefacts, that both shift and change in response to shifting and changing economic and political life in the framework of the general modernising tendency of the European world. In Connolly's view, any attempted rigid division of cultural reality into separate subaltern and elite cultural worlds is untenable, in a way that highlights a similar implausibility in the constructed, artificial nature of a distinctive Irish folklore world as this was officially under­stood in de Valera's Ireland.

Whether labelled as ‘folklore' or ‘popular culture' we should, in this reading, endeavour to regard the materials accumulated by the Folklore Commission as historic instances of cultural expression in particular his­toric contexts within the flow of a single universe of cultural dis­course, without, of course, denying the very real ethnic, linguistic, econ­omic and political diversity that existed in the social circumstances of people's lives. Viewed like this, the Folklore Commission materials retain their very con­siderable value as an ethnographic record. A diff­erent set of questions can, however, be brought to bear on them from the ones designed to elu­cidate exclusively their representative capacity in relation to some essen­tial Irish tradition.

On this basis also, gaps in the ethnographic record can be better per­ceived, and the missing, or largely invisible, folklore and popular culture of the de Valera years themselves can be conceived of, as a target for re­search and elucidation by both historians and ethnologists working in partnership. Many topics quickly suggest themselves: music hall culture; the culture of the dance-hall and the whist-drive; the culture of popular urban Christianity; the culture of the new slum-clearance hous­ing estates; the culture of the factory floor. Connolly himself draws atten­tion to our relative ignorance regarding the culture of cinema in Ireland, given its enormous popularity from the 1920s. We need, he says, to know about the cultural response to this new cultural form of different regions of the country and of different groups of people. We need to know which parti­cular film genres most appealed to Irish audiences and to what degree the characters and the motifs of commercial cinema were assimilated in­to the wider culture. He reminds us that the earlier eight­eenth century Dublin playhouse was the site for a similar hybridisation of elite and popular, or metropolitan and local, or high and low culture in the context of a then socially-undifferentiated consumer demand for a commercially produced form of social recreation.

On the other hand, we can ourselves observe and experience at first hand the emergence and influence within our contemporary cultural world of similar, apparently novel, forms of group recreation such as comedy clubs, or of group religious practice, such as charismatic healing rituals. On examination, these may well turn out to be transformations of cultural forms already present at the local or folk or popular end of the cultural spectrum of de Valera's Ireland. Rendering the specifics of the actual popular culture of the de Valera years is thus a common task for history and ethnology that is essential to any analysis of the cultural his­tory of Ireland in the twentieth century.

A second issue raised by Connolly also has direct bearing on the question of the relative invisibility of contemporary popular culture in de Valera's Ireland. This is the dominant focus, which, Connolly alleges, exists within Irish popular culture studies on the decline and disappear­ance of cultural forms, together with a prevailing sense of loss and dis­possession in the face of great change. Connolly suggests two reasons why such a focus should exist; one having to do with the belief that the language shift from Irish to English inevitably constituted a decline in cultural creativity; the other with a belief that ‘cultural subjugation', as he puts it, the muting and suppression of cultural expression, is also an inevitable consequence of the political subjugation that Ireland has ex­perienced since the seventeenth century. Connolly argues instead for see­ing creative cultural adjustment to changing circumstances and to new possibilities in place of the view that sees continual withering away of cultural expression and cultural identity. He draws attention to examples of evidence of a capacity on the part of Irish-speaking groups in the eight­eenth century to deal ably with the expanding urban and commer­cial sec­tor of society.

I might mention that I have myself discussed the County Clare poet, Brian Merriman, and his long poem ‘The Midnight Court', as an exam­ple of this kind of hybridisation in cultural expression. It bridges native tradition and the social reality of the later eighteenth century north Mun­ster world which was experiencing increasing literacy, increasing mar­ket­isation and monetarisation of the economy, and increased expansion in the operation of courts of law.
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In that eighteenth century cultural world, with its mixture of tradition and commercialisation, Connolly contends that what he terms the ‘triumph' of the metropolitan was inevitable, what­ever the language spoken and whatever the political circumstances. The demonstration of the cultural mechanism of that metropolitan ‘triumph' is what is relevant to our own concerns. The National Folklore Archive, built on the dedicated labours of the Folklore of Ireland Society and the Irish Folklore Commission, comprises a huge and hugely val­uable prima­ry resource for the study of that cultural mechanism, as it actually opera­ted within the cultural and social reality to which the test­imony of the Commission's contributors bears eloquent witness.

When we come to look at the popular culture of Ireland in the mid­dle decades of the twentieth century we can see how a prevailing cultural ideology that saw cultural identity chiefly in terms of anti­quarian tradi­tion, served to divert attention away from the culturally creative nature of the adjustments to modernity that were expressing themselves in the world-view, the lifestyle and the material culture of the twentieth cen­tury urban and urbanising world, in which Irish people actually lived increasingly metropolitan-influenced lives. Hyde had spoken in his 1892 lecture of the Gaelic past at the bottom of the Irish heart ‘that prevents us becoming citizens of the empire.'
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De Valera in his turn spoke of the wish that lay in the heart of every Irish man and woman for a country not only free but truly Irish as well.
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The ways in which the real men and women of de Valera's Ireland could be seen to be truly Irish were, to a sig­nificant degree, circumscribed by the ideol­ogical perspective that plac­ed little or no value on cultural forms that deviated from a kind of folk norm in official thinking.

With later developments in folklore and popular culture studies, we are able to see today how official norms and representations of cultural identity are always destined to be static and crude and out-of-date when set against the ceaseless flow of cultural creativity and cultural trans­mis­sion, the transmission of ideas, values, behaviours and objects that con­stitute the reality of a holistic cultural world out of which new cultural forms and new expressions of cultural identity are continually being created. As Connolly rightly insists in regard to the study of cultural matters by historians, it behoves us all as students of culture to try to avoid becoming prisoners of abstractions of our own making.

The terms ‘folklore' and ‘popular culture' must, therefore, be used in a way that is fully conscious of the unwarranted distortion of the reality of cultural history that their use has sometimes implied. Connolly would, in theory, countenance renouncing the possibility of talking about popu­lar culture as an historical object or a historical system of cult­ural activity in its own right. He envisages, however, a continued interest by histori­ans of culture in studying local, popular cultural manifest­ations.

Folklore studies and ethnology have, for their part too, undergone a veritable paradigm shift since the closing years of de Valera's Ireland, that has brought their thinking on the creation and transmission of cul­ture to a position somewhat akin to that claimed by Connolly for his­torians. The model of culture process that is associated with the name of the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz,
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is one that offers the possibility of study­ing the local and popular production and transmission of culture and cul­tural identity without either a) falling into the trap of resorting to un­justified and unsustainable abstractions; or b) having to forego entirely a vernacular focus. This is achieved by a continual framing of every sub­culture and of all local innovation within the increasingly globalised dif­fusion and interplay of cultural forces and forms.

Folklore and popular culture within this perspective are the cultural forms that give expression to local creativity and identity in divergent vernacular ways rather than in convergent cosmopolitan ones. Both these tendencies are, however, to be regarded as constantly at work to­gether within the wash and flow of cultural production and trans­mis­sion in the media and information age in which we live. A focus on the study of vernacular, local, popular aspects of culture and culture history within an overall frame encompassing cosmopolitan culture process, offers the prospect of being able to throw light on both the history and the cultural dynamic of the means whereby groups and individuals have, in Ireland as elsewhere, continually reconciled their traditional identities and world-views, with the demands and the opp­ortunities of the pre­vailing economic and political circumstances, as these are created and transformed by developments in the wider world.

In mentioning, as a small example of this kind of focus, the UCC research project on the urban folklore and ethnology of Cork's northside – a project established by means of co-operation between the Depart­ment of Folklore of UCC and a number of Cork northside community organisations
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– I want to draw attention to the considerable interest that is today being shown by communities in how best they can them­selves represent (both to themselves and to others) their own traditions and their own cultural identity in the form of folklore and local history. This interest is not, of course, confined to urban communities only but, in general, it offers to folklorists and historians of culture alike, the pros­pect of being able to collaborate with each other and with local groups in order to collect an archive of primary evidence for the operation in de Valera's Ireland, outside of the official frame of antiquarian cultural ideol­ogy, of the actual cultural process that operated in Moore Street and in Mayo, in Donnycarney and in Donegal, in Gurranabraher and in Graigue na Managh.