An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800-1950
Abstract
In An Irish Working Class, Marilyn Silverman explores the dynamics of capitalism, colonialism, and state formation through an examination of the political economy and culture of those who contributed their labour. Stemming from the author’s academic research on Ireland for over two decades, the book combines archival data, interviews, and participant observation to create a unique and intricate study of labourers’ lives in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, between 1800 and 1950. Political anthropology, Gramscian approaches to hegemony, and the work of social historians on class experience all inform Silverman’s perspective in this volume. Silverman explores the complex and changing consciousness, politics, and social relations of a cross-section of workers. These workers were employed in the mills, tanneries, artisanal shops, and retail outlets, and on the landed estates, farms, and public works projects which typified this highly differentiated locality. In constructing the social history of workers in a particular place over time, An Irish Working Class makes an important contribution to Irish Studies, European historical ethnography, and the anthropology of working-class life.
... Kurtz (1996) in his critical examination of its uses by anthropologists, singles out Carstens (1991), John and Jean Comaroff (1991Comaroff ( , 1992 and Fox (1989) for special attention. The notion is especially salient in the ethnographies of Sider (1986); see also Rebel (1989a, 1989b) Ortner (1989 and Silverman (2001), as well as in Gledhill study (1994). Anthropological critiques of Scott's dismissal of the concept can be found in Roseberry (1996), Smith (1999). ...
The popularity of the notion of hegemony in anthropology and cognate disciplines has waxed and waned. The self-censorship of Gramsci's most accessible writings (Selections from the prison notebooks) and the multi-layered nature of his thinking
have led to a variety of understandings of the term. Easier to reflect on historically, after the events, than to use for analyses of the present, hegemony is both attractive to intellectuals insofar as it establishes their role in politics and yet prone to vagueness in its application to
real life situations. For these reasons perhaps, the notion is now on the wane. Yet before we throw out the baby with the bath water, we need to reflect on precisely how it has been used in social analysis and praxis. This article takes a critical view of those people who have most influenced
anthropologists in their understanding of the term and argues that the fetishization of ‘culture’ has probably done more to mystify the concept than anything else.
Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Irish Land War, internationalised partly through the influence of Henry George, the American social reformer and political economist, came at a decisive juncture in Anglo-American political thought, and provided many radicals across the North Atlantic with a vision of a more just and morally coherent political economy. Looking at the discourses and practices of these agrarian radicals, alongside developments in liberal political thought, Andrew Phemister shows how they utilised the land question to articulate a natural and universal right to life that highlighted the contradictions between liberty and property. In response to this popular agrarian movement, liberal thinkers discarded many older individualistic assumptions, and their radical democratic implications, in the name of protecting social order, property, and economic progress. Land and Liberalism thus vividly demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought.
The chapter establishes the intersection of disability and class through an analysis of two autobiographies of vision impairment and the history of blind workers in Ireland. The chapter also traces the persistence of infectious trachoma and its association with famine, poverty, and colonial warfare, discovering in Sean O’Casey’s 1939 childhood memoir an interrogation of the political dimensions of his vision impairment. Fifty years later, Joe Bollard’s 1998 autobiography describes his struggle against what he defines as an underclass mentality of submission, as well as the discrimination that proved a more formidable impediment than blindness. Both works highlight problems of labor and the often harmful impact of institutions that were originally established for altruistic ends.
Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest. With the publication of A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2017), Declan Kiberd could write that its focus on ‘an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people’, would ‘set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come’. This essay asks a number of timely questions in that regard: What is the likely shape of that future debate, in terms of class and culture in Ireland, and what are the lacunae that will guide research and publishing priorities for those who engage with it in academia and the arts? What has been achieved in terms of the recent scholarly inquiry into working-class writing and what are that inquiry's blindspots and limitations? The international contexts, historical breadth, categorical limitations, and institutional and societal challenges are all surveyed in this necessarily short sketch of some of the major issues.
In following on from the groundwork done in Chapters 3 and 4, our intention here is to look at how the purpose of widening participation for non-traditional students is discussed in policy with a particular emphasis on the way equality and economic modernisation are viewed in relation to each other. Access policies – like social policy more generally – are not a unified set of ideas with a clear and defined purpose. It is far more accurate to describe access policies in Ireland as an evolving constellation of guidelines, proposals, assessment techniques and normative aspirations which has resulted in a relatively stable “access agenda” which now underpins major aspects of Higher Education Authority (HEA) policy and informs managerial strategies in HE.
Research on widening participation in Ireland and access policy has repeatedly highlighted the existence of enduring class inequalities in HE. In fact, it has been a vital and defining concern of the literature on access. This chapter offers a summary and critical review of the available research on working class students’ access to HE and outlines the key findings made from the late 1970s till today. One can point to a number of very well-developed lines of inquiry in the research, most notably the work on participation rates, but there are also major lacunae in this body of work. In mapping the contours of the field, a case will be made that what we know and can say about working class access to HE has clear empirical, methodological and theoretical limits.
As the access story unfolds, various plots and sub plots emerge in the narrative. But not all who gain access complete the journey. In this chapter we will discuss how retention is linked to access and equality, review what the research indicates about student retention, completion and persistence in general and then conclude with an outline of what the research says about retention and specific groups of non-traditional students.
Our intention in this chapter is to map out the current routes into which are open to non-traditional students. Alongside this mapping exercise, we will also discuss some of the cognate issues around student finance which we touched on in Chapter 3. Although student finance is but one component of being a student, it is significant and particularly so for those from the “lower” socio-economic groups (SEGs) whom the state wishes to draw into HE. The economic recession, which began in 2008, affected the resource environment of Irish HE considerably. The “we can do more with less” has become the refrain of the past 8 years.
Local history is the history of place, but, though place is central to its meaning, it is much more than this. Local historical research, in the first place, teases out the interplay of landscape, economy, culture and population to explain the shaping of the local community over time. Secondly, by asking ‘big questions about small places’, it prompts the reassessment of assumptions about developments over a wider spatial canvas.1 Thus, local history is about both people and place, and it provides a lens through which one can view the evolution of both the micro world of the locality and the wider world composed of many such localities. Modern Irish local history has been in the making since the mid-eighteenth century, the first significant landmark in its development being the work of the Physico-Historical Society. Established to investigate the roots of contemporary economic development and to combat Ireland’s image as a barbaric country, this society initiated a series of county studies, only four of which were published.2 Though primarily economic in focus, these surveys into ‘the ancient and present state’ of the counties in question effectively linked past with present, and prefigured the interdisciplinary approach of two centuries later by combining elements of geographical, economic, historical and political enquiry.3
This paper provides an overview of the development of ethnography in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic and suggests that, while definitions of the field have been responsive to changes in Irish society and culture as well as to shifts in social theory, "place" and locality remain central to anthropological analyses.
The view that class occupied a central place in the lives of nineteenth-century English workers has recently come under increasing criticism within the fields of labour and social history. Joyce (1980), Stedman Jones (1982 and 1983), Calhoun (1982) and Glen (1984) are prominent examples of scholars who have proclaimed, albeit to varying degrees and with different points of emphasis, that at various times during the nineteenth century workers were far less motivated by class than claimed by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Hobsbawm and likeminded historians. Criticisms of this latter group of historians are, of course, not new. Nevertheless it may be suggested that the recent criticisms of class do possess two distinguishing characteristics. Firstly, they have surely gathered a momentum and a degree of influence within labour and social history which the criticisms of the 1960's (especially the positivist-based critiques of Edward Thompson's view of class) failed to achieve. (This change is, in part, related to the defeats and retreats suffered by the labour movement under Thatcherism, and the current intellectual and political re-assessment of the historical strength of class-consciousness within the British working class.) Secondly, the criticisms of the 1980's issue from a much wider range of theoretical perspectives than was the case during the 1960's.