Helena Wulff

Memories in Motion : The Irish Dancing Body

The aim of this article is to explore the Irish dancing body by combining the growing social science interest in mobility with the established area of the body as a site of culture. On the basis of ethnographic observations and interviews about dance and culture in Ireland, I will discuss the Irish dancing body in relation to the construction of social memory, the embodiment of values linked to Irish national identity, mobility, dance competitions and global touring. First, I will detail three distinct movement sequences from different dance forms in Ireland: competitive Irish dancing, dance theatre and Riverdance(the commercial Irish dance show). Second, I will look at how dance can be said to travel around Ireland, north and south, as well as back and forth to Ireland. The idea of the Irish dancing body offers an example of the unity of body and mind in dance, revealing also that abstract dance and movement communicate stories about their societies. In Irish dance, these stories feature displacement, longing and resistance, often steeped in the history. I conclude that this social memory connects a distinct Irish tradition with European modernity.

LONGING FOR THE LAND: EMOTIONS, MEMORY, AND NATURE IN IRISH TRAVEL ADVERTISEMENTS

With its large diaspora, Ireland has a long tradition of travel ranging from emigration to return migration, expatriate visits as well as tourism. Although Irish tourism increased substantially with the climax of the so-called Celtic Tiger in the early 1990s, Ireland was a major tourist destination even before that. This article explores emotions, memory, and nature in images (in travel catalogues and on the internet) advertising Ireland in a global context. The images target Irish expatriates, indigenous tourists, and non-Irish tourists in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Images featuring pastoral landscapes, rural harmony, and dramatic cliffs can be emotionally evocative in different ways, exemplifying peoples social relationships to their environment. Central themes in the images are expatriate emotions of displacement, longing, and nostalgia often connected with Irish nationalism while at the same time managing to include non-Irish people. This confirms the notion of images as ambiguous, yet points at the possibility of steering the viewers attention through captions featuring the concepts of “home” and “our land.” The article also focuses on expatriate emotions that recur in the narrative of Irish travel advertisements in an increasingly globalized world.

Dance, Anthropology of

Dance as a topic for systematic anthropological investigation was established in the 1960s. As the Western category of dance did not always work in a cross-cultural perspective, bounded rhythmical movements were identified, as well as dance events. Dance is an expression of wider social and cultural situations, often indicating transition or conflict, as well as unity. Dance anthropologists study all forms of dance, Western and non-Western, ranging from ritual dance and social dance to street dance and staged dance performance. Dance and movement are understood in relation to theories of the body and gender, and to ethnicity, nationalism, and transnationality.

In Favour of Flexible Forms : Multi-Sited Fieldwork

This forum opens up a debate about the diversity that is European Anthropology and the directions in which it is travelling. To set the scene, we contacted SA/AS’s Editorial Board and other prominent anthropologists, inviting them to write a short comment on the topic. We suggested they might wish to discuss ‘any of the diverse anthropological debates, approaches or issues that have been generated in European universities, and that have made a contribution to your own research’. We also welcomed work/ approaches that are not necessarily ‘generated in European universities’ but that have been, or are, handled differently or with different emphases in Europe as opposed to other parts of the anthropological world. For instance, this could include some of the thoughts about ‘sociality’ vs ‘the cultural’, or work on ‘indigeneity’, or on environment, post-colonialism and so on. We added a comment about being aware that ‘there is nothing holding this diversity together as such; our aim is to try and gain a sense of the range of institutionally, conceptually, socially, politically, economically – perhaps even aesthetically or morally – distinctive ways anthropology has been thought, debated, and practised from one or other European vantage point’. Appreciating that it’s not easy to say much in such a short statement of 500 to 1000 words, the idea was nonetheless to generate some overall snapshot. The purview that has resulted is therefore far from exhaustive. After approaching around 35 people, the Forum below reflects the responses we got. We’ve divided them here into two: the first nine deal, more or less, with such issues as histories, traditions and the impacts of funding, and the second ten address more specific conceptual statements regarding particular research projects or approaches. In casting our net wide, we tried to convey an ethos for beginning a debate, rather than closing or directing one. The idea was simply to invite colleagues to say what was on their mind, so as to start the ball rolling for a longer and more detailed discussion over the next four years. The results, printed here virtually as they were written, are a rich start to satisfying those aims. Some threads to the commentaries are briefly summarised below. Collectively, they raise many of the key issues affecting anthropology today, not only in Europe, but all over the world. Yet there was also something that stood out as an issue of distinctive relevance to the European region, and which to our minds may form a basis for developing the debate considerably further in future issues. In discussing historical, institutional, and national/state differences in anthropological practice (Eriksen, Gregory, Papataxiarchis, Cervinkova, Kuper, Hviding), severalThis short contribution to the debate proposes that European anthropology must be seen both within a broader disciplinary remit and within a changing meaning of Europe.

Patrik Aspers: Markets in Fashion: A Phenomenological Approach. City University, 2001

precisely (some aspects of) the nature of the Western state that needs to be explained. In his analysis of the relations between the economically powerful and the state. Poggi also describes in some detail other demands that the former direct to the latter for instance that the state constructs infrastructure, imposes tariffs on imports, subsidizes credit and engages in the macroeconomic ‘management of the economy’ and examines some contemporary tendencies in the interaction between political and economic elites. In addition, he critically discusses the thesis that all extraction of resources from economic actors by the state is predatory, he identifies constraints to how many resources the state can extract from private actors key among those constraints are its own political objectives, in both the domestic and the international spheres and he argues that the state’s pursuit of these political objectives tends to produce a ‘massire convergence of interests betiwen economic and political power’ (p. 167). As a consequence, ‘most political elites do not seek just to avoid damaging the economy. but seek positively to foster and protect it, in the light of two key political concerns: to maintain the polity’s military might ... and to secure the compliance and if possible the allegiance of the domestic population’ (pp. 174-1 75). The book also includes a ndl-crafted chapter on the relations between the state and the military, and closes with a very short epilogue. Overall, Poggi’s book is full of sharp observations and thought-provoking analyses, and it makes a contribution to our understanding of social power. At the same time, it is an uneven and sometimes meandering work, which engages in and has been informed by a small fraction of the many and diverse literatures that deal with the extensive range of topics that it addresses.