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The article discusses the contemporary anthropology of Ireland with special attention to the Irish culture, traditions, and society. Other topics mentioned in this article include the ethnology of Ireland, the cultural history of Ireland, and the overall history of Ireland with special focus on anthropological research.

Here I offer a reengagement with Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball's (Arensberg 1968[1937]; Arensberg and Kimball 1940) canonical ethnographies of rural western Ireland along with a new consideration of data the ethnographers never analyzed in their publications. I argue that epistemological debates and commitments in U.S. anthropology fueled Arensberg and Kimball's structural-functionalist orientation because of the ways this theory became emblematic of a scientific, value-free perspective to which these scholars were committed in ways that precluded analysis of state governmentality and violence. The new analysis of Arensberg and Kimball's unpublished ethnographic materials shows how local social life was shaped by the persistence of political violence in the "postconflict" democratic Irish Free State well after the war was officially over. I focus particularly on the nascent district court system to show how the judiciary and its participants were key agents in establishing and contesting the legitimacy of the postwar political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural formation of citizens and the hegemony of the ‘ethical state’ in England emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when capitalist social relations were consolidating, operating through the processes of bourgeois institutional differentiation and the regulation of culture and social space from above. This paper employs the methods of historical ethnography to address the historical vertities of these cultural processes in colonial Ireland. It focuses on one institution—education—in one north of Ireland parish to explore how class and gender mediated the process and experience of the institutional separation of education in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigid ‘culture of control’ orchestrating gender roles and material survival in working-class households framed distinctions in the attainment of schooled knowledges and created divergent uses and functions for such knowledge in the broader social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the anthropology of Ireland with special attention to anthropological researchers Keith Egan as well as Fiona Murphy. Other topics mentioned in this article include anthropological research in the 20th and 21st century, the ethnography of Ireland, as well as the history of Ireland.

The author discusses the anthropology of Ireland in the 20th and 21st century with special attention to researchers Keith Egan and Fiona Murphy. Other topics mentioned in this article include anthropology in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, anthropological research, and researchers Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball.