Symbols in Northern Ireland

Symbols in Northern Ireland. Edited by Anthony D. Buckley. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen's University, 1998. 198 pp. Illus. 18.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0 85389 692 5

The nine essays in this volume deal with what editor Anthony Buckley terms the "serious business" of symbolism in Northern Ireland, inspired by the exhibition Symbols, put together by Rhonda Paisley in 1994 under the auspices of the Cultural Traditions Group of the Community Relations Council. Both the exhibit and the book are intended to give a sense of the range of symbols employed in Northern Ireland and the variety of contexts and meanings that they can inhabit. The book benefits from a clear introduction by Anthony Buckley, who places the specifics of each author's work within the broad context of symbol scholarship, and of Northern Ireland. I am not sure, however, that I agree with Buckley's assertion that symbols "dare us to laugh"; I would be careful about suggesting that insisting that others respect what you do is necessarily the same thing as daring someone to laugh at what you respect.

Buckley and the contributors to this volume deserve credit in generating one of the great strengths of the collection as a whole: its broadening of the academic picture of topics for discussion in and about Northern Ireland. In addition to the pieces that focus on the more traditional research objects; of the different sides of the Protestant/Catholic divide, there are those that treat the differences as background to their central concern, as is the case in Linda Ballard's descriptive account of Northern Irish bikers, or who do not address it at all, as is the case in Michael McCaughan's discussion of the impact in popular culture of the sinking of the Titanic. But as Buckley points out in his introduction:

   it proved difficult to omit matters relating to ethnicity. Ballard's
   motor-cyclists, for example, are not concerned centrally with sectarian
   issues, yet their clubs and associations tend to recruit only from one
   side. [Roger] Sawyer's viragos are found in a literature which long
   predates modern conflicts, yet they are ripe to be used as models for
   modern women engaged, for example, in the politics of feminism or in
   sectarian strife. And [Jack] Santino's essay on Hallowe'en, though it is
   concerned with one of the least sectarian of Ulster's festivals, is
   nevertheless able to identify important sectarian undercurrents (p. 2).

Michael McCaughan's consideration of the Titanic is the only essay in the book that truly escapes the sectarian divide, in great part because the sunken ship is a symbol that has transcended national and ethnic boundaries to become, as he argues, a widely recognised symbol of the dangers of modernity and technology.

Those authors who do tackle aspects of the sectarian divide head-on provide complexity within, and new perspectives on, the old categories, avoiding any sense that the Protestant or Catholic communities an; monolithic or homogeneous. Camille O'Reilly provides a space, in her essay on the symbolism of the Irish language, for discussing and illustrating the different perspectives within the Nationalist community on culture and politics, as does Ciro De Rosa, in his discussion of Nationalist processions and parades, and especially of the Republican flute bands that have disrupted the displays of the more conservative Ancient Order of Hibernians. Neil Jarman's treatment of murals, another topic about which much has been written, breaks interesting new ground in treating the murals as artefacts that mark and indeed produce particular kinds of politicised space. And Dominic Bryan tums his eye to the production and impact of media coverage of Orange parades, in so doing contributing to a growing body of literature on a relatively new anthropological object of study--the media themselves--in the increasingly complex ethnographic landscape of Northern Ireland.

While the book is a compilation of works by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, anthropologists dominate the collection, and the appeal of the book would seem to be particularly strong for both anthropologists and anthropological folklorists. The symbols in this book range from those employed in processions or parades, to festivals such as Hallowe'en, to language, and to modes of dress. There are symbols within symbols, as is the case with the murals Jarman discusses: while the murals are festooned with symbolic images, they have themselves become symbols of particular perspectives on the Northern Irish conflict. This book illustrates the enormous range of just what can be a symbol (nearly anything), and the range of folklore and popular genres, and social situations in which those symbols can be employed. It additionally contributes important new pieces to the anthropological and folkloristic study of many different segments of Northern Irish society.

Donna M. Lanclos, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

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