Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Use of Public Symbols in Northern Ireland

Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Use of Public Symbols in Northern Ireland. By Jack Santino. New York: Palgrave, 2001. x + 145 pp. Illus. 35.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 0-312-23640-9

"Ulster is a space within which two self-defined peoples, two cultures, have to coexist" (p. 127). This dictum is perhaps the most general, neutral, and condensed statement of the central theme of Jack Santino's book about the paradox and contradiction that is Ulster, a book that has grown out of lengthy periods of field-work in the 1990s by an author--at the time of writing President of the American Folklore Society--who had gone to Northern Ireland to investigate Hallowe'en customs but found himself studying much wider issues, and concerned with more than just a calendar festival. Santino, Bostonian, Professor of Folklore and Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, who has an Irish mother and a Catholic background, admits that his political sympathies are with the nationalists and that, if he were to support a political party in Northern Ireland, it would be the Social Democratic Labour Party, which is fundamentally non-violent. It is to his credit that he lays his cards on the table and he is also to be praised for attempting, largely successfully, to discard his personal political inclinations in his exploration of what is, after all, a thorny and complex subject. This does not mean that his account is bland and colourless, but he is striving for scholarly objectivity and clarity as far as that is possible under the circumstances.

In his investigation of signs and symbols on public display in Northern Ireland, he concentrates chiefly on murals, parades, and spontaneous shrines, without neglecting other forms of public gesturing and posturing--visual, verbal, audible, musical, sartorial, festive, commemorative, territorial, religious, decorative, patriotic, rebellious, and so on. At one point he even flirts briefly with Mikhail Baktin's concept of the "carnevalesque." While all these epithets, and what they represent, have various degrees of validity, either alone or in combinations (what Santino calls "assemblage"), and while many of them are employed similarly by both the main warring factions, ultimately it is the elements of irreconcilability, confrontation, invasiveness, and provocative intrusion that are at the heart of all the troubling, often deadly, street theatre.

One can sense the author's struggle to find formulations to express for his readers what he has observed during his time in Northern Ireland and his encounters with people for whom his disturbing experiences are facts of everyday-life. As an American writing primarily for Americans, he employs chiefly American examples and parallels to illustrate or elaborate on the meaning of their Northern Irish "counterparts," as, for instance, in his discussion of calendar-based events like bonfires or parades (of which there are about 3500 every year), or in the explication of spontaneous shrines created at places of bloody events, although in an expansion of the latter theme he spends almost a whole chapter on the public reaction in Britain to the death of Princess Diana.

However, this is by no means just a book for Americans. Santino's opening chapter, for instance, provides an informative picture of the historical background to the current division and its forms of ritual display and presentation. This overview will be for many readers an eye-opening introduction to what they may only know about from the media, but will also provide an understanding that much of what is happening in Northern Ireland is a living-out of its past(s)--many of them genuine, some imagined, and others manufactured--in the present. Similarly helpful is his terminological table (p. 19) throwing light on the complex structure of such opposing terms as Protestant, Unionist, loyalist "Ulster," on the one hand, and (Roman) Catholic, nationalist, republican "Irish," on the other.

Among the most poignant portions of the book are the verbatim transcripts of Santino's conversations with some of the people of Northern Ireland themselves: John Joe Bradley on curbstone painting (pp. 13-14), on the Lambeg drums (p. 71), and on "arches" (pp. 72-3); the Revd Ian Paisley, one of the major political figures, on the Lambeg drums (pp. 31-2); Joe McMullen on flags (pp. 52-3) and on employment (p. 55); Tom Crowe on the parade in Derry (pp. 64-5); W. J. Jordan on banners (pp. 67-70); a highly placed member of the Orange order on Ulster being Teutonic (p. 73); Roseleen and Eileen McManus on personal shrines (pp. 82-4 and 86); George Parton on the same subject (pp. 86-8); Rhonda Paisley on shrines (p. 89) and on painting curbstones and territorial claims (pp. 129-30); Lorraine Lawrence on shrines (pp. 91-6); and Mari Fitzduff on territoriality (pp. 131-33). In Sanfino's judicious choice of transcribed interviews with insiders whose accents are even audible in the soundless medium of the printed word, the world of Northern Ireland of today (and of its past) comes to life in a fashion that even the most felicitous scholarly prose cannot achieve; it pays to read them over several times.