political economist, industrialist, and business man and will not be of mere academic interest’. He stated that ‘our whole approach will be entirely objective and we will feel that we have failed if any prejudice or bias comes into our results in any way whatever’.133 De Valera sent a positive reply to this letter stating that, as he understood it, ‘it will be a scientific study of the socio-economic life of the Irish people and a research into the archaeological sites of the ancient Irish and in no way will be political but only interested in obtaining the objective truth through careful collection of the facts’.134
Warner had a meeting with de Valera whom he described as ‘a very fine man who is intelligent and grasped what I was talking about immediately’. Warner had also to persuade Bishop Fogarty of Killaloe to give him permission to carry out the survey work in Clare. Bishop Fogarty and de Valera were not on good personal terms. Fogarty disapproved of de Valera’s politics and had referred to him as a ‘Dictator’.135 The Harvard team was sensitive to the political and cultural conditions in Ireland during their research and were therefore anxious to obtain permission and support from senior political and religious figures. Warner received his letter of introduction from de Valera and the Harvard Mission began its work shortly afterwards. Warner continued to be worried about the political situation in Ireland and wrote to Hooton on 26 July 1932 to express his fears: ‘The possibilities of civil war are ever present and it is generally understood that I.R.A. gunmen are quietly organising and importing arms and ammunition from America to start a revolution if de Valera’s policies fail, or if de Valera becomes more moderate’.136
One of the reasons Clare was chosen by the American anthropologists was because they considered it to be ‘in transition’ between a modern and traditional society.137 The ‘Harvard University Social and Economic Survey’ was led by Conrad Maynadier Arensberg and Solon Toothaker Kimball. Warner had supervised the PhD theses of both men. Arensberg, who was a graduate student in anthropology came to Ireland on a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and at UCD under George O’Brien, Professor of National Economics and Political Economy, and under Professor Eoin McNeill. He also acquired a knowledge of the Irish language.138 Arensberg made other useful contacts in the academic community in Ireland, including the folklorist Séamus Ó Duillearga. Arensberg and Kimball credited Ó Duillearga with ‘paving our way among the country folk’139 as it was he who had encouraged the locals in North Clare to cooperate and share their knowledge of traditional songs and stories with the Americans. Arensberg and Kimball studied the country people of North Clare and the inhabitants of Ennis, observing the way of life of the small farmer class and the townspeople, their relationships and their traditions. They used innovative ethnographic research methods for examining the way of life of ordinary people using an interdisciplinary approach. The results of this work were published in two books, The Irish Countryman and Family and Community in Ireland.140 Hooton expressed the view that ‘Ultimately all of this material will contribute to a single unified anthropological history and analyses of this gifted and virile nation’.141
3
‘IRELAND BELONGS TO THE WORLD’: CELTIC ORIGINS, ANTHROPOLOGY AND EUGENICS
We believe that the mysticism, artistry, and other peculiar gifts of the modern Irish can be understood only by fitting their prehistory into their modern civilization, and by establishing the continuity of their ancient culture in their life of today.1
– Earnest A. Hooton
Why should Harvard University concern itself with Ireland?
In 1937, R.A.S. Macalister posed the pertinent question ‘Why should Harvard University thus concern itself with Ireland?’2 The reasons why the Harvard Mission came to Ireland and the political ideology underpinning its archaeological work was dominated by eugenic and racialist concerns.3 This work fitted easily with Irish nationalist aspirations for a proven scientific Celtic identity. The academic framework which was used for interpretative purposes and the academic backgrounds of the protagonists helps to explain how and why particular results were obtained about the Celtic race. Macalister believed that the answer to his question on the reasons for Harvard concerning itself with a study of the Irish was ‘the fact that Ireland belongs to the world’. He wrote that:
Here, at the remote end of Europe, but little disturbed by the stream of Time which tore the rest of the Continent to pieces over and over again, Ireland went on in her own old way, and kept alive primeval cultures, arts, beliefs, which were elsewhere submerged. Only in Ireland can we get down to the foundations upon which European civilisation is based; and as the whole world is interested in European civilisation, the whole world calls upon Ireland to solve problems that can be solved nowhere else.4
Macalister was probably referring in an oblique way to the problematic issues associated with the mixing of races, which were being debated around the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Themes of cultural and racial purity were expressed through the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology and were an essential part of a cultural vision reflecting the ‘underlying affinity between anthropology and modernism’.5
The Harvard Archaeological Mission was organised and managed by Earnest A. Hooton and was under the direction of an executive committee of the Division of Anthropology of Harvard University. The members of this committee included Hooton, Alfred Marston Tozzer and Roland Burrage Dixon. Tozzer served as Director of the International School of American Archaeology in Mexico from 1914 and was appointed chair of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard in 1921. He also became a faculty member of the Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930. In 1946, he was appointed John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology at Harvard.6 Roland Burrage Dixon formed ‘an integral part of the archaeological heritage of the Peabody Museum’ at Harvard.7 He made significant contributions and publications in the fields of archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology and sociocultural anthropology, eventually becoming a professor of anthropology at Harvard in 1916.8 He also had an interest in folklore and served as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Harvard Folk-Lore Club (founded 1894).9 Among Dixon’s important books was The Racial History of Man, published in New York in 1923.
One of the reasons that Ireland was selected for a co-operative study by social and biological scientists from the Division of Anthropology of Harvard University was that it was ‘politically new but culturally old’ and that it was ‘the country of origin of more than one-fifth of the population of the United States’. The Harvard team proposed to investigate the social, political, economic and industrial institutions in Ireland and to examine the Irish people. Their physical characteristics would be measured to determine their ‘racial affinities’.10 Excavations would be carried out in an effort to connect prehistoric cultures with early historic and modern Irish civilisation. The relationship of social and material culture to race and environment would be analysed.
The Harvard Mission and Eugenics
Another reason, cited by Hooton, for choosing Ireland for the Harvard survey was because the Celtic language was ‘an archaic Aryan language’.11 For an emerging European, independent nation-state prior to the Second World War, being identified as a white European Celt (possibly an offshoot of the Aryan race) was economically and culturally advantageous. Cultural imperialism was also associated with biological determinism during this period.
Hooton was a member of the American Eugenics Society (AES) and served as Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Anthropometry. The AES was founded a year after the Second International Conference on Eugenics which was held in New York in 1921. Among the founders were the ‘premier racial theorist’ Madison Grant, Vice-President of the Immigration Restriction League and author of The Passing of the Great Race: Or the Racial Basis of European History published in New York in 1918; and the ‘doyen of American archaeology’, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who penned the preface to Grant’s book. The AES became the ‘key advocacy and propaganda wing of the Eugenics movement’.12
