in the 1930s. Castle notes that ‘the desire to revive an authentic, indigenous Irish folk culture is the effect of an ethnographic imagination that emerges in the interplay of native cultural aspirations and an array of practices associated with the disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, folklore, comparative mythology, and travel writing’.39 In the 1890s anthropology, archaeology and ethnography were emerging scientific disciplines. The West of Ireland became important to the Celtic Revivalist and anthropologist alike. For example, J.M. Synge, author of The Aran Islands, was educated in continental Celticism and studied under the French Celtic scholar, Henri D’Arbois de Jubainville. Synge attended lectures on Celtic culture and mythology, philology and cultural anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris.40 Revivalists and anthropologists attempted to reclaim traditions, histories, and cultures from imperialism and ‘to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land’.41 This pivotal role of anthropology in the Celtic Revival resulted in ‘autoethnography’, as native intellectuals attempted to represent themselves to the coloniser using the language and methodology of the colonial discipline of anthropology.42
In the Irish Free State’s programme of native cultural revitalisation, anthropology, archaeology, Irish language, folklore and native traditions became important in themselves rather than as motifs illustrating Irish literature in the English language. The Harvard Mission as part of this revitalisation programme can be described as a modernist project in the sense that it was an anthropological survey to study scientifically a society in transition between tradition and modernity. John Brannigan, in his book Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture, explains that ‘the Harvard study should be contextualised as an important moment in the evolution of the modernist state, in which social and physical sciences were understood to be strategic instruments vital to the bio-political ambitions of the state’.43 The scientific establishment of the credentials of the Celtic race by international archaeological and anthropological expertise was essential to these political aspirations.
The combined native and internationalist dimensions to cultural production fitted de Valera’s anthropological cultural vision, emphasising cultural heritage as a pathway to the future for an independent republic. Nicholas Allen, in his paper ‘States of Mind: Science, Culture and the Irish Intellectual Revival, 1900–1930’, makes the point that ‘Immediately after the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars, we find the discourse of science applied widely in support of cultural, political, and economic development in the new state’.44 While Allen doesn’t refer to archaeology in his article, his ideas can also be applied to the Harvard Mission’s work as the Harvard academics applied scientific techniques of American archaeology to their work in Ireland. American archaeology had become increasingly scientised in the early decades of the twentieth century.45
Irish: The Language of the Celts
Albert Earnest Hooton46, the American physical anthropologist and manager of the Harvard Mission, wrote about the importance of the Irish Free State, citing that one of the reasons for choosing it for a Harvard survey was because of ‘the Celtic tongue, an archaic Aryan language once spoken over a large part of Europe’.47 Hugh O’Neill Hencken, like his contemporaries, took an interest in Celtic, an Indo-European language. He was later to publish a book entitled Indo-European Languages and Archaeology as a volume of the American Anthropologist in 1955.48 According to G.R. Isaac in his paper ‘The Origins of the Celtic Languages: Language Spread from East to West,’ it is still impossible to discuss the origin of the Celts without reference to the Celtic language. He argues that ‘without language, there are no Celts, ancient or modern, but only populations bearing certain genetic markers or carriers of certain Bronze Age and Iron Age material cultures. The origin of the Celts therefore is the prehistory and protohistory of the Celtic languages’.49 The Irish language, therefore, as well as the material culture of the Celts, were deemed important areas of study in Irish universities in the nineteenth century and this continued after independence in 1922.
In 1854, Eugene O’Curry had been appointed to the first Chair of Celtic Archaeology at the Catholic University. R.A.S. Macalister became the first Professor of Celtic Archaeology at University College Dublin in 1909. Douglas Hyde, president of the Gaelic League from its foundation in 1893 to his resignation in 1915 for political reasons, campaigned for and succeeded in making Irish a compulsory subject for matriculation to the newly established National University of Ireland in 1908.50 The state took over the Gaelic League’s educational function by including Irish as a compulsory subject in the educational system and by setting up the special Government Publications Office, An Gúm, in 1926.51 The Irish language was established as the national language in Cosgrave’s 1922 constitution and was also given this status in de Valera’s 1937 constitution. By 1934, in his keynote speech at the International Celtic Congress held in Dublin from 9–12 July, Douglas Hyde was still advocating for the preservation and propagation of the Irish language. At this stage, Éamon de Valera, who was in the audience together with Maud Gonne, Agnes O’Farrelly and delegates from Brittany, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, had pledged his backing for a permanent research institute where all the Celtic languages might be studied’.52
Patrick Pearse, who had served as the editor of the League’s journal, An Claidheamh Soluis (1903-1909), aimed to create ‘a modernist literature in Irish’.53 He argued that ‘Irish literature if it is to live and grow, must get into contact on the one hand with its own past and on the other with the mind of contemporary Europe’.54 By the 1930s literary works of ‘an indigenous tradition of amateur self-ethnography’ appeared.55 These included books such as Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty years A-Growing, The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island, Tomás Ó Crohan’s The Islandman, and Pat Mullen’s Man of Aran. Irish-speaking islanders were regarded in this period as pre-industrial and pre-modern. Ideas about degeneration in cultural and racial terms, a common discourse in the 1930s, fed into the need for regeneration through cultural, economic, political and moral projects in the Irish Free State. One of the most influential cultural critics in the interwar period in Ireland, the writer Seán O’Faoláin, criticised the Irish language revival, referring to ‘the poverty and degenerate nature’ of Gaeltacht culture’.56 This rhetoric is similar to that of the nineteenth-century colonialist writers on Ireland. The use of the word degenerate is disingenuous as the impetus of the Irish language revival and native cultural regeneration in general was an attempt to address the perceived degenerate nature of culture, race and society at that time.57 Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge (a new umbrella co-ordinating body for Irish-language organisations) was established in 1943.
The 1930s can be seen as the apogée of a native cultural revitalisation programme which began with Hyde’s speech and served as the cultural blueprint for the independent state. The Irish Free State, under Cosgrave in the 1920s and de Valera in the 1930s, favoured cultural activity which fitted into this ideological framework. Unfortunately, Irish-Ireland ideology got a bad name because of the vitriolic outpourings of journalists such as D.P. Moran.58 The impetus for regeneration in the Irish Free State was part of a wider European project where nation-states across Europe defined their nationhood in terms of race, culture, language and purity. These modernist regeneration projects included the enactment of laws which institutionalised concepts of national culture, and embedded it in the political agenda of the state. The nationalist governments of Cosgrave and de Valera shared a similar Irish-Ireland cultural ideology. Attempts to establish the racial credentials of the Irish as Celtic dovetailed neatly with the American agenda of the Harvard anthropologists and archaeologists. They concentrated on rural dwellers for their anthropometric survey as they believed that ‘the country people were perhaps more truly representative of Irish racial types and less likely to be mixed with recent foreign blood than would be the city dwellers’.59
From Hyde to Lithberg
As part of the deAnglicisation project Douglas Hyde had written about the importance to the Irish nation of the collections of a national museum and the necessity of gathering antiquities and ‘enshrining’ each one of them in ‘the temple that shall be raised to the godhead of Irish nationhood’.60 When Hyde penned these words, no doubt, he was not referring to all vestiges of the past but to selected items from what he perceived to be a Celtic, Irish
