first, most of our conversations were with children, teenagers, and the elderly. We tried to clarify our role as American anthropology students who wanted to learn what it was like to be a Traveller. We explained about writing doctoral dissertations, which they interpreted to mean books. When they asked how long we were going to stay and we answered, “A year,” they were skeptical. Most contacts Travellers had with outsiders were short-lived—a brief economic transaction, questioning by the police, and the like. After repeated visits, however, people began to realize that we might be serious. As we became more familiar, they became friendlier. We were gradually building rapport—that necessary sympathetic relationship and understanding between a researcher and the people he or she lives among. Not being Irish may have worked to our advantage. Besides the novelty of our being Americans, it probably lessened their suspicions that we were something other than what we claimed.
After several weeks of commuting between Dublin camps, we chose Holylands as our primary research site.4 Its layout was better for fieldwork than that of Labre Park since the families were camped in wagons and trailers facing one another across a central field rather than being strung out single file in crowded tigins. This made daily life readily observable. Holylands also contained a better cross section of the Travelling community. Some families hailed from the more prosperous East and Midlands, while others came from the poorer west of Ireland. Some had been living in Dublin for nearly a decade, while others were recent arrivals and still quite mobile. Besides a stable core of families who remained on the site the entire thirteen months of our research, another dozen or so families came and went.
Although we had met most of the families living at Holylands by the end of the first month and felt quite comfortable with them, commuting to camp each day from our rented bedsitter was unsatisfactory. Travellers often made plans on the spur of the moment. Some days we would arrive in camp to find that virtually everyone was gone. George’s attempts to accompany various men on scrap-collecting or horse-buying trips were no more successful. He might arrive at the site first thing in the morning and then wait hours, never certain they wouldn’t decide to skip the activity altogether. Few Travellers could tell time or had any need to, and understandably, our “appointments” were far more important to us than to them.
Increasingly, we realized that we were missing out on important events. This was reinforced each time we arrived in camp to be told something like “You should have been here last night, the guards [police] came up and took Big John.” More importantly, we wanted to lose our outsider status and get “backstage,” to borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s metaphor, to blend into the background of camp life so that people would feel comfortable and act naturally around us. Travellers were used to dealing with non-Travellers in superficial and manipulative ways. It was important for us to view their lives from the inside, to observe everyday behavior, and to try to learn what they really thought and, as much as possible, to see the world as they saw it. Moreover, because Travellers had never been studied in-depth before, we felt a need to collect as wide a range of ethnographic data as possible. Only living in a camp would enable us to do this.
Early in the second month of our fieldwork, several people in Holylands suggested that we buy a wagon and move onto the site. It was foolish to pay rent, they said, when we could live at Holylands for free. One day Red Mick Connors and Mick Donoghue took George around to other camps in the city to find a barrel-top wagon to buy, and within a week they purchased one for £100 (US$250). It was in need of paint and a few repairs, but this gave us something tangible to do each day when we arrived in camp. And now that it was clear that we really intended to move in, the social distance between ourselves and Travellers lessened.
As we worked on the wagon, people stopped by to give advice, lend a hand, or simply chat. Some days we arrived to find that someone had worked on our wagon in our absence. Michael Donoghue painted its undercarriage a bright canary yellow—its proper color. His father, Mick, made a new window frame for its front Dutch-style door. Paddy Maughan found replacement shafts and later helped George bargain for a horse, a large black mare named Franny. When our fieldwork was over, we sold her to Paddy at the same price (US$350), not realizing she was in foal and, therefore, worth considerably more. (When we returned to Ireland in 2011, several Travellers confessed that they had known this at the time but that they had been warned by their parents not to tell us since that would interfere in another Traveller’s business.) I made curtains for the wagon’s windows and laid red linoleum tiles on its tiny floor. Nanny Nevin gave me a lucky horseshoe to nail above the door. Once the repairs were complete, we bought camping gear—sleeping bags, a lantern, pots and pans, dishware, wash basins, and a small camp stove—and moved in.
Our transition from regular visitors to camp members was completed the first night when we were awakened around midnight by the roar of trucks and vans racing into camp, followed by loud talking and laughter as people returned home from the pubs. Not long after the camp had settled back down to sleep, a loud argument broke out in the trailer next to us. Accusations and obscenities were hurled back and forth, followed by screams, thuds, and shattering glass. I crept out of bed and cautiously peered through the wagon’s small front window, catching an oblique glimpse of my new neighbor as she staggered out her trailer door. It was the first time either of us had ever heard, let alone witnessed, domestic violence. It would happen several more times during the year, raising an ethical dilemma, although there was no real way for me to intervene except to hide my neighbor when she fled. Only a close male relative like a brother or son would intervene on a woman’s behalf.
The next morning we acted as if nothing had happened. Everyone we saw, however, seemed subdued and somewhat sheepish. As Nanny Nevin walked by our wagon, she coyly asked me how well we’d slept but made no direct reference to the fight. Sam, the eight-year-old son of the family involved, came closest when he said, “You must have learned a lot last night.” Indeed we had. Many of the polite public fictions maintained for visiting outsiders had been broken. We soon realized that Thursdays, the day that the men received the “dole,” or unemployment payment, were days of heavy drinking for many that, not infrequently, ended up in arguments and, sometimes, domestic violence once they returned home.
Living on the site dramatically improved our rapport. We could now talk to people casually while going about our daily chores of hauling water, preparing meals, or searching for our mare. We no longer had to force conversations as the visitor must but could wait for opportunities to talk to arise naturally. People quickly became accustomed to us and comfortable with our presence. We had gotten backstage and were beginning to know and share the private lives of Travellers.
Our research and lives soon fell into an enjoyable routine. Because Travellers spent much of their time out of doors, they were more accessible than the people who had been in the villages in the west of Ireland and Mexico where we previously had done student fieldwork. Every family lit a campfire in the morning and kept it going until they went to bed at night. A blackened kettle of water was kept hot, and pots of tea were brewed throughout the day. Much of our fieldwork involved talking to people while sitting around a campfire. At night, most men and some younger couples went off to the pubs to drink. For several weeks we wanted to join them, since we imagined that it would be a good opportunity to talk, but didn’t feel confident enough to ask. Then one evening we were invited along by some of the Connors men and learned that they had been talking about doing so for a while but hadn’t been sure that we would want to be seen with them in public or go to the few working-class pubs that served Travellers. After that, we joined them most evenings, often sitting around the campfire afterward to talk and drink some more.
Figure 2-3. The late-morning routine at Holylands as people mobilize for work. The men on the cart are leaving to collect scrap metal in Dublin.
Sports provided another outlet for socializing. The boys and younger men in camp often played handball or a version of cricket using a tennis ball and a board as a bat. George had discovered the value of sports in building rapport and creating friendships
