What is Irish?

Isn't this the question of the hour? One American in my traditional music class observed, "Everybody wants to be Irish except the Irish." According to my music teacher, a professional guitar player of both traditional and art rock music, an Irish musician can't get a gig in Ireland, but he or she can tour as much as they want to packed houses in any other country, especially America. He was relating how people won't get radio play in Ireland if they sound "too Irish". And this in the town where U2 came from...Of course, they didn't make it in Ireland, they just came back. As I am studying the Irish music revival, it turns out that some of the most influential Irish music compendiums were written by Irish emigres in Chicago and New York. Some of the most early influential recordings of Irish fiddle music were recorded in Chicago, and then brought back. Many of Ireland's most famous authors were banned in Ireland and had to publish in England, France, and America. How interesting! Here is an emblematic image of the problem. See? Here is a Guinness tap, but you can only get Heineken out of it:


What brings this topic to mind is that I just got back from a weekend in Munich to visit my very good friend from graduate school.
Being in Germany for the weekend and then coming back to Ireland was a great way to freshen up my ethnographic eyes, especially after spending a weekend using American sociolinguistic rules and then returning to Irish sociolinguistic rules.

In Ireland there is still a strong tradition of hospitality. I have YET to pay for a cup of coffee and have really struggled to be able to buy other people pints. I'm just not socially quick enough to do it consistently. Actually, today I was finally quick enough and I am proud to say I was able to buy someone else a cup of coffee. (on a tangent, a cup of coffee, no refill, small cup, is two euro. that's about half a Starbucks grande for a third more the price and half the quality: but I digress). So, strong tradition of hospitality, but very very strong personal boundaries. There is certainly more personal restraint, and more verbal games before really communicating. There seems to be a certain insecurity maybe that expresses itself in a careful guarding of boundaries, not giving too much away. There is a restraint in performance and a value of community such that you shouldn't really be too good, or at least, not admit to being very good, so that you don't jeopardize the community feeling of the group. Good 'craic' seems to be good community cheer. Alcohol seems to help the strong boundaries issue, which means that when those boundaries go down, look out! Then you start to get the 'too much information' syndrome. There also seems to be a certain dissatisfaction with external pressures and controls that seems to express itself in the 'carnival' of alcohol. But even without alcohol, there seems to be a sort of passive aggressive challenge to authority what with parking wherever one can, ignoring inconvenient rules, and passively not cooperating.

There seems to be a huge generation gap between people born after 1985 and people born before that. The economic boom of the 90's brought huge culture change. People who remember the recession of the 80's and downright poverty of the 60s and 70s still have a more backwards looking idea about tradition as a vehicle for cultural identity with older generations just recovering from barely healed early 20th century cultural wounds of the beginnings of the free state. But there also appears to be a desperate need to innovate through personal expression. This is sort of a catch-22 for some people who might feel caught in the middle of the ideas that Innovation is a sort of treason, but tradition can be suffocating. Traditional music is an interesting case of this cultural conflict. On the one hand people are trying to "preserve" traditional music, which is music not associated with a particular composer, passed on by oral tradition, and played by the community on a regular basis. On the other hand, one is encouraged to add one's own style and mark to the playing such that you get jazzy type chords on guitars that are backing 'traditional' tunes, reggae beats for hornpipes, or chromatic runs being added as ornaments to reels.

And there is a simmering violence underneath it all. We didn't get out of the gym fast enough one night, and the guy who sits in the entry booth of the gym verbally abused our group all the way out the door. A bus driver, on whose bus I was sitting, messed with almost every passenger by moving the bus about three feet forward when they tried to get on, or not stopping at a bus stop until being several yards away to make the people at the bus stop run for the bus. Two young men got into a verbally abusive shouting match on the bridge outside my building, but they were shouting too incoherently for the nature of the conflict to be clear. I'm not saying anybody comes to blows, or at least I haven't been around when that's happened, but anger seems near the surface such that the careful social restraint seems very useful. One person put it that you can't give anything away because you don't know who will use it against you. She said it was important not to let on that you aspire to anything because everybody will just laugh at you if you don't get it, and never let you forget that you tried and failed. The professors here also do not believe in praise, only telling you how poorly you've done. Other people have said that you can't compliment people because it will just bring bad luck. You should call a beautiful person 'dogface' because it's just asking for trouble to say they are good looking. In my folklore class, the professor talked about how in 'the old days' (whatever that was or whenever that was), you never compliment people or cute children because then you would call the fairies attention to them and the Good Folk would take the complimented person or child away.

But doesn't this all sound familiar? Isn't it just like this in America also? The more I am in different places, the more people seem the same. Except for listening strategies. In Japan, when you listen, you have to keep up running 'listening noise', in America you have to do consistent but spaced out 'listening noise', but in Ireland, you should keep quiet until you know the other person is done talking. It took me a month to figure this one out. An Irish person commented to me recently that I wasn't like all the other Americans who are constantly interrupting.