The book examines the evolution and current significance of the parading tradition in Ireland. Since 1995, confrontations over parades have existed side by side with the Northern Ireland peace process. The most bitter of these have occurred over the Drumcree church parade at Portadown and the Relief of Derry parades. Using a range of historical and anthropological perspectives, the book traces the parading tradition from the seventeenth century to the present.
Throughout the world, divisive monuments, ceremonies, and processions assert and reinforce claims to territory, legitimacy, and dominance. These contested symbols and rituals strengthen and lend meaning to communal boundaries; confer and renew identities; and inflame tensions between groups, polarizing communities and, at times, triggering violence. In Contentious Rituals, Jonathan S. Blake focuses on one such controversial tradition: Protestant parades in the streets of Northern Ireland. Marchers say they are celebrating their culture and commemorating their history, as they have done for two centuries. Catholics see the parades as carnivals of bigotry and strident assertions of power. The result is heightened inter-communal friction and occasional violence. Drawing on over 80 interviews, an original survey, and ethnographic observations, Blake investigates why participants choose to march in parades that are known to be a primary source of sectarian conflict today. His analysis reveals their reasons for acting, the meanings supplied to them, and how they make sense of the contention that surrounds them. Ultimately, he discovers, many paraders are not interested in the politics of their actions at all, but rather in the allure of the action itself: the satisfactions of joining with others to express a collective identity and carry on a cherished tradition. An insightful exploration of the characteristics and dynamics of nationalism in action, Contentious Rituals offers an innovative approach to the contested politics of culture in divided societies and a new explanation for an old source of conflict in Northern Ireland.
Orange parades are political rituals which reveal the nature of relations between Protestant and Catholic communities in Ireland. They also expose key political divisions within Unionism and the relationship of the Protestant community to the British state.
In The Globalization of Irish Traditional Song Performance Susan Motherway examines the ways in which performers mediate the divide between local and global markets by negotiating this dichotomy in performance practice. In so doing, she discusses the globalizing processes that exert transformative influences upon traditional musics and examines the response to these influences by Irish traditional song performers. In developing this thesis the book provides an overview of the genre and its subgenres, illustrates patterns of musical change extant within the tradition as a result of globalization, and acknowledges music as a medium for re-negotiating an Irish cultural identity within the global. Given Ireland’s long history of emigration and colonisation, globalization is recognised as both a synchronic and a diachronic phenomenon. Motherway thus examines Anglo-Irish song and songs of the Irish Diaspora. Her analysis reaches beyond essentialist definitions of the tradition to examine evolving sub-genres such as Country & Irish, Celtic and World Music. She also recognizes the singing traditions of other ethnic groups on the island of Ireland including Orange-Order, Ulster-Scots and Traveller song. In so doing, she shows the disparity between native conceptions and native realities in respect to Irish cultural Identity.
Focus: Irish Traditional Music is an introduction to the instrumental and vocal traditions of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as Irish music in the context of the Irish diaspora. Ireland's size relative to Britain or to the mainland of Europe is small, yet its impact on musical traditions beyond its shores has been significant, from the performance of jigs and reels in pub sessions as far-flung as Japan and Cape Town, to the worldwide phenomenon of Riverdance. Focus: Irish Traditional Music interweaves dance, film, language, history, and other interdisciplinary features of Ireland and its diaspora. The accompanying CD presents both traditional and contemporary sounds of Irish music at home and abroad.
This book examines the development of the Irish community in Manchester, one of the most dynamic cities of nineteenth-century Britain. Based on research into a wide variety of local sources, it examines the process by which the Irish came to be blamed for all the ills of the Industrial Revolution and the ways in which they attempted to cope with a sometimes actively hostile environment. It discusses the nature and degree of residential segregation in one notable Irish district and the role of the Catholic Church as a source of spiritual comfort and the base for a dense network of mutual aid and social and cultural organisations. It also examines how the Irish community allied itself with local campaign groups and political parties and organised celebrations and processions that simultaneously expressed its evolving sense of Irishness but fitted in with local traditions and customs.
The book examines how an organisation originating in late eighteenth-century Ireland became a significant and controversial element in Liverpool history. Using a wide range of sources including rarely accessed Orange Order records it places the Order within an early nineteenth-century Liverpool context of apocalyptic evangelical Protestantism, a labour market dominated by irregular dock work, a growing influx of immigrant Catholic Irish, marked residential segregation and sporadic civil conflict. It explores how the Order survived official disapproval, dissolution and schism to become deeply rooted within Protestant working-class communities. It analyses the attractions of lodge life, the appeal of ritual, colourful regalia and 12th July processions, the intense social bonding within lodges, the mutual support provided in adversity and measure taken to guard and transmit their world view. The intense royalism and patriotism of the Order and its troubled relationship with the Church of England are examined plus its role in sustaining the working class Tory vote which contributed to a century long Conservative hegemony in city politics. The book concludes with the cultural and socio-economic changes in British society which marginalised the core concerns of the Order, triggering decline in strength, visibility and significance in civic life.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias (and other oppositional religious communities), music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume as a whole, then, approaches Christian groups and their musics as diverse and powerful windows into the way in which music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) between places, now and historically. It also tries to take account of the religious self-understandings of these groups, presenting Christian musical practice and exchange as encompassing and negotiating deeply felt and deeply rooted moral and cultural values. Given that the centerpiece of the volume is Christian religious musical practice, the volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.
Set against a volatile political landscape, Irish republican culture has struggled to maintain continuity with the past, affirm legitimacy in the present, and generate a sense of community for the future. Lullabies and Battle Cries explores the relationship between music, emotion, memory, and identity in republican parading bands, with a focus on how this music continues to be utilized in a post-conflict climate. As author Jaime Rollins shows, rebel parade music provides a foundational idiom of national and republican expression, acting as a critical medium for shaping new political identities within continually shifting dynamics of republican culture.
