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Many examples of Irish folklore reflect and instill enduring conceptions about the workings, vulnerability, and viability of community, which is understood to be a doing, a project in need of continual maintenance. Arguably, there has been no more devastating blow to the vernacular understanding of community as social contract for mutual support than the mid-nineteenth-century Famine in Ireland. If folklore provides models for contemplating and reproducing ideas about how community may be enacted, it also bears witness to the haunting consequences of abandoning community.

More than quaint local color, folklore is a crucial part of life in Aghyaran, a mixed Catholic-Protestant border community in Northern Ireland. Neighbors socialize during wakes and ceilis-informal nighttime gatherings-without regard to religious, ethnic, or political affiliation. The witty, sometimes raucous stories swapped on these occasions offer a window into Aghyaran residents' views of self and other in the wake of decades of violent conflict. Through anecdotes about local characters, participants explore the nature of community and identity in ways that transcend Catholic or Protestant sectarian histories. Ray Cashman analyzes local character anecdotes in detail and argues that while politicians may take credit for the peace process in Northern Ireland, no political progress would be possible without ordinary people using shared resources of storytelling and socializing to imagine and maintain community.

Although many scholars have characterized nostalgia as a counterproductive modern malaise, members of one North Irish community demonstrate that nostalgia can be essential for evaluating the present through contrast with the past and for reasserting the ideal of community in the midst of sectarian division. By preserving and displaying local material culture of the past, Catholics and Protestants alike grant seemingly obsolete objects new life as symbols necessary for inspiring critical thought that may lead to positive social change.

Profiles of artists and performers from around the world form the basis of this innovative volume that explores the many ways individuals engage with, carry on, revive, and create tradition. Leading scholars in folklore studies consider how the field has addressed the relationship between performer and tradition and examine theoretical issues involved in fieldwork and the analysis and dissemination of scholarship in the context of relationships with the performers. These vivid case studies exemplify the best of performer-centered ethnography.

Murals, graffiti, flags, and annual commemorative parades are common in urban Northern Ireland where Irish Catholic nationalists and British Protestant unionists use these vernacular forms of custom and material culture to reiterate their differential identities in terms of ethnicity, denomination, and politics. Rural areas, on the other hand, present a very different visual scene with far fewer public visual displays broadcasting political messages and affiliations. Nevertheless, this lack does not necessarily signify that rural dwellers are somehow less politically minded or more peacefully integrated in comparison to their urban counterparts. Moving beyond the visual scene alone, we must pay attention to how rural dwellers contextualize their seemingly unmarked environment through oral legendary and personal narrative. In particular, the oral traditions of one rural, majority-nationalist Community in County Tyrone demonstrate significant differences between urban and rural ways of imagining and internalizing the Irish Catholic nationalist cause. Many urban murals, for example, focus outward, gesturing to a secular, cosmopolitan, and international consciousness, while the Tyrone landscape--as contextualized by oral tradition--focuses inward on the local, autochthonous, and sacred. Despite advances in an on-going peace process, this rural, radically emplaced vision of the Irish nationalist cause may well have significant staying power.

Although many scholars have characterized nostalgia as a counterproductive modern malaise, members of one North Irish community demonstrate that nostalgia can be essential for evaluating the present through contrast with the past and for reasserting the ideal of community in the midst of sectarian division. By preserving and displaying local material culture of the past, Catholics and Protestants alike grant seemingly obsolete objects new life as symbols necessary for inspiring critical thought that may lead to positive social change.

This is an ethnographic study of social interaction and oral narrative in a Northern Irish border community in western County Tyrone. People in this locality have witnessed a staggering amount of cultural, political, and socioeconomic change. As members of the eldest generation die, their all-night wakes become primary sites for comparison of past and present through humorous and contemplative anecdotes about the deceased and other past locals, especially those referred to as “characters.” Likewise, during nighttime social visits (ceilis), storytelling focuses on the personalities and actions of local individuals, while gesturing toward the character of the community that is composed of such individuals. Through narrative and over time, individuals are transformed into character types—models of and for behavior—that are useful for coming to terms with being an individual within a group in the midst of change. Swapping local character anecdotes and narratives in other related genres becomes an exploration of human nature, community, local identity, and social transformation. Throughout this project, interpretation of scores of transcribed stories and strips of conversation is informed by performance studies, which challenges the division of text and context through holistic analysis of communicative events. After an introduction in the Prologue and Chapter One to the topic and the community studied, Chapters Two and Three discuss wakes and ceilis as traditional yet adaptive social events, and as sites for intimate commemoration through storytelling. Chapter Four investigates the range of local storytelling genres as a system of communication, and identifies the local character anecdote as central in this system for this speech community. Chapters Five and Six discuss the notion of character from an etic perspective that draws on literary theory and from an emic perspective that draws on recorded interviews and storytelling events. Observations about commemoration and the construction of community, collective memory, and local identity coalesce in the conclusion. Specifically, Chapter Seven recasts stories about personal character as both articulations and enactments of a local culture that challenges the final authority of external, institutional power and of often sectarian, publicly asserted forms of identity construction.

As a symbolic figure in Irish folklore and popular literature, the outlaw embodies folk morality in conflict with the self-interest and inequity of the state. In the aftermath of British colonisation, the Irish outlaw is represented as more than a criminal. He provides a hero through whom ordinary Irishmen and women can vicariously enjoy brief victories, and imagine their collective dignity in the midst of political defeat and its consequences. Legends, ballads and chapbooks portraying the outlaw are the products of hard-pressed people representing themselves to themselves, reflecting on their strengths and weaknesses, and contemplating issues of morality and justice.