Connecting Folklore, History and Theory in the 21st Century: Irish Folklore

A Folklore Society Online Talk

by

Prof. Sarah Covington (Queens College, New York)

Tuesday 17 June, 19:00 BST

This talk will use the folklore of Ireland as a way to urge scholars and students to think in new ways about the relationship between history and folklore, and the how both could be transformed by more recent theoretical “turns.”

Scholars such as Dorothy Noyes have described the need for folklorists to inhabit the middle terrain between high theory and local interpretation; historians, with some great exceptions, need for their part to more deeply understand all the methods and approaches that have long been known to folklorists. The history of emotions, the “animal turn,” the return of materialist analysis and theories of multiple temporalities have already been applied in various degrees by folklorists and historians. But further dialogue can be undertaken between the two disciplines, propelling both in exciting new directions.

Before the nineteenth century, history and what came to be known as folklore were inseparable, equally useful in understanding the past. After a long hiatus apart, the two disciplines eventually reunited, enriched in more recent years by the seminal work of historians such as Guy Beiner, Angela Bourke, David Hopkin, and Clodagh Tait. Meanwhile, folkloristics came to assume a more historicist turn, under the advocacy of Dan Ben-Amos most famously, or in the journal TFH: The Journal of History and Folklore .

Working from case studies in Irish folklore, this talk will argue, however, that much more work needs to be undertaken to propel the mingling of history and folklore forward in possibly ground-shifting ways. In addition to more well-known recent “turns”—the animal turn, the emotions turn, the post-human turn—other more overtly theoretical approaches might help us to approach the interpretation of folklore in new ways. Anthropocene time or Reinhard Koselleck’s idea of multiple temporalities, for example, can help us to understand how “folkloric time” co-exists with or reflects a different temporalities; the “spatial turn” as well as the “global turn” and the notion of “glocalization” also hold out possibilities for further work. Finally, the return to materialist analyses—in response to the domination of the cultural in the 1990s and beyond—might also be fruitful, and include a revisiting of Gramsci and others. This talk will make these theoretical ideas more concrete by applying them to a range of examples in Irish folklore; it will also suggest how Irish folklore can be subject to quantification and computational analysis by using the database (dúchas.ie) issued by Ireland’s great National Folklore Collection.

Sarah Covington is Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her most recent work is entitled The Devil from Over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2022); she has also written a number of articles on folklore and history. She is currently director of Irish Studies at Queens College and directs an oral history project on Irish working class immigrants in the greater New York City area.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code: log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/connecting-folklore-history-and-theory-in-the-21st-century-irish-folklore-tickets-1245539665669?

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Image: Seaģn Oģ Suģilleabhaģin