This book is an introduction to Traveller Studies and its corollaries, Romani Studies and Diaspora and Migration Studies. This book traces a number of common themes relating to the representation of Irish Travellers in Irish popular tradition and how these themes have impacted on Ireland’s collective imaginary. A particular focus is the development of the ‘settled’ (i.e. non-Traveller) community’s perception of Travellers as an outsider group in Irish society and the representation of Travellers as an Other who are perceived as both inside and outside Ireland’s collective ideation.

The initial chapters of the book examine historical attempts to locate and...

Irish Travellers are a minority who have lived on the margins of mainstream Irish society for many centuries. Many contemporary sources refer to the Irish Travellers as an ethnic group, and they are recognised as such in Britain, although not in Ireland. It is estimated that there are at least 36,000 Travellers living in the Republic of Ireland with a further 6,000 in Northern Ireland. There are also significant communities of Travellers who claim Irish descent living in Britain and the United States. They are distinct from the surrounding population due to a range of differing cultural attributes. These include...

The question of group origins as a marker for cultural legitimacy is today often considered a very recent development, a development that can be attributed entirely to modernity. The issues of ethnogenesis, group origins, kin-related heredity and apparent ‘legitimacy’ in both cultural and historic terms were all issues which fascinated intellectuals and scholarly communities in the nineteenth century and earlier, however. In fact such subjects or ‘objects of enquiry’ would actually serve as the backdrop to the very first ‘institutionally-inspired’ studies of Travellers and Gypsies in Western Europe.

A secondary or marginal interest for much of the nineteenth (and indeed,...

The initial Gypsilorist interest in Irish Travellers/tinkers was a short-lived phenomenon and it faded away after a few years. More than three decades passed before the subject was revived again as a source of interest. Once again, philology and its relation with cultural categorisation would prove the catalyst. It was not until the late 1930s that an interest in Traveller culture resurfaced once more and on this occasion it was the Traveller language known as Cant/Gammon and Shelta which acted as a catalyst for this renewed interest.

In 1937 the Scottish Celtic scholar R. A. S. Macalister gathered together much...

The concept of the ‘Other’ or Otherness has been explored through a diverse array of discourses including the historical, the socio-cultural, the anthropological, the psychoanalytic (see Freud, 1938, 1950a, 1950b, 1957, for example), the linguistic and the philosophical (see Lévinas, 1996; Volf, 1996). While the question of the ‘Other’ or Otherness may have not have been a term which carried much significance in Irish academic circles during the 1950s and 1960s when folklorists such as Seán McGrath were writing, it can be said with little fear of contradiction that it was the search for Otherness, albeit Irish and Gaelic and...

I have briefly traced the development of the Irish ‘Othering’ tradition as encompassed in a reiterative and reductionist discourse because Ireland’s history of colonisation has meant that the ‘official’ version of the Irish people (including Irish Travellers) and Irish history is, it can be argued, itself a form of ‘Othering’. Healy’s statement regarding the ‘manufactured’ or mediated nature of much of the historical record can be seen to be particularly pertinent to Irish history: ‘History is a construct, often a narrative of interested parties who seek to prove a thesis’ (Healy, 1992: 15). That the interpretation of history and definitions...

Aside from the construction of Travellers as ‘degraded’ or ‘threatening/dangerous’ Other, the second primary discourse that serves to delineate Travellers within the Tinker Questionnaire material is that which ‘frames’ them as a culturally exclusive group, one who function completely ‘independently’ of the major organs of Irish society and who actually function as a countercultural group, forming ‘a society within a society’.

This depicts Travellers in terms of a countercultural threat. They are seen to disturb the moral order because they are perceived to inhabit an exclusive and secretive society which operates in symbiosis with and yet on the margins of...

Traditionally post-colonialism has read Irish culture through its inherited dichotomy of colonised/coloniser and empowered/disempowered thereby replicating imperialist power structures of old; the reading of the two primary strands within the representative discourse explored here points rather to the atypicality, the nomadic qualities, of Ireland’s postcolonial configurations and the subaltern histories of social groupings which Gramsci characterised as ‘fragmented and episodic’ (Gramsci, 1971: 55). My discussion seeks to underscore the importance of rethinking and re-interpreting nationalist ideology and praxis within the Irish (post-) colonial context. Emphasised in the narratives explored here however is the ‘radically undecidable nature of the text’ and...

The folktales explored here are no longer as widely known or as widely disseminated as they once were. However theirraison d’être– i.e. the ‘accursed’ or ‘disordered’ status of Travellers as a consequence of their perceived ‘punishment’ – continues to resonate strongly both in Irish popular belief and in the general public discourse concerning Travellers in Ireland. I argue that reductionist stereotypes as applied to Travellers in the folklore tradition and in Irish popular belief generally continue to have an impact upon the way in which the popular image of Travellers is constructed in Ireland. For the settled community...

As evidenced in the Irish language archive from which these narratives have been sourced, the tradition of representation as a whole whether hostile or a favourable as regards Travellers is an element of native Irish cultural tradition. The narratives are exemplars of the hegemony of native Irish culture as set against British colonial traditions. The stories are an element of both the settled Irish narrative traditions and the Traveller community’s tradition. They are simultaneously the same and ‘Other’. They are both inside and outside in the same way as the guardians and tellers of these stories were, whether Traveller or...

This volume has traced the development of the Traveller image as ‘Other’ through mythical and binary discourses of alterity. Until the recent arrival of a more overtly multicultural society in Ireland Travellers have constituted the ‘Other’ for mainstream Irish society. As ‘Other’ they have often acted as objects on whom power is exercised. Their representation and the roles constructed for them have been determined primarily by the settled community and have been influenced by the need to define national, social and class identity. This project of representation has used the tools of mythology and history. These two related aspects of...