Signs of War and Peace focuses on the role public display plays in the conflict in Northern Ireland. In doing so, it ranges freely over other times, places, and events that shed light on the social and political processes and dynamics involved in public display traditions, such as the Saint Patrick's Day parades in Boston, Massachusetts, and the popular spontaneous shrines to Lady Diana in London. The book is about the nature of public display, its relationships to class-based aesthetics, tradition, and popular style. It is also about contest, conflict, and civil war, and the ways the former are intimately intertwined with the latter, both in Northern Ireland and elsewhere throughout the world. The work is interdisciplinary, combining ethnographic, anthropological, folkloristic, and performance studies approaches. The manuscript benefits from large amount of field work in Ireland, and as a result contains both ethnographic data and revealing interviews with many people in Northern Ireland who have participated in the display events Santino seeks to analyze. The perspective that Santino offers helps to explain the intensity of the conflict as well as the origination, motivations, and justifications of bonfires, murals, commemorative displays, parades, etc. that symbolically articulate what he terms the 'dual master narratives' that underlie and in many ways help to articulate the parameters of that conflict.

The prominence of public rituals and displays of symbols by both sides suggest that Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland share a common political culture. This shared political culture is important because it structures events--by influencing how Catholic and Protestants define and pursue political goals.

Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.

The deep and abiding sectarian divide splintering Northern Ireland has been the focus of considerable attention recently. In particular, the role parades and visual displays play in underscoring opposition has come into the spotlight with the emergence of heightened tensions, close on the heels of a tentative peace. Providing penetrating insights into the historical roots of Northern Ireland's ethnic hostilities, this timely book explores the role of images and material culture in shaping present attitudes. Ritual, identity, class and memory are shown to be potent forces informing trenchant animosities -- animosities which are visually reflected in banners and murals for unionists and nationalists alike. The pivotal role of the Twelfth of July parade in Belfast, when an estimated 100,000 either parade or watch the Orangemen, is highlighted. Anyone interested in the future of Northern Ireland and concerned about escalating conflict across the globe will warmly welcome this impressive study.

If memory was simply about past events, public authorities would never put their ever-shrinking budgets at its service. Rather, memory is actually about the present moment, as Pierre Nora puts it: “Through the past, we venerate above all ourselves.” This book examines how collective memory and material culture are used to support present political and ideological needs in contemporary society. Using the memorialization of the Troubles in contemporary Northern Ireland as a case study, this book investigates how non-state, often proscribed, organizations have filled a societal vacuum in the creation of public memorials. In particular, these groups have sifted through the past to propose “official” collective narratives of national identification, historical legitimation, and moral justifications for violence.

Civilization and culture have traditionally been regarded as mutually exclusive concepts. In this comparative case-study of Northern Ireland, Máiréad Nic Craith explores the commitment of unionists to a civic, 'culture-blind' British state; contrasting this with nationalist demands for official recognition of Irish culture. The 'cultural turn' in Northern Irish politics and the development of a bicultural infrastructure is examined here in the context of differing interpretations of equality and increasing demands for intercultural communication within, as well as between, communities.

Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on the sometimes lethal conflicts over parades, flags and other issues that continue to disrupt political life in Northern Ireland. It examines the emergence during the nineteenth century of the concept of public space and the development of new strategies for its regulation, the establishment, the new conditions created by the emergence in 1920 of a Northern Ireland state, of a near monopoly of public space enjoyed by Protestants and unionists, and the break down of that monopoly in more recent decades. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing sectarian and political divisions.

Irish Ethnologies gives an overview of the field of Irish ethnology, covering representative topics of institutional history and methodology, as well as case studies dealing with religion, ethnicity, memory, development, folk music, and traditional cosmology. This collection of essays draws from work in multiple disciplines including but not limited to anthropology and ethnomusicology. These essays, first published in French in the journal Ethnologie française, illuminate the complex history of Ireland and exhibit the maturity of Irish anthropology. Martine Segalen contends that these essays are part of a larger movement that “galvanized the quiet revolution in the domain of the ethnology of France.” They did so by making specific examples, in this instance Ireland, inform a larger definition of a European identity. The essays, edited by Ó Giolláin, also significantly explain, expand, and challenge “Irish ethnography.” From twelfth-century accounts to Anglo-Irish Romanticism, from topographical surveys to statistical accounts, the statistical and literary descriptions of Ireland and the Irish have prefigured the ethnography of Ireland. This collection of articles on the ethnographic disciplines in Ireland provides an instructive example of how a local anthropology can have lessons for the wider field. This book will interest academics and students of anthropology, folklore studies, history, and Irish Studies, as well as general readers. Contributors: Martine Segalen, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Hastings Donnan, Anne Byrne, Pauline Garvey, Adam Drazin, Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, Joseph Ruane, Ethel Crowley, Dominic Bryan, Helena Wulff, Guy Beiner, Sylvie Muller, and Anthony McCann.