Island Taskscapes: Heritage, Ritual, and Sustainability on Inishark and Inishbofin, Ireland

Lash, Ryan P

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-vf7e-hk97

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Island Taskscapes: Heritage, Ritual, and Sustainability on Inishark and Inishbofin, Ireland

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This dissertation examines how the maintenance and adaptation of heritage monuments and ritual traditions have contributed to the sustainability of communities on the islands of Inishark and Inishbofin along the west coast of Ireland. My analysis combines archaeological investigation of a pilgrimage tradition on Inishark, from its origins in the early medieval period to the island’s evacuation in 1960, with ethnographic observation of contemporary heritage tourism on nearby Inishbofin, still home to about 170 residents. The deep timescale of this multi-disciplinary study demonstrates how engagements with monuments that evoke the past have cultivated perceptions of belonging that fostered the social relations essential to different patterns of dwelling on the islands across the centuries. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the islands and situate this study in relation to the history of anthropological theorizations of cultural stasis among marginalized groups. Primitivist tropes – emerging from a variety of colonial, romantic-nationalist, and social evolutionary strains of thought – have long characterized western rural Ireland as embodying the persistence of archaic linguistic forms, racial categories, and social practices. Such tropes frame debates on Irish pilgrimage traditions, known as turas, which were common in the 18th-19th centuries and persist today. Participants in turas traditions visit and interact with a circuit of features – stone altars, cross-slabs, holy wells, sacred stones – associated with early medieval saints. New archaeological evidence from Inishark indicates that monuments and practices of liturgies that gathered monks and laypeople to the island’s monastic settlement in the medieval period (c. 700–1300 CE) became the basis of a turas maintained by inhabitants of a later fishing and farming village (c. 1750–1960). To build a nuanced account of change and continuity through time, this study views monuments within the changing ensembles – or taskscapes – of human and other-than-human beings, materials, and forces that render the landscape and enable human dwelling (Chapter 2). This approach explores how encounters with monuments fostered commemoration of the past and emplaced actors in relation to other-than-human forces and models of social order upon which islanders’ subsistence and political economies relied. Chapter 3 summarizes previous research on the islands and outlines the methodology of the present study. The wide temporal frame and mixed methods scrutinize continuity by identifying correlated change in islanders’ social relations, dwelling practices, and engagement with heritage monuments. Chapters 4 and 5 present the results of archival and archaeological investigation of turas monuments on Inishark conducted by myself and colleagues on the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) project. Chapter 6 examines the taskscape of turas monuments in the medieval period. Encounters with built-features (cenotaphs, stone-huts, and enclosed shrines) and ‘natural’ objects (water-worn pebbles) generated perceptions of venerable heritage, devotional affinity, and sacred hierarchy that buttressed the claims of the island’s monastic community to the labor and produce of their lay tenants. Chapter 7 examines the taskscape of turas monuments in the modern period. From c. 1780–1850, collective stewardship and veneration of turas monuments in the absence of priests fostered collaboration among villagers, who relied on a system of collective agriculture. After c. 1850, the growing influence of clergy and changes in landholding encouraged islanders to re-focus community devotion within a restored church sanctioned by local priests. Adaptation of heritage fostered productive local social relations that helped islanders endure, but could not alter the structures of inequality and vulnerability that led the island’s evacuation in 1960. Chapter 8 explores how islanders of Inishbofin have developed heritage tourism as an important aspect of a contemporary dwelling taskscape heavily reliant on seasonal tourism. Through online media, books, annual festivals, and walking tours, islanders share their heritage in ways that foster a sense of belonging and participation among familiar visitors that strengthen the tourist trade through annual extended stays. The history of the islands, thus, demonstrates both the capacity and incapacity of heritage to help forge functional and sustainable articulations between perceptions of belonging, patterns of political economic interdependence, and modes of subsistence. To conclude, Chapter 9 reflects on avenues for future research and broader theoretical implications. I suggest that taskscape analyses reframe questions of continuity as explorations of sustainability that highlight the creative potential of heritage. To this end, taskcape fosters a necessary and productive tension between post-humanist attention to other-than-human agency and humanist sensitivity to inequality and the diversity of individuals’ lived experience.

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