Purchase this article
USD $22.00
Cartographies of Communicability and the Anthropological Archive
Civil War Executions and the Harvard Irish Study
in Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
Author:
Brigittine French
Brigittine French
Grinnell College frenchb@grinnell.edu
Search for other papers by Brigittine French in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by Brigittine French in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
USD $0.01
All currencies in US Dollar
This article traces ideological constructions of communication that enable powerful actors to determine what counts as silences, lies and surpluses in efficacious narratives about violence (Briggs 2007) in order to elucidate occlusions regarding legacies of the Civil War in the Irish Free State. It does so through a precise triangulation of multiple competing and overlapping narratives from unpublished fieldnotes, interviews, published ethnographies and other first-person accounts. The inquiry highlights social memories of the Irish Civil War that have been 'assumed, distorted, misunderstood, manipulated, underestimated, but most of all, ignored' (Dolan 2003: 2). The article argues that the excesses of the anthropological archive make the recuperation of a multiplicity of collective memories possible through a linguistic anthropological perspective that enumerates the kind of erasures at play in contentious memory-making moments, highlights polyvocality in metapragmatic discourse and tracks the gaps in entextualisation processes of historical narratives about political turmoil.