Becoming the ‘other’?: Exploring mimetic practice in the Ulster Plantation

Summary

Mimesis involves the interpretation and imitation of behaviour. Crucially, it is a strategy employed not only by the ‘colonised other’, but also by those in authority engaging with and endeavouring to understand the behaviour of those over whom they wielded power. Far from settling an unpopulated colonial wilderness, those few planters who made their way to Ulster in the early seventeenth century were thrust into a populated Gaelic world where their survival depended upon a process of accommodation and adaptation. The power they held was fragile. While routinely denied in historical memory, archaeological evidence hints at the ways in which English planters selectively incorporated elements of Gaelic cultural practice into their own repertoires. While early modern Ireland was indeed undergoing significant transformation through the mechanism of British expansion, the cultural changes associated with this process – like those occurring throughout the Atlantic world- were never unidirectional.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cultural transformations in early modern Ireland, an archaeological perspective   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 533