Cult and Cultivation: Vulnerability and Resilience on Inishark Island, Co. Galway, Ireland in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Critics of new materialism caution that focus on the active qualities of materials and the distributed agency of assemblages obscures the cruelties of inequality that allow the powerful to do as they will and others to suffer what they must. Engaging such critiques, this paper examines the famines in nineteenth-century Ireland as a political-ecological catastrophe about which an assessment of the role of human (landlords, government officials, tenant farmers) and nonhuman actors ("the blight," the lumper potato, marginal landscapes) carries considerable political stakes. Drawing on archaeological and archival data from the island of Inishark, I suggest that attending to the subsistence, sensory, and mnemonic affordances of diverse materials in the landscape actually highlights islanders’ creative agency in maintaining collective identity, action, and livelihood in the midst of adversity. I argue that islanders’ curation of medieval ritual monuments and annual commensal celebrations associated with the cult of Saint Leo generated a shared heritage that reinforced the social bonds required by their community’s collective agricultural regime. New materialist approaches can therefore nuance understandings of vulnerability and resilience by exploring how humans operate within material assemblages that afford and constrain patterns of subsistence, lived-experience, and social affinity and difference.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32958