The essays in Irish Ethnologies have had to tread a somewhat unconventional path to publication. First prepared in 2008, they were translated into French and published in a special issue of Ethnologie française (41, no. 2 [2011]) titled “Irlande après Arensberg et Ó Duilearga.” At least some of these essays—for example, those by Hastings Donnan and by Pauline Garvey and Adam Drazin—have been revisited since their first iteration, as they include references to publications from 2012 and later. In her preface to the volume, Martine Segalen, editor of Ethnologie française, refers to the continuing relevance of the issues addressed (xiii), thereby implicitly endorsing the decision to make them available now to readers of English.

Editor Diarmuid Ó Giolláin's introduction outlines key moments of ethnological interest in Irish society, noting inter alia the importance of the first “Gaelic Revival” in Belfast at the close of the eighteenth century, the role of the Royal Dublin Society (founded 1731), the Ordnance Survey (operating in Ireland from 1824), and the data collected by the 1835 Poor Law enquiry. The nineteenth century saw the beginning of tale collecting in rural areas by Thomas Crofton Croker and others, while the anthropological survey of the Aran Islands by Alfred Cort Haddon and Charles R. Browne (1891–1893) coincided with the Anglo-Irish literary revival centered on W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory and the Gaelic revival spearheaded by Douglas Hyde. The twentieth-century institutionalization of folklore studies saw the Free State prioritize the work of collecting, while in Northern Ireland folklife rose to the fore. Scandinavian experience informed conceptualization and practice in both jurisdictions.

Many of the points mentioned in the introduction receive expanded treatment in other contributions. For instance, Donnan's essay, “Re-placing Ireland in Irish Anthropology,” engages with the shift from siting folklore research in the rural west to a thematic approach, which may include the concept of “multilocality” (32). Gearóid Ó Crualaoich's essay, “Folkloristic-Ethnological Studies in Ireland,” traces a national-cum-personal methodological journey, closely interweaving rural and urban experience, orality, and literacy (83). The latter offers a welcome corrective to the common perception of a cleft between oral tradition and print, when the reality in Ireland as in Western Europe generally has been one of complex links between orality and literacy for at least half a millennium: even illiterate informants usually have access to printed sources, albeit at second or third hand. Indeed, this understanding underpins Guy Beiner's examination of the diachronic background of current traditions arising from the Battle of Ballinamuck, County Longford, the last major encounter of the 1798 rebellion. Emphasizing that oral tellers are not talking books, Beiner discusses the intertwining of twentieth-century oral and published accounts of the exploits of Robin Gill, a local hero of 1798.

Several essays explore innovation in ethnological methodologies and themes. These reflect the widening of scholarly interest from traditional folklore concerns to an ever-expanding ethnological universe, while also engaging with silences and absences. Thus, Joseph Ruane, in “Pluralism and Silence,” treats of the occlusion of discourse around Protestant experience in the twenty-six counties, a phenomenon that finds parallel in the failure over many decades of the National Museum to display its folkloric and ethnologic collections (Garvey and Drazin) and even in the sidelining of the experience of traditional farmers, who find they have to conform to a top-down, “knowledge”-based approach if they are to benefit from Rural Environment Protection Scheme (Ethel Crowley). The shift of emphasis to urban and contemporary concerns can be seen in Dominic Bryan's assessment of the evolving role of Belfast city center as a shared and neutral civic space, complementing the many partitioned housing areas of the city. On the other hand, Sylvie Muller's essay on the complex significations of the tradition of the mermaid who marries a human, bears him children, recovers her cloak, and returns to the sea ends with the claim that “the peasant calendar,” which recognizes “the nourishing role of death,” is at variance with “the urban calendar,” which is based on the “victory of light and of life” (198). Finally, in a critical appraisal of recent compositional developments in music and dance (A River of Sound, Riverdance), Anthony McCann dispels any easy notion that an intellectual consensus is likely to emerge from the widened ethnological horizon. Au contraire, his essay sees conflict between the individualistic interests of those with access to the resources of the academy and media and the overall well-being of the art of traditional communities. This perceived opposition between modernity and tradition returns us to the excitement and stimulation of encounters between researchers (as representatives of intellectual academic enquiry) and informants (as reflexive representatives and expert bearers of tradition) in a world where the parameters of traditional, popular, and community culture and those of critical enquiry are all in a never-ending state of flux.

In the background of many of these essays is the ever-changing relationship between researcher and informant and the greater degree of equality now to be observed between them (Ó Crualaoich, 79). This change may be related to the exigencies of the researcher-informant interaction, nowadays more likely to be by appointment than by extended periods of societal immersion, often becoming so-called yo-yo fieldwork, characterized by the researcher's regular to-ing and fro-ing (Donnan, 31; Helena Wulff, 144). Intriguingly, Wulff notes the increasing tendency of “studying sideways,” whereby the anthropologist studies colleagues, fellow intellectuals, who, like the writers she studies in Ireland, also spend a lot of time reading and writing (143). But she astutely observes that there have always been reflexive informants who had an intellectual inclination, be they educated or not, people who can be counted on to provide reliable replies to questions time and again and who keep surprising “with analytical insights that sometimes can go directly into text” (143).

But in one major respect there is a wide chasm between researcher and the more traditional informant, as is highlighted in Anne Byrne's study of correspondence relating to the Harvard-Irish Survey of the 1930s. While the researcher is usually embedded in a formal institutional structure, a milieu that is academic and international, with both a well-defined career path and funding process, local informants, even when literate and firmly based socially, may be reduced to a gauche informality in trying to navigate for themselves some tangible recompense for their collaborative efforts, particularly when individual researchers may arbitrarily disappear from an informant's life (Byrne, 52).

The thought-provoking essays in Irish Ethnologies testify to the efficacy of judiciously combining the benefits of theory and fieldwork, which is highlighted especially in Ó Crualaoich's endorsement of Ó Giolláin's call for “a closer relationship between the two ethnological traditions that have long worked in Ireland, folklore and anthropology” (87).