Swing time: on children, peat bogs, and pendulums

ABSTRACT

This contribution is part of a special issue, comprising an essay by Tim Ingold (“From Science to Art and Back Again: the Pendulum of an Anthropologist”) and nine invited responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Tim Ingold
• science and art
• anthropology
• childhood
• imagination
• landscape and environment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stuart McLean Stuart McLean is Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book is Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

Notes

1 Situated in the far northwest and bordered partly by Northern Ireland, Leitrim is Ireland’s least populous county.

2 The Boglands symposium was recorded in the form of photographic exhibitions in Dublin and Belfast and of a documentary film, directed by Aisling Stuart. For a more extended discussion of the symposium, see McLean (2007).

3 One such initiative, jointly sponsored by the Irish Peatland Conservation Council and An Taisce (the National Trust for Ireland, literally ‘the store’ or ‘the treasury,’ a non governmental environmental organization founded in 1848), at Girley Bog near Kells in County Meath in the Irish midlands. One of the aims of rewetting bogs is to enable them to trap more carbon dioxide, thus mitigating the effects of anthropogenic climate change (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/blocking-drains-to-capture-carbon-1.2731413).

4 In late twentieth and early twenty-first century Ireland, childhood re-emerged as an object of public concern in part through a series of widely publicised court cases involving the alleged sexual abuse of children (many of them now adults) by members of the Catholic clergy. At the same time, Ireland’s much vaunted commercial and foreign-investment boom of the 1990s (the so-called Celtic Tiger economy) was accompanied by the publication of a series of childhood memoirs, many of them evoking the conditions of life in an earlier, very different and markedly less prosperous Ireland. Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s bestselling emigré narrative of a childhood in the slums of Limerick, is only the best known of these, others having dealt, for example, with life in Church-run orphanages and juvenile detention centres (Goode, McGee, and O’Boyle 2003; McCourt 1996; Moore 1995; O’Doherty 1998; Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999).

5 Dúchas was abolished, amid some controversy, in 2003, and its functions were taken over by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Office of Public Works. In 2011 built and natural heritage in Ireland came into the remit of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.