LONGING FOR THE LAND: EMOTIONS, MEMORY, AND NATURE IN IRISH TRAVEL ADVERTISEMENTS

Abstract

With its large diaspora, Ireland has a long tradition of travel ranging from emigration to return migration, expatriate visits as well as tourism. Although Irish tourism increased substantially with the climax of the so-called Celtic Tiger in the early 1990s, Ireland was a major tourist destination even before that. This article explores emotions, memory, and nature in images (in travel catalogues and on the internet) advertising Ireland in a global context. The images target Irish expatriates, indigenous tourists, and non-Irish tourists in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Images featuring pastoral landscapes, rural harmony, and dramatic cliffs can be emotionally evocative in different ways, exemplifying people's social relationships to their environment. Central themes in the images are expatriate emotions of displacement, longing, and nostalgia often connected with Irish nationalism while at the same time managing to include non-Irish people. This confirms the notion of images as ambiguous, yet points at the possibility of steering the viewer's attention through captions featuring the concepts of “home” and “our land.” The article also focuses on expatriate emotions that recur in the narrative of Irish travel advertisements in an increasingly globalized world.

Key Words:

• emotions
• visual imagery
• memory
• nature
• Ireland

The data presented in this article derive from fieldwork in Ireland funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. The article was first presented at the World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology in Stockholm in July 2005, at the Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San José in 2006, and as a Socrates lecture to research students at the University of Vienna in 2006. I am grateful to Marcus Banks, Patrik Aspers, Andre Gingrich, Thomas Fillitz, and Sabine Strasser for comments on these occasions. I also thank Maruška Svašek and Zlatko Skrbiš, the editors of Identities and two anonymous referees for suggestions on how to clarify the argument.

Notes

1. The FORTE report (1996: 50) estimates that there are about “62 million people of Irish descent scattered across the globe”; see also Hickman (2005: 117), who continues by saying that “at any one time a significant proportion of people alive who were born in Ireland were living abroad.” The population in the Republic of Ireland is indicated by the Central Statistics Office to be 3.9 million in 2002 (www.cso.ie/statistics/population) and 1.6 million in Northern Ireland in 2001 by NISRA Statistics Research Agency (www.nisra.gov.uk/census).

2. Coining this “yo-yo fieldwork,” I went back and forth to Ireland doing participant observation, interviews, and archival work at and around performances, competitions, and festivals in the dance world all over the island spending more than eight months altogether in the field (Wulff 2002, 2007).

3. Drawing on conspicuous cases of the emotional and social life of human remains, such as the deathmask of a deceased actor husband which the widow treated with loving care, Maruska Svašek (2007) has challenged the distinction between subject-object by showing how artifacts can provoke an array of diverse emotions and produce social action.

4. Visual anthropology started out with Bateson and Mead (1942) and was recently redefined by Morphy and Banks (1997), Banks (2001), Pink (2001), and Grimshaw (2001) among others. For visual sociology, see for example Prosser (1998), Harper (1998), and Emmison and Smith (2000).

5. See Urry's (1990) seminal work on the tourist gaze, which Chaney (2002) recently suggested could be developed to make room for an exchange of glances, a dialogue between visitor and local, guest and host.

6. The subtitle of the magazine The World of Hibernia is The magazine for the Irish diaspora: An ongoing celebration of Ireland and the Irish around the World.

7. According to the web page www.knowth.com/newgrange.htm Newgrange, Co. Meath, in the Republic of Ireland, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with 200,000 visitors every year. There is, however, only room for 50 visitors inside the monument at the solstice event. They are chosen by lottery among about 20,000 people each year, who express an interest in taking part. It is still not known whether Newgrange was built to be temples, tombs, or something else. See also Wulff (2007) on the dance production titled Tombs, which is inspired by Newgrange, choreographed by Robert O'Connor and Loretta Yurick for their company Dance Theatre of Ireland.

8. Giant's Causeway, Co. Antrim is the major tourist site in Northern Ireland. It came about through “volcanic eruptions which took place some sixty million years ago. Several flows of lava exuded from fissures in the chalk and solidified into layers of hard basalt which cracked as they contracted, forming masses of adjoining columns; the majority are hexagonal in shape … .The Causeway consists of about 40 000 columns … and has been divided by the action of the waves into three sections” ( Michelin Tourist Guide Ireland 1992: 195).

Visit Northern Ireland 2004. Belfast: Northern Ireland Tourist Board. Unpublished brochure.