From the Man in the White Suit to the Woman with the White Mantle: Milestones in my Education as an Anthropologist

Abstract

The present paper pays tribute to a teacher who profoundly influenced the author's education as an anthropologist. Beginning with a discussion of memory, it explores the impact upon him of Douglas Miles's personality and style of teaching. Dwelling upon the idiosyncratic connections that often link what one is taught to what one is then able to apply as an ethnographer, it discusses the surprising relevance of Miles’ evocation of wayang kulit and ludruk to the author's understanding of the way Ireland's remote rural poor viewed television. It then broaches how Miles’ treatment of religious syncretism helped sensitise the author to this element in popular Catholic piety, something that has continued to inform both his study of Irish visionaries and their devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and his recent research into ‘Mother Mary's’ association with Vietnamese mother goddesses. Throughout, the aim is to celebrate the importance of an approach to comparative analysis that shows how the improbable and extraordinary can be used to illuminate our understanding of the most diverse phenomena.

Keywords:

• Miles
• Ireland
• Vietnam
• Marian
• Virgin Mary
• syncretism
• wayang
• ludruk
• television
• narrative

Notes

1. Among the multitude of authors who have dealt with the way memory works, let me single out one who especially appeals to me, the neurologist Oliver Sacks. See, for example, his An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), especially the chapter titled ‘The Landscape of his Dreams’, but also ‘The Last Hippie’.

2. Its lilting music had, of course, long before been celebrated in literature by Synge (1907/1961) in a manner Williams (2000) would surely have been delighted by.

3. For excellent discussions of key issues, see Droogers (1989, 2005), Stewart and Shaw (1994) and Stewart (1999).