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  • Chapter 10 - Irish Travellers, the Environment, and Literature

  • Edited by Malcolm Sen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  • Book:
    A History of Irish Literature and the Environment
    Published online:
    14 July 2022
    Print publication:
    28 July 2022, pp 206-226

  • Summary

    This chapter provides a much-needed corrective to the territorial and terrestrial logic of Irish literary and nationalist discourses. Mary Burke argues that the preagricultural modes of nomadic living mean that ambulant cultures negotiate landscape in very different ways to the more dominant sedentariness prized in normative discourse of nationalism. In Ireland, Travellers “provided seasonal farm labor, horse trading, entertainment, hawking, and tinsmithing services to both the urban and rural majority. The latter two services, in particular, are central to understanding Traveller impact on the environment, since some of the labor of tinsmithing involved the mending and repurposing of items and equipment used in homes and on farms.” Burke shows us how an interconnected set of developments and policies transformed Travellers from providers of services that emphasized mending, repurpose, and reuse, to a degraded community that could only be ‘fixed’ by coerced assimilation into a progressively consumerist majority culture in which disposability was increasingly prized.”