John Millington Synge's Romantic Vision of the Aran Islands
When John Millington Synge made his way to the western most islands of Ireland he was in search of inspiration for his writing. The fruit of his journey was the fame-winning book entitled “The Aran Islands”. Synge had many purposes for this book, but one of the most compelling was his desire to write an anthropologically geared account of the people and lifestyle of what many believed to be the last bastion of true Irishness. However, Synge’s anthropological work could not avoid the strong Romantic tendencies that influenced his writing. In my opinion it is Synge’s Romanticism that makes his account more believable. The tenants of Romanticism call for the writer to be at once awed with nature and somewhat set apart from the “noble savages” that he is writing about. Synge’s awe of nature is necessary for the anthropological nature of the book because the environment of the Aran Islands is instrumental in the understanding the psyches of the people, and his Romanticism produces the vivid imagery needed for the reader to understand the landscape. The fact that Synge sees the people of the Aran Islands as a different race from himself, in my opinion, provides him with more perspective and thus allows him to relate the events and personalities of the people with a more accurate and essentially unbiased voice.
One of the most important aspects of anthropology is the understanding of how a culture relates to their environment. Thus, Synge’s imagery of the islands is instrumental in the reader’s grasp of the people and the culture which Synge is trying to describe. Synge develops the landscape in two different wa...
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Synge found the inspiration he was looking for when he entered the Aran Islands. He set out to write an anthropological record of one of the remotest cultures inhabiting Europe. To accomplish this Synge needed to be both acutely aware of his surroundings but also detached from them in order to provide his reader with vivid imagery and unbiased prose. Synge’s Romantic style of writing aided him in this venture because it motivated him to write extensively about the landscape of the Aran Islands, which is instrumental in the readers understanding of the islander’s culture. It also provided him with a belief in the “noble savage” which enabled him to at once hold himself above the islanders and yet respect them and their culture. This attitude kept him separate from the people and thus able to provide the reader with a more detached recounting of his experience.
Throughout time, many people feel as if they have lost their connection to their cultural from outside influences and numerous disruptions. Disruptions to one’s cultural can be seen in the Picture book The Rabbits by john Marsden and Shaun tan which is an an allegory of the invasion of Australia. Another example is the film avatar by James Cameron. The creators of these works are expressing the effect of man on nature and disruption it brings upon the cultural of the indigenous people who are the traditional owners of the land.
Cahill begins his discussion of the Irish people in an extensive reference to Medh, the Queen of Connacht. Through her story we are first shown the aggressive spirit and strength of the Irish people. As Cahill relays, no barbarian tribe or nation was feared like the Irish when it came to the slave trade, and it is through this vein of interaction- the slave trade- that a young man by the name of Patricius is introduced to the realm of Unholy Ireland. Taken from his home in Romanized Briton, he is subject to several years of slavery in the most unsavory of conditions. These conditions serve as a catalyst for his spiritual enlightenment and ultimately that of the Irish peoples (38).
Included within the anthology The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction,1[1] are the works of great Irish authors written from around three hundred years ago, until as recently as the last decade. Since one might expect to find in an anthology such as this only expressions and interpretations of Irish or European places, events or peoples, some included material could be quite surprising in its contrasting content. One such inclusion comes from the novel Black Robe,2[2] by Irish-born author Brian Moore. Leaving Ireland as a young man afforded Moore a chance to see a great deal of the world and in reflection afforded him a great diversity of setting and theme in his writings. And while his Black Robe may express little of Ireland itself, it expresses much of Moore in his exploration into evolving concepts of morality, faith, righteousness and the ever-changing human heart.
Blij has clearly put this book into historical significance by mentioning the idea of geography and how it plays a role in societies all over the world. However, the five themes of culture regions, cultural diffusion, cultural interaction, cultural ecology, and cultural landscapes are all clearly defined within a specific context to a particular nation. Through reading this intriguing piece of literature I received the underlying notion that Blij firmly believes that landscapes of the world realm are not going to change. De Blij worldview of regions, diffusion, interaction, ecology, and landscapes has allowed him to simultaneously link issues together from the United States all the way to Southeast Asia.
The writer classified this group of Irish people according to their characteristics. This group was highly ferocious and exhibited an alacrity and lust of land that originated from the Northern part of Ireland. This group was comprised of individuals who were conservative Christians who loved living in their own cliché of clans. They were also very cruel and intolerant towards Indians. Because of their characteristics, they were referred to as settlers. Their characteristics ma...
Sahlins work provides in a depth-analysis of the Hawaiian culture and how it developed through past events. Sahlins was able to show how paying close attention to culture can be helpful when studying the past. With a detailed tale of Captain Cook’s importance in the Hawaiian culture, the cultural interactions with the British and how it led to dynamic changes in the Hawaiian culture.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
Being a culture under pressure from both sides of the contact zone, there needs to be passion and emotion or else the culture might disappear into history. Anzaldua’s text makes great use of passion and emotion while merging the ideas of multiple cultures together through the tough experiences in her life. Autoethnographic texts give perspective to outsiders on how a culture functions from the inside point of view. Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” excellently portrays her culture’s plight and creates a fiery passionate entrance for her culture in their uprising through the contact zone.
Nanda, S and Warms, R.L. (2011). Cultural Anthropology, Tenth Edition. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. ISBN – 13:978-0-495-81083-4.
A small archipelago off the northwest coast of Britsh Columbia is known as the “islands of the people.” This island is diverse in both land and sea environment. From the 1700’s when the first ship sailed off its coast and a captain logged about the existence, slow attentiveness was given to the island. Its abundance, in both natural resources physical environment, and its allure in the concealed Haida peoples, beckoned settlers to come to the island. Settlers would spark an era of prosperity and catastrophe for the native and environmental populations.
For Gerald of Wales, religion was one of the most essential aspects of being a civilized human being. Therefore, when he wrote, The History and Topography of Ireland, he portrayed its inhabitants as subhuman and barbaric during his apparent travels to Ireland. As a colonizer, Gerald picked a far away place in which many had not been to, in order to establish them as the “other”. Unfortunately, for Gerald, he may have ridiculed the Irish for their lifestyle conveyed in his writing, but his exploitation of them most likely was done because he could in fact relate to them. In the book, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s analysis in his chapter, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales”, closely focuses on Gerald’s cultural hybridity, which mirrors his accounts of the Irish. Although he deemed the Irish as barbaric, they were also hybrids, thus he also shared a feeling of displacement with them. Nonetheless, he still held himself to a higher degree because they did not properly celebrate Christianity, ultimately leading them to make other unpleasant decisions.
In the introduction to “The Pure Products Go Crazy,” James Clifford offers a poem by William Carlos Williams about a housekeeper of his named Elsie. This girl is of mixed blood, with a divided common ancestry, and no real collective roots to trace. Williams begins to make the observation that this is the direction that the world is moving in, as Clifford puts it—“an inevitable momentum.” Clifford believes in that, “in an interconnected world, one is always to varying degrees, ‘inauthentic.’” In making this statement, Clifford is perhaps only partially accurate. In the western hemisphere, where Williams was located, perhaps it can be said directly that the influence of modern society has attributed to the lack of general ancestry, as one culture after another has blended with the next. Perhaps it can be said as well that, as Clifford puts it, “there seem no distant places left on the planet where the presence of ‘modern’ products, media, and power cannot be felt” (Clifford, 14). The intention of this paper is to contend first that there is essentially such a thing as “pure” culture, and contrary to Clifford’s belief, that there are “pure” unblended cultures that remain (while not altogether untouched by foreign influence), natural within themselves. It will be argued as well that the influence of modern society does not necessarily lead to a loss of cultural soundness itself, but rather that a presence of certain cultural practices within the respective cultures has attributed to the lasting “purity” of certain cultures. In this case, we will be discussing the cultures that exist in Haiti and Bali.
Imagination according to Oxford English Dictionary is defined as “the mind's creativity and resourcefulness to invent images which have the tendency to form ideas which do not correspond to reality.” In “The Playboy of Western World” by John Millington Synge, the presence of imagination directs the outcome of the play. Synge uses Christy as a substitution to the existence of boredom, fear and insecurity.
This chapter explores the idea of landscape in an anthropological construct. Hirsch aims to move away from the western ideals of understanding of landscape, and deconstruct it in an attempt to understand the local interoperation of landscape to prove it is part of a cultural process. Landscape has been used as a “standard framing device” (p1) by those looking from the outside in across anthropological history. Hirsch is looking to explore the landscape through the cultural understandings of the local people. (p1-5)