Although James Dingley does not refer to it, his new book, Durkheim and National Identity in Ireland, is timely. Over the next year, with the hundredth anniversary of the 1916 rising, there will much public debate and discussion about Ireland and how it came to be the way it is. It would be helpful if these discussions were less banal and ideological and more critically reflective. We need to think about not just how the island of Ireland became divided by two types of nationalism, but also about the nature of nationalism in general. Dingley's book promotes just this sort of analysis.
Dingley argues that if we are to understand nationalism, we should begin with Émile Durkheim, a thinker who recognized that the success of the nation-state depends on its ability to transcend the competing religious and ethnic identities that bind people together. For Durkheim, nationalism has to be based on scientific thought, rationality, legal principles, and reasoned debate, which seek to enshrine individual as opposed to group rights. Respect for the reasoning individual is what makes nationalism good. The opposing tendency to base nationalism on nonnegotiable group beliefs, values, and identifications is what makes it bad. In a detailed review of Durkheim's writings on France and his sociology of religion and knowledge, including the related secondary literature, Dingley makes a good case for developing and applying a Durkheimian perspective on nationalism to Ireland.
What makes his book controversial is that Dingley argues that the nationalism that developed in the South and, later, the Republic of Ireland was Catholic (ultramontane and scholastic), mythical, magical, institutional, romantic, closed, and unscientific; whereas in the North it was Protestant, scientific, individual, and open to reason, debate, and change. These radically different cultures made the North a scientific, technological, and industrial powerhouse while the South wallowed in traditional romantic aspirations, imagining the nation as a spiritual haven full of saints and scholars who rejected the North's materialism. The explanation for this bifurcation is that the social structure of the South was based on a mechanical form of solidarity in which freedom and individuality were stifled and constrained, whereas in the North the social structure was more organic: religion had always been less influential in the North, and individuals had greater freedom to develop themselves.
My problem with Dingley's book is that, having set up a challenging argument, he then digresses into a lengthy review of the literature on nations and nationalism. While much of this secondary analysis is very competent, it tends to stand too much on its own and is not integrated sufficiently into addressing the Irish question. The same could be said even for the more substantive chapters on the revisionist historical debate in Ireland and on contrasting approaches to science and the arts in the two parts of the island: they stand too much alone. These chapters could do more to press Dingley's suggestive and controversial thesis.
The revisionist debate has been central to the way history has been done in Ireland and, consequently, to the way the Irish story has been told. For many decades after independence, there were many people who felt the need to rewrite Irish history and to capture the important role of colonization and the role the Catholic Church played in the liberation and modernization of Irish society. Given the difficulty of ever developing an objective, detached, scientific story of Ireland, there was, particularly from the 1970s, an attempt to include an Anglo-Irish, Protestant, Unionist dimension to the Irish story. Dingley synthesizes the revisionist debate very well. He does a similarly good job describing how, as part of the creation of a new, romanticized version of Irish nationalism and the promotion of the church's role in Ireland's story, the sciences became secondary to the arts in Irish education.
The debates about these discourses and how they shaped institutions and, therefore identities, are relevant, but they often relate to high rather than popular culture and, for me, the connection between the two could have been made more explicit, particularly if there had been more empirical detail. Beyond the important role of education, how did irredentist Catholic nationalism become so embedded in Southern collective consciousness? What was the role of collective memory in relation to colonial exploitation and the Famine, for instance?
Dingley is right to emphasize not just the independent role of culture in the development of the North and South in Ireland but the ways in which it was intertwined with economics and politics. Although he avoids going into the postcolonial debate, the Irish story relates to the ways in which the majority of the people in the South could never become like the Protestant English, while those in the North could never have become otherwise. And this is where popular culture becomes important. As much as the Protestant working class in the North began to develop an identity and collective consciousness through the Orange Order and all the symbolism that went with it, small farmers and the working class began to embrace all the folklore, beliefs, and practices of the Catholic Church, many of which were fundamentalist and magical.
The Catholic Irish nationalism that developed in Ireland during the nineteenth century, some traits and legacies of which can still be found today, portrayed the Protestant English as materialistic, corrupt, and “unspiritual,” while it characterized the Irish as spiritual, virtuous ascetics. Protestant English nationalism, on the other hand, portrayed the Catholic Irish as uncouth, uncivilized, magically oriented, and religiously dominated, and the English as rational, scientific, progressive modernizers. This, Dingley argues, is the origin of Ireland's two main strands of nationalism.
We all know the legacies of the symbolic cultural wars in Ireland. The peace process makes important strides each year in overcoming the divide between North and South and between Catholic and Protestant. But as evident in the persistence of denominational schooling, flags, parades, murals, and so forth, there is still a deep cultural divide between the communities. Dingley has done a good job in revealing how the cultural wars are reflected in discourses relating to nationalism, particularly in relation to education, arts, the sciences, and intellectual debates. Maybe it is the task of a Durkheimian oriented anthropologist or ethnographer to describe and analyze how these divisions are embodied and acted out by people in their everyday lives.
