Mind 10521 The history of peasant life in Ireland has yielded a number of ‘traditions’. In reality the domina-
tion of peasant families by landlords seeking to maximize rents created the Ireland that is most
often said to be ‘traditional’. This is the peasant life described in Conrad Arensberg’s Irish Coun-
tryman, then in Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball’s famous Family and Community in Ireland.
This particular peasant society, whose features made it so vulnerable to potato blight, developed
in the period between 1700 and 1850. An ancient Irish society, reaching back to Erse myths and
the ‘golden age’ of Irish ruling families, was destroyed by British invasion, beginning in the 13th
century and ending with Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland in the mid-17th century. I discuss Arens-
berg and Kimball’s sociology in Inishkillane, pp4–7.
The literature of Ireland is not to be reduced, of course, to a reflection of any single aspect of Irish
(or any other) history. Yet there is a connection between the moods of much Irish writing and the
successive transformations and disasters in the history of the country’s peasantry. This idea is
something I use throughout the text of Inishkillane, setting literature alongside sociology.
22 James Woodburn’s summary of attitudes to hunter-gatherers in southern Africa is in his essay
‘Indigenous Discrimination’. There Woodburn details a set of negative attitudes that their neigh-
bours appear to hold towards hunter-gatherers, then goes on to identify reasons for the discrimi-
nation. This includes the appearance of hunter-gatherers in the eyes of agriculturalists or
pastoralists, with a related identification of hunter-gatherers with the wild, and the apparent
absence among hunter-gatherers of institutions of authority and social control. Woodburn also
cites evaluations of hunter-gatherers that are ambiguous or even positive, identifying the extent to
which they are believed to have exotic powers; but he adds a fascinating observation about the
extent to which in Africa and many other places, ‘there is a fear that those who are weak and
impotent have mysterious supernatural powers which threaten those who exercise power. Power
holders tend to be ambivalent about their right to power, wealth and prestige and they fear that
resentment of those who lack power, wealth and prestige may mysteriously threaten their health,
well-being and prosperity.’ He adds that hunter-gatherers can, at times, use this fear to redress
some of the political imbalance between themselves and others. Other writing by James Wood-
burn that bears on these issues includes the introduction he co-authored with Alan Barnard to
Hunters and Gatherers and his essay ‘Egalitarian Societies’.
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