Speech at the National Folklore Collection’s Symposium “Believing in the Tradition Archive”
UCD, Dublin, 3rd March 2015
Ladies and Gentlemen,
A Dhaoine Córa,
Tá áthas orm, mar éarlamh ar Chnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann, labhairt libh inniu. Is mian liom mo chomhghairdeas a ghabháil le lucht eagraithe an tsiompóisiam as ucht na pearsantachtaí suimiúla ón bpobal acadúil a bhailiú le chéile chun a gcuid saothar a roinnt. Ba mhaith liom buíochas ar leith a ghabháil leis an tOllamh Ríonach Uí Ógáin, Stiúrthóir an Chnuasaigh, a bhfuil blianta fada caite aici ag cur thraidisiún bhéaloideas na hÉireann chun cinn.
It is a great pleasure to join you this afternoon, as you conclude this symposium convened by the National Folklore Collection on the role of archive in recording, conserving and disseminating folklore and tradition. I am very happy to have this occasion to acknowledge the significance of our National Folklore Collection, and to praise the great work carried out by Professor Ríonach Uí Ógáin and her team. It is for me an honour to be patron of such a wonderful cultural repository.
May I also salute our guests from Estonia, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, all countries that have very well established tradition archives. I have no doubt that all of the attendees in today’s symposium will go home having greatly benefited from the exchanges of expertise, experience and advice with other scholars in the field.
The collection of folklore in Ireland is associated with the Gaelic Revival, a movement which, at the turn of the last century, produced such notable writer-folklorists as Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge. The scientific recording of folk beliefs was institutionalised in the Irish Free State by the formation, first, of the Folklore of Ireland Society in 1926, then the Irish Folklore Institute in 1930, and finally the Irish Folklore Commission, established in 1935 under the government of Éamon De Valera.
The current National Folklore Collection, of which UCD is a custodian on behalf of the Irish people, was inherited in the 1970s from this Irish Folklore Commission. Over the decades, collectors have recorded vast amounts of data from the length and breadth of Ireland, in both Irish and English. Today the Collection contains millions of pages in manuscript form; tens of thousands of photographs; and the voices of about 100,000 contributors, including over 10,000 hours of sound recordings and 1,000 hours of video material.
The preservation, expansion and dissemination amongst the public of such a wealth of material entail great challenges, which are at once of a technical, financial and substantive kind. I know that you have examined those challenges in your discussions earlier, hence I shall content myself with offering a few remarks on why it is that the tradition archive is of such crucial importance to us as a community.
This archive performs an essential function, I would suggest, in ensuring access to our forbearers’ intensity of vision and imagination, to the diversity of their beliefs and practices, and their extraordinary inventiveness. It enables us to approach that unique combination between the particular and the universal that is characteristic of vernacular culture.
Indeed folk traditions, and vernacular forms of knowledge in general, are, on the one hand, eminently local. They are typically passed on informally within one-to-one or small group communication, through performance, initiation, or by example. The infinite variety of tunes, stories and songs recorded in the National Folklore Collection thus reflects the diversity of place and context, as well as the infinite possibilities of human imagination – the creativity of each musician, storyteller and singer within a given local pattern. All those traditions and cultural expressions that have preceded us give an essential quality of depth to our identity and belonging today.
Yet on the other hand, myths, symbols, rites of passage and festivals also have a universal, or at least, civilisational, dimension, emphasised by scholars such as Arnold Van Gennep, James Georges Frazer or Georges Dumézil. All of you here are well aware of how our ancient Irish myths and legends, our great cycles and tales of seafaring, are connected to broader European and Indo-European patterns. This, of course, is a reflection of the movement and interaction of our peoples across continents and over centuries. It also points to the fundamental commonalities that underpin our shared humanity.
As another interpreter of popular rituals, Mircea Eliade, has shown, when proffering or listening to a myth, one forgets his or her particular condition and is projected into another world, that transcends any historical situation. Without drifting into structuralist conceptions, it seems to me that any such reminder of our shared humanity is of great significance – all the more so in our times, marked by a resurgence of intolerance and exclusionary ideologies.
Another reason why the tradition archive is so important to us is because it connects us to a version of culture that evades commodification. It calls attention to a different meaning of creativity, one that is both personal and inter-generational in kind; a creativity that was often drawn from hardship, as illustrated, for example, by John Millington Synge’s depictions of life on the Aran Islands.
The tradition archive thus documents and celebrates that which, at first glance, might appear ordinary, born out of the mundane of everyday existences, but which actually belongs to the singular and the extraordinary of humanity’s cultural diversity. It invites us to extol that cultural diversity, to overcome the immediacy of a self-absorbing present in order to become aware of that which has gone before us – that to which human imagination has given so many unique expressions, and that which collective memory has made endure.
Had those individuals who commenced the archive a century ago lacked the wisdom to see the immense value in their contemporary environment, we would not enjoy, today, the collective treasure that Ireland’s National Folklore Collection is. Irish history, Irish music, Irish literature – all those spheres of achievement that are such an integral part of Ireland’s cultural life and international contribution – would not be what they are.
We now rely on the foresight and discernment of those who are currently in charge of the Collection, and who are doing such an excellent job in continuing to expand it, deciding which of our contemporary customs, music or stories should be recorded in the archive.
To me the foresight of our contemporary collectors was demonstrated, to mention but one example, by the 1979-1980 Urban Folklore Project. This project saw a team of collectors record, over a sixteen-month period, hours of audio and video material and compile a comprehensive photographic account of Dublin’s social, commercial and cultural life. The collectors saw the value in that cultural hot-pot, from which came out artists such as Roddy Doyle, U2 and Sinéad O’Connor, and we should be grateful to them for that.
Thus, far from freezing the living tradition, as some would see it, the archive makes it available to all those who are willing to draw from it and give it new life. As this particular audience knows very well – as the many historians, musicians, creative writers, media researchers and storytellers who turn to the National Folklore Collection can attest – the tradition archive remains profoundly relevant to us. It is a treasure we must cherish, and one to which we must continue to make additions. How will our times be recalled by future generations – our hubris, our responses to the recession, our attempts at doing something new, and our imagination?
May I, then, thank our host today, University College Dublin, for holding in trust the National Folklore Collection on behalf of the Irish people. As President of Ireland, I also want to express my gratitude to all the collectors, folklorists, ethnographers, linguists, toponymists, historians and archivists who have built and continue to build this wonderful collection. I am sure that all of you, in your various fields, will share Ruth Benedict’s remark about her own discipline, when she said:
“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.”
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.