The remote Irish countryside of my childhood was like a scene from the famous Arnsberg and Kimball anthropological research. It was at one and the same time both deceptively authentic and perilously misleading. These two Americans studied family and community life in County Clare in the early 1930s. Like a lot of academic research, they got some things right- and probably quite a few things wrong. Theirs was an effort to solve some of the puzzles about Irish rural life. The landscape and its populace were notoriously difficult to interpret. It was not Samoa but, in some ways, it was no less exotic, if your field-reference was only a dusty Gaelic encyclopaedia. However, for many years Irish rural sociology came to be defined in relation to Arnsberg and Kimball’s (maybe overly celebrated) anthropological study.
Their Family and Community in Ireland, for which fieldwork was undertaken in Clare between 1932 and 1934 is still regarded as a landmark, if for no other reason in that it was the only one done at the time. It is thus, a snapshot of history. It has been observed that ethnographers in Ireland (post-Arnsberg and Kimball) were strongly inclined to take the community as their unit of analysis. They focused social life on kinship and social networks and adopted a distinct structural functionalism as their theoretical model of local society. With the increasing use of methodological rigor, new scholars began to see flaws in what their predecessors thought they had observed.
Alongside the useful anthropological evidence they had captured, their methodological assumptions (sometimes) looked startlingly naive. The scholars were (rather) obsessed with scientifically explaining certain phenomena like the conferring of nicknames or local sobriquets. Misled by the villagers, they had come to believe this was via some ritualistic ceremony. This was one of the obvious things the Harvard researchers with their ancient university bow ties, got so badly wrong. Bamboozled by local jokers, Arnsberg and Kimball claimed they had come up with a fail-safe formula for determining the origin of Irish nicknames.
Harvard is one of the world’s finest universities and the elitism of Cambridge, Massachusetts is the jewel of the Irish American city of Boston. Harvard may be impressive, but it does not always fully understand Ireland. Moreover, armchair-Gaeilgeoir (or Irish linguists whose field is decidedly bookish or scholarly, rather than genuinely muddy) often misunderstand Gaelic countryfolk. They knew the books but not the good humour of the people. They had absorbed the lofty annals of the likes of the CW Dunn Collection, the Houghton Library and the FN Robinson Celtic Archive. But they did not much understand the subtleties and hidden complexities of rural life.
For the uninitiated reader, in parishes like mine you might find most people had only a handful of family names (let us say Lynch, McCloskey, Conway and O’Kane – all famous Irish names) with perhaps a small smattering of even more venerated but less common signatures (like Bradley, O’Neill and Duffy.) I really mean you had 1000s of people with only about a dozen family names shared between them. It was a recipe for confusion and had to be managed by some form of improvisation for these forenames that were so much alike.
Now to allow normal day to life to happen without confusion, local folks had designed nicknames or pet names for each of these separate blood families which arose casually out of needing to differentiate family from family. Most “fellow-named” villagers were not blood relatives to the best of their knowledge. We were a handful of families of the same name, but few with any blood connection that they would admit to. Now the lofty Arnsberg and Kimball with their typewriters and notebooks thought they had found an explanation. They created a kind of pie chart or periodic table of the Irish surname elements as a way of determining where these nicknames came from. It was mostly, misunderstanding. There was no such complex “village naming ceremony” as you might imagine Native-Americans or Canadians might have. Let us dream up an ancient Irish chief in a ceremony announcing, “I name you Long Feather- as your family is tall”. Despite all the cleverest PhDs in the world, these nicknames arose truly by chance and based on common experience.
A family got known as the “Fine Days” because of the courtesy of one of their ancestors in greeting people. Then we had “The Butchers” whose relatives had once slaughtered meat for the village; “The Tricks” whose relatives were known for their trickery; “The Black Bushes” named because of a great grandfather who drank heavily; “The Threshers” (owners of the first mechanical harvester) and of course “The Spuds” (the biggest potato-producing family in the parish).
If truth was to be told, and truth was oftentimes scarce when alcoholic beverages were freely flowing, Cuchulain had no role in creating these noms de guerres. There was no elaborate sacramental conferment of local monikers. People just made them up as they went about their daily business. They needed to distinguish Conway from Conway and Lynch from Lynch, and they did so with a large portion of happenchance.
They plucked the most recognizable thing about each clan and with serendipity this nickname became the accustomed way of separating family-name from family-name. Even some of these eke-names changed in response to local events and with the passage of time. For example, the arrival home of a returning relative from the USA meant a vast clan was promptly re-named “The Yanks.” It was a work of spontaneity and cunning local knowledge, not of ritualistic appellation. It was easy for outsiders like the brilliant Harvard duo to misunderstand it, particularly when they were being wittingly misled by humourful inhabitants.
– Martin Duffy
Martin Duffy is a student on the MFA in Creative Writing. This piece is inspired by his earliest childhood memories which are a frequent source of stimulus in all his creative writing, which spans non-fiction and autofiction prose. He has worked extensively with the Irish Folklore Commission and the Sound Archives of National Museums, Northern Ireland. He particularly specializes in succinct vignettes of conflict memoir and the Irish short-story form. Some of his recordings are digitalized as part of the British Library’s “Save our Sounds” Collections.