Anthropology on wheels

Image via Wikipedia

a retrospective piece about fieldwork in Ireland

Carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in a rural community without a car was not something I put a huge amount of thought into, I simply imagined that it could be done and so arrived in Sligo in a van my Dad had borrowed to help me move, with my bike in the back.  The weather would be grueling at times and I would find the hilly terrain testing but perhaps out of youthful naiveté, didn’t really think much more upon.

Each day I would set out from the tiny cottage I rented and branch off the road in a different direction, and cycle as far as I could comfortably manage until my legs began to ache or hunger got the better of me. Thus I delineated the boundaries of my field site, about twenty-five square km. Enough of an area to cover by bike in a day with time to explore. This twenty-five square km also neatly fitted the geography of the Cuil Irra peninsula, just south of Sligo Bay.

Coming to Sligo as a graduate student researching a PhD in anthropology was at times disconcerting. I had known the area from childhood as the place my  brother and I went as kids on our holidays, to my Dad’s sister and her family in Rosses Point. In a way coming to Sligo was an easy option, no impenetrable language to decode, no hostile natives and for the most part nature doesn’t want to kill you (although I gave the riptides at Strandhill beach a wide margin).  In spite of this, during my first few weeks in Cuil Irra I experienced a kind of culture shock which I never imagined possible in a familiar place. I had immersed myself into a community where, in spite of my Sligo connections, I knew absolutely nobody. I had no grasp of how people really lived in this place. And so I cycled. I cycled until eventually a kindly neighbour leaned over his fence to ask ‘why?’

I discovered quickly that I had become something of a local curiosity. The one on the bike living down in xx field. What’s she doing here? I didn’t come across many other cyclists in Cuil Irra, possibly because it could shorten your life negotiating the narrow, overgrown maze of roads and speed at which the locals drive. My visibility on the landscape as a cyclist meant that I was noticed and talked about. In the end it was my neighbours curiosity about me, more so than mine about them that gave me my first inroads into the community. I was invited in for cups of tea and questioning. I was offered lifts to Tesco to do my shopping. People waved when I passed (which they never do in Dublin and I never got used to it once I moved back, alas). My bike became my most trusty research tool. My social identity in Cuil Irra was intimately bound to it.

My bike also allowed me to ‘feel my way’ into the landscape. My informants described the physical terrain but I felt it, the pull on my calf muscles as I hauled myself up the ‘brae road’ to Strandhill, or the lash of the wind catching me up by Carrowmore. They spoke of the weather and I felt that too. I surveyed field boundaries, farms, woodland, coastline. Where I couldn’t cycle I walked. I put myself physically into the land to learn it from the ground up, to make sense of their experiences of this incredible environment and its rich history and pre-history.

Would I have achieved this if I had a car? Probably, but differently. Perhaps without the immediacy that cycling afforded me…who knows?  Suffice to say that many two-wheeled adventures and a PhD thesis later I end up in the North-west of Scotland…