Abstract
Angela Doyle lives in Greyrock,1 one of the new commuter towns that developed around Dublin during the heydays of the Celtic Tiger economy. She is forty-one. She is married with three children. She is a stay-at-home mother. She grew up in the suburbs of Dublin where her parents still live in the same house. She is the second youngest of five children. She has three sisters and one brother. They were all born fairly close to one another. The eldest sister is forty-eight. Although she does not see much of them, she says they are a close-knit family.
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Notes
This concept of people being suspended in webs of meaning, which they spin afresh themselves in their daily lives, comes from Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 5.
For a description and analysis of how Irish culture is a mix of local, national, and global cultural elements, see Tom Inglis, Global Ireland: Same Difference (New York: Routledge, 2008).
As Swidler notes: “People vary greatly in how much culture they apply to their own lives. Some people draw on a wide range of cultural precepts, psychological theories, personal incident, and anecdote, while others move within narrow confines, using one or two formulas or phrases again and again.” Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 46 (emphasis in original).
For an analysis and critique of the different theories and methods used in Irish Studies, see Tom Inglis, “Are the Irish Different? Theories and Methods in Irish Studies,” The Irish Review, 46 (2013), 41–51.
There have been many anthropological studies that have provided rich thick descriptions of Irish culture during the twentieth century; see Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968 [1948]);
and Hugh Brody Inniskillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). For an overview of these and many other important anthropological studies that have described and analyzed Irish culture, and the meanings of people’s lives,
see Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan, The Anthropology of Ireland (Oxford: Berg, 2006).
For a more detailed description of these changes, see Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson, and Tony Varley, “Introduction of the Third Edition: Arensberg and Kimball and Anthropological Research in Ireland,” in Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, (Ennis [Co. Clare]: CLASP Press, 2001), v–vi.
See Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London: Profile, 2009);
Tom Inglis, Lessons in Irish Sexuality (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998);
Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Riseand Fall of the Catholic Church in Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), 129–177;
Inglis, “Origins and Legacies of Irish Prudery: Sexuality and Social Control in Modern Ireland,” Eire-Ireland, 40.3 and 4 (2005), 9–37.
The shift from external to more internalized forms of self-restraint is central to Elias’s theory of the civilizing process, but it can also be linked to Foucault’s argument that within modernity there was a shift from physical to more subtle forms of discipline and punishment. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000);
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979).
See Tom Inglis, “From Self-Denial to Self-Indulgence: The Clash of Cultures in Contemporary Ireland,” The Irish Review, 34.2 (2006), 34–43;
Inglis, “Pleasure Pursuits,” in Ireland Unbound: a Turn of the Century Chronicle, ed. M. Corcoran and M. Peillon (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2002), 25–35.
See Tom Inglis, “The Global and the Local: Mapping Changes in Irish Childhood,” Éire-Ireland, 46. 3 and 4 (2005), 63–83.
See, Pat O’Connor, Emerging Voices: Women in Contemporary Irish Society (Dublin: IPA, 1998), 81–108;
Betty Hilliard, “The Catholic Church and Married Women’s Sexuality: Habitus Change in Late 20th Century Ireland,” Irish Journal of Sociology, 12.2 (2003), 28–49;
Hilliard, “Changing Gender Roles in Intimate Relationships,” in Irish Social and Political Attitudes ed. J. Garry, N. Hardiman, and D. Payne (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 33–42; Inglis, Moral Monopoly, 178–200.
In 1971, only 8 percent of married women were in the labor force. By 2006, this had increased to 52 percent. See Betty Hilliard, “Family,” in Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map, ed. S. O’Sullivan (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), 90;
Pat O’Connor, Emerging Voices: Women in Contemporary Irish Society (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1998), 193.
Finola Kennedy, Cottage to Crèche: Family Change in Ireland (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2001), 63.
See, D. Hervieu-Léger, “Individualism, the Validation of Faith, and the Social Nature of Religion in Modernity,” in The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion, ed. R. Fenn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 161–175.
Tom Inglis, “Individualisation and Secularisation in Catholic Ireland,” in Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map, ed. S. O’Sullivan (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), 67–82.
Susie Donnelly and Tom Inglis, “The Media and the Catholic Church in Ireland: Reporting Clerical Child Sexual Abuse,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, 25.1 (2010), 1–19.
Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000);
Tom Inglis, “Catholic Identity in Contemporary Ireland: Belief and Belonging to Tradition,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, 22.2 (2007), 205–220.
Wouters defines informalization as a process in which “more and more of the dominant modes of social conduct, symbolizing institutionalized power relationships, come to be ignored and attacked, with the result that the standards of social conduct change towards greater leniency, variety and differentiation. At the same time this signifies a shift in power relationships between social superiors and subordinates in favour of the latter.” Cas Wouters, “Formalization and Informalization: Changing Tension Balances in Civilizing Processes,” Theory, Culture & Society, 3.2 (1986), 1.
See also Wouters, Informalization: Manners & Emotions since 1890 (London: Sage, 2007).
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutional Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002);
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love (Cambridge: Polity, 1995);
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 189–201. Bauman summarized it: “In a nutshell, ‘individualization’ consists in transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a ‘task.’” Zygmunt Bauman, “Individually, Together,” in Individualization, Beck and Bech-Gernsheim, xv.
Elliot and Lemert have characterized rugged individualism as necessary to survive challenges, risks, and pitfalls of contemporary life in Western society. See Anthony Elliot and Charles Lemert, The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2009), 185–196.
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).
This is an adaptation of Kluckohn and Murray’s original description of how human beings are similar, yet different. See Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray (eds.), Personality in Nature, Society and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1948), 35.
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Inglis, T. (2014). Webs of Significance. In: Meanings of Life in Contemporary Ireland. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413727_1
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