The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: A Guide for Cultural Analysis of the Irish Land War

Transcription

1 The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: A Guide for Cultural Analysis of the Irish Land War Anne E. Kane New Hibernia Review, Volume 5, Number 1, Earrach/Spring 2001, pp (Review) Published by Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas DOI: For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (9 Nov :51 GMT)

2 Anne Kane The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: A Guide for Cultural Analysis of the Irish Land War During the past thirty years, social history has taken a so-called cultural turn : an analytical refocusing on the cultural dimension of social life to explain historical events and processes, collective action, political transformations, and a myriad of other social phenomena. The new cultural analysis seeks to understand the symbolic systems of meaning that underlie all facets of social action, structure, and events. Nowhere has cultural analysis been more prevalent and productive than in the study of social movements, both historical and contemporary. The cultural turn in social movement study began with a reanalysis of the French Revolution by such scholars as François Furet, William Sewell, Jr., Lynn Hunt, and Keith Baker. 1 Since then, scholars of revolutionary, nationalist, anti-colonial, civil rights, feminist, urban, democratic, and fundamentalist to name a few movements have investigated the symbols, codes, discourses, narratives, and rituals of social movements. Their interrogations have led to new understandings of how the construction and transformation of meaning contributes to mobilization, ideology, solidarity, strategies, goals, collective action and outcomes of social movements. One of the most significant social movements in Irish history the Irish Land War has yet to be fully revisited through cultural analysis. 2 The principal modern studies of the Land War engage in fairly strict structural analyses; both in the movement s emergence and unfolding, economic and political conditions, interests, and power relations are presented as the major causal determinants. 3 While new works on the cultural dimension of the Land War 1. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (1978; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); William Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2. See, however, Anne Kane, Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, , Sociological Theory 15 (1997), ; Narratives of Nationalism: Constructing Irish National Identity during the Land War, , National Identities, 2 (2000), James S. Donnelly, Jr., The Land and the People of Ireland (London, 1975); Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978); Samuel Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Donald Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from The Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge and 136

3 are surely imminent, Michael Davitt s early account of the Land War, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, sheds much light on, and indeed is a rough guide to, the role of meaning and symbolic systems in that pivotal event in Irish history. Davitt s account of the Land War can be employed by researchers using two main types of cultural analysis in social movements: frame analysis, and the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure model. The dominant cultural model in social movement research at least in the United States conceptualizes culture as a tool or resource, and meaning construction as an instrumental and rational process dominated by organizations and leaders. Many sociologists studying social movements now discuss meaning construction as framing, that is... the conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action. 4 According to David Snow and Robert Benford, who largely developed the concept in relation to social movements, a collective action frame serves two main ideological functions: it emphasizes the seriousness and injustice of a social condition, and/or redefines as unjust or immoral a social condition that may previously have been understood as unfortunate but acceptable; it provides both a diagnosis of the problem and a resolution in other words, it designates blame and suggests the appropriate action and assigns responsibility for changing the situation. 5 An analyst approaching the Land War using a framing perspective could not find a better starting place than Davitt s account in The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland. In his discussion of discourse, action, and outcomes of collective action at land meetings, eviction demonstrations, boycotting, court proceedings, and state trials, Davitt reveals both the collective action frame of the land movement, and how it was constructed by the movement leaders and activists, including himself. For example, at the first mass meeting at Irishtown, two leaders of the movement, Thomas Brennan and O Connor Power, delivered speeches that included the following excerpts: I find that several countries have from time to time been afflicted with the same land disease as that under which Ireland is now laboring and although the New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Margaret O Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994); Stephen Jones, Graziers, Land Reform, and Political Conflict in Ireland (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1995). 4. Doug McAdam, John MacCarthy and Mayer Zald, ed. Comparative Perspectives in Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p David Snow and Robert Benford, Master Frames and Cycles of Protest, in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. by Aldon Morris, Carol Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) pp

4 political doctors applied many remedies, the one that proved effectual was the tearing out, root and branch of the class that caused the disease. 6 If you ask me to state...what is the Irish land question, I say it is the restoration of the land of Ireland to the people of Ireland. And if you ask me for a solution of the land question...i shall be equally brief and explicit. Abolish landlordism and make the man who occupies and cultivates the soil the owner of the soil. (FFI ) Davitt himself delivered an infamous speech at Westport which included this passage: To confiscate the land of a subjugated but unconquered people and bestow it upon adventurers is the first act of unrighteous conquest, the preliminary step to the extermination or servitude of an opponent race. And the landlord garrison established by England in this country, centuries ago, is...alien to the moral instincts of our people. It is the bastard offspring of force and wrong. (FFI 155) At the same meeting, Charles Stewart Parnell gave his initial movement speech, and contributed a major frame concept and movement slogan: You must show them that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourself to be dispossessed as your fathers were dispossessed in You must not allow your smallholdings to be consolidated. You must help yourselves (FFI 154). Together, these speeches, and hundreds similar to them, articulate the symbolic frame for mobilizing and organizing collective action in the Land War. First, the activists specify the conditions that are immoral, unjust, and no longer tolerable to the Irish people: the exorbitant rents tenant farmers are forced to pay for land stolen from Ireland, the resulting poverty, and the exile of the Irish. Second, the agents of injustice and oppression are named: British domination of Ireland and the landlord system. The prescription is to abolish landlordism, establish peasant proprietary, and go on to achieve independence from Britain. These goals will be achieved through the unified action of the Irish people, especially tenant farmers, in resisting the will of landlordism and struggling for their right to the land and the country. An alternative approach (employed widely by historical sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists) to analyzing the role of culture in social movements places explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure or, more specifically, on the mutual transformation of social 6. Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or The Story of the Land League Revolution (London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904), p. 148; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (FFI 148). 138

5 structure, social action and cultural systems in historical transformations. Recent exemplars of this approach include Christopher Ansell s analysis of how an organizing symbol, the strike, that emerged through discursive interaction between competing unions contributed to the realignment of the French working class in the late nineteenth century; Mabel Berezin s investigation into the creation of Italian Fascist identity through public spectacle in piazzas, the symbolic core of Italian community; and William Sewell, Jr. s exposition of how the symbolic interpretation of an event the taking of the Bastille led to the creation of a new symbolic concept revolution and a new meaning of political sovereignty. 7 These works, along with many others, recognize that the foundation underlying the reciprocity of social action, social structuring, and the reproduction and transformation of cultural systems, is meaning construction the process of using cultural models to make sense of experience. Whether mundane or extraordinary, experience is the encountering of specific structural conditions (both material and non-material) and events (ranging from the behavior of other actors, to the fall of the stock market, to a change in political regimes). How individuals and collectivities respond, and the specific action they take, depends on how they interpret conditions and events using symbolic systems of understanding, or cultural models, which themselves are subjected to interpretation when they are used. Meaning construction is thus at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. 8 Elsewhere, I have demonstrated how meaning was constructed during the Land War, as people made sense of both structural conditions and events through a continually reconfigured symbolic system. Davitt himself, of course, does not engage in such analysis; but his account can serve as a guide for understanding the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in the unfolding and outcomes of the Land War. Take for example this passage, which discusses the consequences of the House of Lords voting down the Compensation for Distress Bill during the summer of 1880: The failure to obtain redress from Westminster intensified discontent in Ireland. The league fanned this feeling everywhere by its meetings, resolutions, and defiant policy....evictions multiplied, but so did scenes of resistance. 7. Christopher K. Ansell, Symbolic Networks: The Realignment of the French Working Class, , American Journal of Sociology, 103 (1997), ; Mabel Berezin, The Making of the Fascist Self (Ithaca, 1997); William Sewell, Jr., Historical Events as Structural Transformations: Inventing the Revolution at the Bastille, Theory and Society 26, (1996), See Anne Kane, Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice, History and Theory, 39 (2000),

6 Persons were prosecuted for obstructing the law, but evicted families were supported, while those proceeded against for opposing process-servers were defended by the league...in this manner the struggle went on relentlessly on both sides... nothing could have been more promising for the ultimate aim of the national organization than the fighting spirit shown by those who had hitherto allowed themselves to be cowed into tame submission by a landlord s process of eviction or a magistrate s sentence of a month s imprisonment. (FFI ) While Davitt s account does not include an analysis of meaning construction and cultural transformation, it does point to how structural conditions (the power of the House of Lords, the ability of landlords to evict), events (the Compensation Bill failing passage, evictions, process-serving, defense of tenant farmers by the league) and cultural practices (especially mass meetings where speeches, resolutions, and discourse articulated symbolic understandings) led to symbolic reconstruction and collective action. It could only be through a transformation of understanding that those who had hitherto allowed themselves to be cowed into tame submission could now show a fighting spirit and resist eviction. To analyze fully this reconstruction of meaning, one would need to investigate the sites of cultural transformation during the Land War that Davitt recalled. Through the rhetoric, narratives, and discourse in arenas of social contention and symbolic construction mass meetings, resistance demonstrations, boycotts, and court proceedings we can chart the construction and reconstruction of meaning throughout the Land War. At the same time, we can trace how each version of cultural transformation recursively mediated further collective action, events, and structural transformations. Finally, at new sites of social interaction, contention, and symbolic construction we can connect recent collective action, events, and structural transformations to further cultural changes. Since its publication in 1904, Michael Davitt s The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland has been seminal to the study of the Irish social movement known as the Land War. Unlike many accounts of historical events written by participants, Davitt s work is sufficiently multidimensional to allow numerous generations of scholars to mine it for new insight using current models of analysis. This essay has examined The Fall of Feudalism of Ireland in light of the recent cultural turn in social history. Though The Fall of Feudalism of Ireland does not provide a systematic cultural perspective on its own, Davitt moves between analysis of collective action, contingent events, and social structures (the economic, political and cultural systems) to indicate changes in collective understanding and symbolic representation in other words, meaning. Thus, 140

7 for social historians pursuing a recursive model of cultural analysis, The Fall of Feudalism provides a map through the Land War. For cultural analysts employing a framing approach, the speech passages quoted above represent the collective action frames of the land movement. Revisiting The Fall of Feudalism for guidance in employing new analytical perspectives demonstrates that Davitt s work will remain central to the study of the Land War for generations to come. UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN 141