AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST WORLD ANTHROPOLOGY Article Honored Ancestors, Difficult Legacies: The Stability, Decline, and Re-Emergence of Anthropologies in and of Ireland Keith M. Egan Institute for Lifecourse and Society, National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway, Ireland Fiona E. Murphy Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, Queens University Belfast, Ireland We repeat, one of the essential values of anthropology, as a social scientific and humanistic enterprise, is that it provides a view of how people actually live . . . to both chronicle and understand their lives, ethnographers of Ireland should shake off the fetters of their anthropological tradition and training, and immerse themselves in the actualities of an Ireland entering the twenty-first century. –Chris Curtin and colleagues, Irish Urban Cultures [1993:13] As an Irish anthropologist I occasionally feel the presence of an- cestors such as Haddon and Browne or Scheper-Hughes. Today, their expeditions seem weird—the craniometers and Rorschach tests are gone but “unethical” remains like a tattoo. –Mark Maguire, “From the Door of My Tent I Could See Latour: Remarks on Anthropology, Universities and Jobs” [2013:24] H ow is one to define a contemporary anthropology of Ireland? Can one begin with current work or is it nec- essary to move further back in time to the anthropological ancestors of a putative “Irish” tradition of anthropology? To give an example, in an otherwise staid functionalist account of kinship and inheritance patterns on Tory Island in the North of Ireland, Robin Fox (1978:160) writes offhandedly that “immediate orgasm is the goal and boast of sophisti- cates.” Any reader might be taken aback at such an egregious “ethnographic” claim today. This brief segue into the prag- matics of sexual practices on an island off the Irish coast is not, however, an aberration in the anthropological literature on Ireland. Rather, anthropologists have perennially arrived on Irish shores with the aim of accounting for the ethnic Irish, circumscribing what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) calls a “savage slot” for Ireland in anthropology and, in doing so, creating “zones of cultural invisibility” (Rosaldo 1988:78). Such recurrent lapses in the ethnographic imagination and the texts produced in and against this exoticizing tradition are our chief concerns here. In this article, we are concerned with an anthropology of Ireland long encumbered by a history of exoticization American Anthropologist, Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1–9, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C  2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12174 and misrepresentation. We offer a thoughtful unpacking of how the anthropology of Ireland has developed through an examination of several important book-length texts, based in the political-geographic jurisdiction of Southern Ireland. 1 Taking our starting point in a brief overview of the history of early anthropological work on Ireland, we show how ethnographic representations of Ireland and the Irish reflect the shortcomings of early anthropological theory and method. We also sketch the tropes that our anthropological ancestors deployed—representations of an edge people; a stable, homogenous national community; a society marked by repressed sexuality; and a pathological nation—that have issued forth from a short list of notable work on Ireland. These representations were of stereotypical, “stage” Irish that relied on narrow readings of an evolving national question in Ireland since at least the 18th century (see Moore 2011). They formed a series of procrustean refractions of southern, religious, rural, anomic–idyllic, ethnic Irish iden- tities. In the reproduction of this homogenizing narrative in anthropological accounts, however, controversy followed, marking out for a long time a particular public understanding of what anthropologists in Ireland were doing. Anthropology has historically cast the Irish in multiple, often-contrasting forms, from the Irish noble savage to a truly unlikeable, if not outright dystopian, brute. This was an anthropology shrouded in a series of claims to science and ob- jectivity, thereby standing incommensurate with contempo- rary anthropological practice. Race science of differing hues has historically delineated how a people located in the “savage slot” is ultimately doomed in its assumed defectiveness as “a cheap and common political animal” (Strathern 2001:35), as William Petty characterized the inhabitants of 17th-century Ireland. 2 Such a “structure of feeling” (Williams 1979:156) has pervaded much thinking and writing on Ireland and is thus evidenced in numerous anthropological texts. Our opening epigraphs highlight enduring discomfort with these structures of feeling. The call from Chris Curtin and col- leagues (1993) for a more scientific record of the Irish peo- ple is overshadowed by Mark Maguire’s wistful recollection of the specters of still-honored anthropological ancestors with their craniometers and Thematic Apperception Tests. A generalized image of a dying inferior culture in the wake