IRFL40110

This course offers a critical exploration of ethnological approaches to material culture as expressions of vernacular tradition, tracing developments from nineteenth- and twentieth-century comparative folklife scholarship to contemporary ethnological practice, with particular reference to Ireland, the North Atlantic and beyond. Beginning with foundational scholarship in Irish folklife studies, students evaluate descriptive and typological methods in dialogue with contemporary ethnographic and analytical frameworks. Objects are analysed as multisensory phenomena, including the acoustics of everyday life, the haptic qualities of craft materials, and the gustatory and olfactory dimensions of foodways, situated within domestic, productive, and ritual contexts. Vernacular agricultural practices and maritime lifeways are examined as expressions of intergenerational and communally-maintained environmental knowledge: transhumance and communal resource allotments; coastal provisioning and marine subsistence; the integration of local materials in vernacular architecture; and the adaptive strategies through which communities have negotiated relationships with land, sea, climate, and other species. Students examine how ethnological perspectives on local knowledge systems critically inform and facilitate the documentation of intangible cultural heritage and sustainable practice. The course interrogates how vernacular space and the dynamics of everyday and celebratory action mediate between individual agency and collective enactment, with attention to labour, play, and the embodied transmission of intergenerational knowledge. Attention is given to how tradition archives and folklife museums have shaped and constrained the documentation of material culture, and to the relationship between antecedents, variation and innovation in the shaping and reshaping of tradition. Students learn to reflexively engage with and apply ethnographic and archival methods in researching the materiality of everyday life.