Seamus Heaney: The Poet as Ethnographer
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Anthropologist James Clifford describes ethnography as “a state of being in culture while looking at culture, a form of personal and collective self-fashioning.” Many poems of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), particularly his early ones, read like ethnographies of everyday rural life in mid-century Northern Ireland, providing firsthand knowledge of farming, crafts, the Ulster dialect, and the rituals and history of his homeland. Heaney’s work celebrates the Irish values of hard work, family loyalty, personal warmth, humor and perseverance in the face of adversity, but it also highlights the violence and complicity of his culture, particularly in relation to the sectarian strife of the Irish Troubles (1969-1998). As Heaney’s renown as a poet grew, his “halfie” identity as a native-born Irishman who was also a British intellectual with a global readership served to expand his perspective. His myth-based poems, especially those written toward the end of the Troubles, transformed his ethnographic approach into a more universal vision of humanity, while maintaining the connection to his Northern Irish rural background.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Publication date | December 31, 2023; August 2023 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Avila, Eileen |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Gigante, Denise |
Subjects
| Subject | Poetry, Modern |
|---|---|
| Subject | Ethnography |
| Subject | Northern Ireland |
| Subject | Dinnseanchas |
| Subject | Crafts |
| Subject | Irish Troubles |
| Subject | Sectarian Violence |
| Subject | Archaeology |
| Subject | Anthropology |
| Subject | Heaney, Seamus |
| Subject | Crediting Poetry |
| Subject | Classicism |
| Subject | Culture |
| Subject | Myth |
| Subject | Halfie |
| Subject | Ritual |
| Subject | Complicity |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Avila, E. (2023). Seamus Heaney: The Poet as Ethnographer. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/rp458yb6770. https://doi.org/10.25740/rp458yb6770.
Collection
Master of Liberal Arts Theses
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- Contact
- eileenmavila@icloud.com
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