Abstract
Many examples of Irish folklore reflect and instill enduring conceptions about the workings, vulnerability, and viability of community, which is understood to be a doing, a project in need of continual maintenance. Arguably, there has been no more devastating blow to the vernacular understanding of community as social contract for mutual support than the mid-nineteenth-century Famine in Ireland. If folklore provides models for contemplating and reproducing ideas about how community may be enacted, it also bears witness to the haunting consequences of abandoning community.
Community, evil eye, fairies, famines, neighborliness, space and place, reciprocity, collective memory, witchcraft, worldview
The text of this article is only available as a PDF.
Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
2020
You do not currently have access to this content.