New Directions in Celtic Studies

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Jessica Hemming

New Directions in Celtic Studies. Edited by Amy Hale and Philip Payton. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. x + 235 pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling] pbk, 42.50 [pounds sterling] hbk. ISBN 0-85989-587-4 (pbk), 0-85989-622-6 (hbk)

Deconstructing Celtic Studies is something of a hot topic at present. Particularly since the publication of Malcolm Chapman's The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992), there has been a flurry of activity among Celticists, anthropologists, archaeologists and other interested parties, which some have regarded as indicative of an identity crisis within Celtic Studies. In part, this has been a reaction against the discipline's traditional bias towards language and literature (especially medieval) on the one hand and Iron Age archaeology on the other. Philology is now regarded by many as rather old-fashioned, while new developments in archaeology and anthropology have cast doubt on the validity of clear-cut ethnic labels. "Celt" has now been recognised as an externally-imposed term, which until at least the eighteenth century was not used by the various peoples now so-called. In addition, old school Celtic Studies pays little attention to modern aspects of "Celticity," causing many contemporary Celts to feel simultaneously excluded from serious study and robbed of their rightful name. This has prompted some useful recent reviews of the state of the discipline and attempts to broaden its outlook. Good examples include Celticism, edited by Terence Brown (1996), and Patrick SimsWilliams's article, "Celtomania and Celtoscepticism" (Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 36, 1998).

This book attempts to do something similar, beginning with a clear, useful introduction by Amy Hale and Philip Payton, describing in more detail the issues briefly outlined above. The editors' stated aim is to demonstrate that Celtic Studies is an interdisciplinary "area studies" (p. 11), and to draw together some of the disparate work now being done on subjects which, while not part of the traditional remit of Celtic Studies, they feel properly belong within it. To this end they have collected ten essays within three thematic sections, each prefaced by a short editorial introduction. As is often the case in such volumes, the quality of the articles is a bit uneven.

"Part One: Popular Culture, Representation and Celtic `Lifestyles'," comprises four articles on highly disparate topics. Shannon Thornton's "Reading the Record Bins: The Commercial Construction of Celtic Music" and Leslie Jones's "Stone Circles and Tables Round: Representing the Early Celts in Film and Television" are both fascinating and highly entertaining studies, although the latter is at times rather flippant in tone. Both authors examine the intriguing interaction between popular imagination and media constructions. By contrast, Antone Minard's "Pre-Packaged Breton Folk Narrative" is a little disappointing. The title and the introductory paragraphs lead one to expect a rather broader text base than the study turns out to use; the article focuses almost entirely on postcards and a single web site. Some editing for infelicities of style might also have been worthwhile.

The final article in this section is Marion Bowman's "Contemporary Celtic Spirituality," which presents a compelling case for studying this phenomenon as a valid religious expression. She also raises one of the key issues which is central to the whole "what is Celtic Studies" debate: the problem of "authenticity." "Cardiac Celticity" (to borrow Bowman's useful term) may be very real to practitioners of contemporary Celtic spirituality and other people who may not speak any Celtic languages or originate from Celtic culture areas. However, given that this kind of Celtic self-identification is not "authentic" in the conventional academic sense, do we have to study it under the aegis of Celtic Studies? This is the crux of the difficulty I have with this whole book, even with regard to its best articles. Why include all this varied material within Celtic Studies?

"Part Two: The Celtic Diaspora" is perhaps the least engaging section, although it also deals with the vexed question of self-identification. Amy Hale and Shannon Thornton present a straightforward discussion of this issue in "Pagans, Pipers and Politicos: Constructing `Celtic' in a Festival Context." Much of the subject matter of their study is also of dubious "authenticity" and the article would have been more interesting if the authors had made their own views on this more explicit. Philip Payton's "Re-inventing Celtic Australia" is a little on the dry side, but is an informative presentation of identity building in the colonial and post-colonial context. Deborah Curtis's "Creative Ethnicity: One Man's Invention of Celtic Identity" is to my mind the weakest article in the book. A discussion of the author's father's creation of a Scottish identity for himself, it seems too personal and not scholarly enough for a collection of this kind.