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Stuart McLean
Anthropology
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Professor Stuart McLean grew up in the West Midlands of England
and began his career as an academic studying English Literature
at Oxford University. In fact, his interest in anthropology and
in Ireland was formulated, among other influences, via James Joyce,
the subject of McLean's undergraduate thesis. McLean was attracted
to Joyce's approach to nationalism and politics and his eclecticism
– his stylistics and experimentation with prose, on the one
hand, and his gritty realism, especially in descriptions of Ireland,
on the other. As McLean describes,"Joyce often claimed that
if Dublin were razed to the ground, it could be reconstructed from
the pages of his Ulysses." Despite his love for Joyce, McLean
found himself attracted to anthropology precisely because the boundaries
of the discipline seemed less defined than that of English Literature.
Because anthropology as a discipline is always questioning its own
boundaries, it allows for greater flexibility, creativity and interrogation.
For McLean, anthropology – much like James Joyce – is
eclectic, a bricolage of experimentation and realism.
For McLean's dissertation and recently published book The Event
and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, and Modernity, he continued
his interest in Ireland, where he studied one of the major events
of Irish history, the Great Famine of the 1840s. Researching multiple
narratives and accounts of the famine from the Irish Folklore Commission's
collection to present-day commemorative events, McLean approached
the various memories and histories of this event as a pivotal site
to understand the experience of modernity, the production of academic
and nationalist histories in colonial and post-independence Ireland,
and disciplinary engagements with the past.
During his time in Ireland, McLean literally treaded onto his next
research project on peat bogs! Since bogs occupy extensive areas
of Ireland's central plain and western seaboard, McLean often found
himself hiking on and through boggy surfaces. Alongside their continuing
exploitation as a fuel source and the increasing recognition from
the 19th century onward of their archaeological significance as
repositories of the prehistoric past (in the form of artifacts and
in some cases human remains preserved below their surface), bogs
have afforded an enduring focus of inquiry for the natural sciences
and a source of inspiration for writers and visual artists. More
recently, bogs have become an object of concern on the part of conservation
groups, whose efforts, supported by recent European Union environmental
legislation, have brought them into conflict with commercial peat
producers and rural residents.
It was, however, reading a 19th century traveler's account of Ireland
in the context of his famine research that propelled McLean to turn
his longstanding fascination with bogs into one of his current research
projects. In this travelogue, he came across representations of
the Irish landscape and peat bogs as colonial topographies that
needed to be reformed; these accounts, interestingly enough, mirrored
colonialist accounts of "the Irish people" as backward,
irrational, and turbulent. Bogs, as places of colonial intervention,
were linked with and collapsed into "the Irish" as part
of a civilizing project. Bogs, it occurred to McLean, confound any
clear-cut opposition between the natural and the social; they instead
symbolize the linkage between landscape and people as a continuum
of colonialization, and problematize outmoded dichotomies between
"nature" and "culture," the material and the
symbolic.
McLean considers bog landscapes as marking at once a culturally
instituted boundary and a point of contact and transmission between
human settlement and visions of an un-reclaimed "nature,"
between colonial imaginings of primitivism and modern ideologies
of economic development and between past and present (as a material
medium through which the present encounters the past in the form
of the archaeological record). McLean aims to chart ethnographically
and historically the ways in which human beings, landscapes and
material objects can be seen to traverse a continuum encompassing
the natural so-called and the social so-called.
McLean's most recent project moves beyond the analysis of localities
and nation-states to consider the emergent post-national formation
that is the European Union. The challenges posed by the EU to existing
understandings of citizenship, sovereignty and territoriality have
been a subject of debate across academic disciplines. Anthropologists
in particular have argued for the need to address these questions
through situated empirical research and have grappled with the difficulties
of adapting the techniques of ethnographic field study to entities
such as the EU that are by nature trans-local and multi-sited. "My
research offers a new perspective on these theoretical and methodological
dilemmas by focusing on the EU’s often neglected, yet highly
visible role as a cultural producer and patron." Closer attention
to this aspect is, McLean argues, crucial to understanding the EU’s
attempts to configure Europe as a distinct cultural, political and
geographical space. When the EU invokes "Europe," what
exactly is being talked about? How are physical geography, political
participation and claims regarding cultural identity and historical
memory related to one another? The question of the relationship
between Europe as cultural entity and a geographical one has come
to seem at once more urgent and more vexed following the recent
eastward expansion of the EU, as attempts to articulate an overarching
European identity are obliged to engage an ever-increasing polyphony
of languages and national, regional and local idioms of belonging,
together with the shifting physical contours and political boundaries
of the Union itself.
When asked how McLean has adjusted to life in the Twin Cities,
he remarked with enthusiasm, "I love snow!" He then added
that Ireland by contrast hardly ever has any (or enough) snow despite
James Joyce's convincing ending in Dubliners where an entire blanket
of snow covers Ireland. Minnesota, interestingly enough, also has
more peatland and bogs than any other state besides Alaska! So,
with heaps of snow as plentiful as Dubliners and millions of acres
of bog lands, moving to the Twin Cities has ironically kept McLean's
sources of inspiration – Joyce and Ireland – close at
hand.
Written by Karen Ho and Stuart McLean
Reprinted with permission from the fall 2005 edition of World
Views, a publication of the Department of Anthropology.
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