Passing the Time in Ballymenone:

...The people of Ballymenone watched Glassie construct his description of themselves, and his work has almost certainly figured prominently in the talk of recent ceilis...

...There is not space here to offer a fair sample of Hugh Nolan's three-and-a-half-page story about the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, but it is a masterpiece of narrative connecting our own time with the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland while describing a fearfully recent catastrophe to explain a rabidly politicized present...

...In front of it too stood a compact, handsome man in a black suit holding a rosary in both hands before his breast...

...This scholarship is almost holy...

...Whatever else may be said of Henry Glassie's exhaustive and enigmatic account of the goings on in a five-mile swath of rural Fermanagh, seven miles north of the border which divides Ireland, it is so reverent in its conception and approach, so sensitive to the situations of its characters, and so thorough in its depiction of their complexity and mystery, one assumes it could not be the work of an unkind man practicing an ominous craft...

...That's admirable method...

...He chose Bal-lymenone, "a small place of green hills, white homes and brown bog" because, he says, "it pleased me...

...Light smoke played from its roof, and I forced myself through the first opening in the hedge, re-closing it with a dead branch, slipped up a wet field, scattering its cows, fumbled along the next hedge, scratched through, stumbled into a drain, mucked my way up another field, skirting its bull, tore through more thorn, and stood finally atop the hill in front of the house...

...And then there was no foreign stuff comin in, do you see...

...And if it's beneficial in any way orrespect-that's great...

...Could the requisite dehumanization of these people have begun in the act of scholarship...

...On Sunday nights, when the pubs on their side of the border are closed, they go South to Swanlinbar, or "Swad," to drink and sing...

...On other nights, they gather together in their kitchens at "ceilis" and talk...

...the layout of their lands...

...Entertainment's the greatest thing...

...Why this is true of sex is anybody's guess...

...Violence is never far away from where we are...

...Years later, when, as Glassie writes "we had ceased mistaking each other for representatives of different nationalities," Peter Flanagan, the man with the rosary, would admit that Glassie had frightened them...

...He was unhurried (and his study required seven years), assuming that encounters with one person at a time would eventually yield a vision of communal structure...

...The cause of the Famine was: the failure of the potato crop...

...It is true of anthropology, probably, because folks quickly recognize in other folks something common and sacred...

...even before anything has happened...

...When the mouth's open, you must give it a wee consideration what you're sayin...

...Ballymenone is not really a town or a village, and when Glassie arrived there in 1972, he stood on a lane surrounded by a physical landscape which offered little or no tangible evidence of human community...

...Flanagan says, "that's the thing...

...The Famine, to Nolan's listeners becomes a familiar and urgent thing, a way, at least, to understand the violence which, in Northern Ireland, is never far enough away...

...But it should disquiet our own community, which is as precarious as any in Fermanagh...

...Flanagan's fiddle music and to have a few drinks...

...They made awkward small talk and agreed to meet again in a few days to record some of Mr...

...The tongue," says Peter Flanagan, "is the worst instrument attached to the human being...

...In Ballymenone they know how words can become murder, but they also need them to rise above the fear and necessity and blood and dung of their lives...

...During the day in Ballymenone they (about 130 people) pass the time at work, getting hay and peat, and growing potatoes, onions, rhubarb, garlic, broad-beans, turnips, beetroot, carrots, and cabbage...

...Everything in "the District" or "the locality," as Ballymenone's people call their part of the world, is described and even catalogued here: 42 households, 33 Catholic and 9 Protestant, four out of ten managed by unmarried people...

...In this way, Glassie rediscovers a remarkable community in which the oral tradition is as indispensable to survival as the hay it saves and the turf it clamps...

...The book's nearly thousand pages are liberally sprinkled with beautiful photographs of people, dwellings, and artifacts, and Glassie's descriptions are ample and precise without being clinical and dead...

...The Dominican nuns who taught me in grade school used to call this thing "the soul...

...He set out "to create an ethnography strong enough to cause disquiet in my own world, but gentle enough to cause no discomfort among the people I wrote about...

...the way they decorate their kitchens...

...Francis does, "a mob of kings...

...Nolan, a prominent local storyteller, apologizes in mid-course without breaking the spell: So now, if you were talkin to a more intelligent person than me, people that had read more, they could tell ye more about it, but that's a rough outline of it...

...They need them for the high art of "entertainment...

...We could use disquiet like that.e disquiet like that...

...Folks know that they can systematically study intramolecular vibrational redistribution, Alexandrian Christology, febronianism and bat feces, but to study other folks is at least to imply that the soul is appropriately introduced into an ordinary scale of values...

...Having gone through one fine chapter entitled "Home," I've found it impossible to take our northern Indiana kitchen for granted any longer...

...But the book's greatest value and the most honorable aspect of Glassie's scholarship is the reproduction of Ballymenone's talk...

...the way they thatch their roofs...

...the positioning of their houses...

...It's the most destructful of the soul...

...But a scientific enterprise in which compassion and accuracy so complement each other is as unsettling a thing as a liturgical event should be, because it invites us to consider humanity the way Chesterton's St...

...He said I looked tired and invited me in, quietly introducing himself and the small man who sat in a big chair by the fire...

...And then: death and misery...

...Before the Gypsies were added to the Holocaust, they were protected by a Reich Department of Historical Monuments, which wanted to study their race and culture as medieval curios...

...Glassie wanted to observe people ' 'as they are: free and stuck in the world.'' He wanted to see people thus situated surviving "despite boredom and terror," and so chose Northern Ireland...

...Michael Qarvey SEAN O'FAOLAIN, having studied his people and himself, concluded that "we will have to agree that too many strains and influences have been woven into the tapestry of the Irish mind for anybody to disentangle them all...

...the implements with which the inhabitants farm...

...Whenever folks generalize about folks, a telltale apology like O'Faolain's can be found conveniently close |o the scene of the generalizing...

...They were two old brothers, he said, who lived on their lone...

...Anthropology, like sex, is one of those inevitable, necessary, and engaging things about which we feel (and know we should feel) guilty from the outset...

...His assumption proved correct, and in his description of his first experiment, there is enough poetry and magic to pack a couple of generations worth of social science graduate schools:To my left , a low ridge ascended Above it poked the gable of a house...

...In his generosity, Glassie has presented a people too noble and durable for us to imagine how a mere scholarly book could discomfort them...

...The stories of Ballymenone serve many other purposes as well, of course, but they always involve a sort of illumination, an assertion that darkness will not, after all, engulf those who sit around the hearth to warm themselves, to listen and to speak...