University of Toronto Press
Sightlines: Beyond the Beyond in Ireland
Key Metrics
- Eileen Kane
- University of Toronto Press
- Paperback
- 9781487544997
- 9 X 6 X 1 inches
- 0.02 pounds
- Social Science > Anthropology - Cultural & Social
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
It is the 1960s, and Ireland is hoping to join what will later become the European Union. The government has devised a plan to protect Ireland's cultural identity and strengthen the Irish language by supporting small factories in the Gaeltacht, traditional Irish-speaking villages in remote western areas. But is the plan working? Will farmers go into the factories? Will their children see factory work as an alternative to emigration? And will a young anthropologist be able to make sense of it all in time to write her thesis?
With her signature humor and charm, Eileen Kane transports the reader to County Donegal with a detailed account of rural Irish life during this period of rapid change. Drawing on traditional anthropological methods, as well as early participatory research, she discovers the cultural gap that exists between local communities and policy makers who are only a generation or two from the countryside.
Sightlines is a story about people living beyond the margins of maps, boundaries, language groups, and government departments - people bound by borders that have little or no correspondence to their own cultural, economic, and historical margins. Ultimately, it is a story about life on the edges, and the places and people who fall outside them.
A companion website offers expanded discussions of historical events and study questions that draw connections to the state of the field today.
Author Bio
Eileen Kane is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Connecticut College, where she also directs the Program in Global Islamic Studies.
She is the author of Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Cornell, 2015), which won the Marshall Shulman Book Prize from ASEEES (2016), and received Honorable Mention for the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from ASEEES and the Heldt Prize for Best Book by a Woman in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies from AWSS (also 2016).
Kane is a specialist in modern Russian history with a particular interest in religion, migrations, and Russia-Middle East connections. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University, and her A.B. from Brown University. Between college and graduate school, she spent two years studying in Istanbul, Turkey on a Fulbright grant.
She is currently finishing up a year training in Middle East Studies at Brown University on a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. Her new book project is a synthetic history of Russia and the Middle East, told through a focus on migrations. She is grateful to the ASEEES Nominating Committee for inviting her to stand as a candidate for ASEEES Board of Directors, and would be honored to represent her colleagues in this elected position.
Source: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
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