Position Paper

(Under construction -- Hard Head Area)

This site conveys one man's opinions, and those not necessarily well-informed or well-educated by customary standards. But such standards don't necessarily apply here because there are serious conflicts between both my "tribes" (Country People and Travellers) about which almost all of the former are deaf and almost all of the latter are mute. I've had a foot in both camps for almost seven decades and having at least some of my faculties still intact, almost six years ago I set up Travellers' Rest to share my life's experience of The Irish Travellers in the USA.

The goals outlined in my original "mission statement" have been expanded considerably as I learned more and more from Travellers and non-Travellers alike over the intervening years and some ambitions of which I never dreamed nor for which I especially prepared have been urged upon me, one in particular: to write "The Story" of the Irish Travellers.

And "Story" it must be. In a number of notable Irish eras there seem to be occasional tantalizing clues to a class of artisan/merchant wanderers who then filled some socioeconomic niches that have been commonly associated with Travellers for the last 125 years or so, as the surrounding masses of rural poor that had masked them from critical attention for so long began to diminish. These clues emanate from archeological and legendary sources mostly, but some even intrude on the historical record in more recent times.

Were all these same wanderers above our ancestors? Likely so; they would be part of the lineage of most Irish people, including us. Especially us? Can they be particularly considered as Traveller ancestors over and above their estimation as cultural predecessors? Yes, I happen to think so, although I have no doubt that premise would be vigorously disputed by several social scientists of my acquaintance (for whom I have the utmost respect) and many others. And in truth, if there are far too few actual facts available to suit a history, well, there may be far too many of them yet to be encountered to suit the story I would like to tell. We will just have to see as we go along.

The following "axioms" are anything but self-evident or universally recognized. Even so, I believe that they are the product of a common sense attitude, one that reflects a hopeful desire for a rapprochement between the "hard" and "soft" factions of the social sciences, avoiding utter reliance on the purely anecdotal (the "softest") or unwarranted faith in biological determinism (the "hardest"). At this juncture these assumptions are based on my memories of articles read over the years and I have no specific footnotes to offer in support of them. If reader response warrants, I will link and/or reference any supporting or contradicting commentary and data when encountered. Every relevant response from any knowledgeable informant, pro or con, will be considered for inclusion. And that leads us to

Preliminary Observations (a.k.a. Prejudices):

• First and foremost, legends are generally a sort of collective wishful thinking, at best containing a few grains of possible truth;
  • The older the legend, the fewer but more germinal are its truths;
• Near-term history is not written by the victors, but by specialists who are ultimately assigned by the victors or their descendants (or, less directly, their instrument --the marketplace) to justify the outcome, to make it seem teleologically inevitable;
  • The earlier the historical era under study, the greater the potential for truthful perspective and comprehensive scope in evaluating the outcome of its events and just the opposite with respect to their causes;
• Archeology offers physical evidence of long-ago to not-so-long-ago events and often of their causes and consequences;
  • The older the archeological dig the more important the lessons we can learn from it and the less that information is distorted by assignment to a ratiocinative matrix of presuppositions, always bearing in mind that "primitive" and "simple" are not necessarily synonymic and "inductive reasoning" and "intellectual conceit" often are;
• Ockham's Razor cuts both ways and should be used to trim the questions more often than the answers;
  • How often it is when we do not discover what we are looking for, we believe we have found nothing, when what has actually occurred is that we have encountered something unknown;
• "Hard" scientists call "the leading edge" of research, "the bleeding edge" for good reason;
  • Though I suspect that's a mere walk in the park compared to running the gauntlet among the the power brokers of academe, bureaucracy, Irish Travellers and other ethnic minorities on the question of our origins, a very touchy proposition indeed, especially in any European context.

  Pretty arrogant, right? Right! Especially since, so far, I have had no education in nor carried out any investigation of the speech or history of the Irish peoples. Well, please bear in mind that any misgivings (above), that I might have about the utility of traditional resources in reconstructing a very non-traditional people will prove justified or not quite quickly. (I can already think of exceptions to my caveat on legends: the origin myth of the Lemba tribe of Southern Africa, and then there was also Schliemann using the world's oldest mapping software, the Iliad, to locate Troy and Mycenae).

  
  
  (To be continued)