Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life

In 1971, anthropologists Sharon Bohn Gmelch (Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman; Tinkers and Travellers: Ireland's Nomads) and George Gmelch (The Irish Tinkers: The Urbanization of an Itinerant People; both anthropology, Univ. of San Francisco and Union Coll., Schenectady, NY) chose as their subjects the Irish Travellers. The couple studied, and after a time moved in with, a group of these indigenous Irish nomads who were camped on the outskirts of Dublin at a time when a national volunteer movement had begun to move Travellers to sites where they would have, for example, running water and access to schools. The book mainly covers the contrasts between what the authors found at that time and the conditions they discovered upon returning to Ireland in 2011. Chapter one details the 1971 visit, illustrating day-to-day problems in the camp—domestic and other violence, alcoholism, poverty, illiteracy—and the discrimination the anthropologists' subjects faced from the wider society. Fun times are documented, too, with the overall Traveller existence described in a mix of accessible anthropological terms and in ways resembling a standard memoir. Chapters on the meetings 40 years later, which focus on various locales throughout Ireland and on particular individuals, reveal a new life as Travellers are largely settled. Some of the same motifs emerged, and developments that could not have been imagined in 1971 were evident, too, such as the civil-rights work of Traveller activists. Throughout the book are sprinkled just enough statistics and background to give context for the lives featured; much more frequent are color photos that form a full picture of the group's culture over the decades, and that reflect the importance of photographs in Traveller life, as discussed in the text.