Taylor, Lawrence J. (1992) The languages of belief : nineteenth-century religious discourse in Southwest Donegal. In: Approaching the past : historical anthropology through Irish case studies. Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 143-175. ISBN 9780231079204 (cl)

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Abstract

This short narrative was one of hundreds of legends gathered in the 1930s and 1940s from men and women then in their seventies and eighties living in southwest Donegal. Many of the stories related individual and social dramas with religious themes and actors - saints, holy wells, and powerful priests. All such figures or places displayed power, by punishing of enemies, as in the preceding case, or by rewarding the believer with a cure. Gathered by a native-born folklorist and now stores in the National Folklore Archive, this corpus of texts constitutes and rare and potentially fertile resource for a historical ethnography of the region in the late nineteenth century.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	Language of belief; nineteenth-century; religious discourse; Southwest Donegal; ethnography of religion; anthropology Ireland;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology
Item ID:	1996
Depositing User:	Professor Lawrence J. Taylor
Date Deposited:	17 Jun 2010 14:40
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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