After the ceasefire

In this chapter the Labour government’s focus turned to long-term plans for constitutional and security policy. The period up to March 1976 marked a phase in which the great uncertainties that had dominated since the collapse of Sunningdale were replaced with clearer plans for the future. Some Labour ministers sought to discuss radical changes to Northern Ireland’s relationship with Great Britain. Rees was dismissive and, after the Convention concluded, these debates ended with the affirmation of indefinite direct rule. Sectarian violence led Wilson to announce the deployment of the Special Air Service (SAS) to County Armagh but longer-term plans were also made more publicly clear. Rees’s commitment to what became known as criminalisation was announced with the ending of detention without trial, a declaration that special category status for prisoners would be phased out and an emphasis on operating through the court system.

Seeing/Being Orange: Perceptions and the Politics of Religion in County Armagh, Northern Ireland

We each of us focus on our own perceptions (anthropologists included) and often remain ignorant of the affect inherent in others’ perceptions. In Northern Ireland, perceptions are often shaped by shared memories and histories of violence, as well as by shared concepts of ancestry and homeland—but these perceptions are shaped on either side of the bicommunal divide between the two majority communities, Catholic-Irish-Nationalists and Protestant-British-Unionists. In this article, I draw on my early experiences collecting data in County Armagh at the Orange Order’s July Twelfth parades to analyze the interplay between such perceptions of politics and religion. Framing my preliminary data through Veena Das’s (2007) study of how violence influences daily life and Anthony Smith’s (2009) arguments on the role of ethno-symbolism in nationalism, I reveal how the continued every-day divide between Northern Ireland’s two largest communities shapes not only how members of the Protestant community who support the Orange Order “be” in everyday life and during the rituals of the Twelfth, but also how others “see” them. For while being is ordinary-- whether cultural and/or religious-- seeing is risky, controversial, and threatening. Through this distinction, we understand that the political possibilities of violence are still a part of everyday religious life in Northern Ireland.

Robert Hart and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service

In September 2003, academics from China, Europe and the USA gathered at Queen's University Belfast. They came first to attend an exhibition and then to present and discuss papers on the career in China of Robert Hart. Largely forgotten in Britain and even Northern Ireland, although not in the academic field of Chinese Studies, Robert Hart was born in County Armagh and studied at Queen's before travelling to Hong Kong in 1854 as a young recruit to the British Consular Service for China and Japan. He soon found himself despatched to the British consulate at Ningbo to study consular procedures and learn Chinese with the aid of a Chinese tutor and one of the Confucian classics, the Mencius. At this time, much of south China was engulfed by the Taiping Rebellion, which was inspired by Christianity.