Ireland
This paper will investigate the culture of Ireland by taking a look at the five characteristics. Each characteristic will be allotted its own subsections. The first section will encompass the history to illuminate the connection of a country’s struggle and their learned culture. I will communicate the key aspects that connect an individual culture to the region of the world it inhabits in the second section. In the third section, the language and art of the land are discussed to draw lines to the symbols a culture is founded upon. The fourth section of the essay is dedicated to the characteristic of culture being made up of many components. This is illustrated by the ethnicity/racial, weather, terrain, and military breakdown of the island. The final section is commentary on the dynamic characteristic that interacting cultures learn, develop, and transform due to their shared contact and friction.
Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people…Culture in its broadest sense of cultivated behavior; a totality of a person’s learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning (http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html).
Culture has five basic characteristics: It is learned, shared, based on symbols, integrated, and dynamic (http://home.eartlink.net/~youngturck/Chapter8.htm).
CULTURE IS LEARNE...
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...nguage and art to interpret a better of understanding of Ireland’s symbols. The fourth section of the essay focused on the ethnicity/racial, weather, terrain, and military elements of the country. The last section gave insight to a few of the culture’s contributions to the world.
Works Cited
Choudhury, Ifte. “Culture.” Cultural Definition. Texas A&M University. Web. 11 Jan. 2014. http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html.
Youngturck. “Characteristics of Culture.” The Characteristics of Culture. Earthlink. Web. 12 Jan. 2014. http://home.eartlink.net/~youngturck/Chapter8.htm.
“Background on the Irish Language.” Irish & the Gaeltacht. Udaras na Gaelachta. Web. 13 Jan. 2014. http://www.udara.ie/en/an-ghaeilige-an-ghaeltacht/stair-na-gaeilge/.
“Ethnicity/Race.” Ireland. Fact Monster. Web. 14 Jan. 2014. http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0107648.html.
Included within the anthology The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction,1[1] are the works of great Irish authors written from around three hundred years ago, until as recently as the last decade. Since one might expect to find in an anthology such as this only expressions and interpretations of Irish or European places, events or peoples, some included material could be quite surprising in its contrasting content. One such inclusion comes from the novel Black Robe,2[2] by Irish-born author Brian Moore. Leaving Ireland as a young man afforded Moore a chance to see a great deal of the world and in reflection afforded him a great diversity of setting and theme in his writings. And while his Black Robe may express little of Ireland itself, it expresses much of Moore in his exploration into evolving concepts of morality, faith, righteousness and the ever-changing human heart.
Dunne’s work, Tom Dunne, `The Gaelic Response to Conquest and Colonisation: the Evidence of the Poetry’ in Studia Hibernica 1980, does a good job of explaining the inherent problems in attempting to ascribe cause to the Gaelic reaction. As he aptly points out, the conquered rarely write their own history. The Gaelic, as victims of colonization had very little voice. Dunne attempts to give the Gaelic a voice by analyzing poetry from the later decadedsof the seventeenth century, through to 1729. He attempts to discuss the effects of conquest and colonization on the Gaelic population. I response to Branden Bradshaw’s argument that the Leabhar Branuch shows the development of Irish Nationalism, Dunne, rebuts this stating “ Neither the evidence of the Leabhar Branuch itself, or of gaelic poetry as a whole, in this time or later periods, allows this interpretation”.
Furthermore, while Baile Beag is a place rich in community and in culture, a sense of threat and danger undercuts this. For, you see, Friel presents us with a society that teeters on a knife-edge; a people that live in constant fear of rural collapse and the horrendous poverty which would inevitably follow. Exacerbating the relentless grip which this fear has on people's lives is the prospect of the collapse of the Irish language at the hands of the national school, and the potential cultural and linguistic erosion as the result of the remapping of Ireland by imperial forces (although it is unlikely that the people of Baile Beag were aware of this erosion until it occurred). Therefore, while Baile Beag may be a relatively intellectual community, it is in no way an idyllic Arcadia.
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
Irish American Magazine, Aug.-Sept. 2009. Web. The Web. The Web. 06 May 2014.
Within the work, Heaney anthropomorphizes both countries. He compares the geological features of Ireland to the ‘tracked and stretchmarked body’ of a woman, whose most intimate identity - here symbolised by the ‘ferny bed’ and ‘bogland’ is invaded by the phallic ‘battering ram’ of an ‘imperially Male’ invader.
Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
The contribution that Emyr Estyn Evans (E.E Evans) has made to Irish studies is not just realised in his works and academic achievements, it is also realised in the present and it will continue to be recognised in the future. As we all share in one way or another, the same proud feeling for our Irish heritage in all its forms from historical, geographically, orally and traditionally. The author will seek to discuss this in this essay; it is in large, partly attributed to the foundations laid and explorations undertaken by E. E Evans. Although a lot of Evans life and achievements were lived and realised in Ulster and Belfast his lasting legacy is felt as a whole on the island of Ireland. He believed in the nine counties of Ulster being just that rather than making aware or highlighting the divide that is North and South of the border. He once recalled how he saw the Irish heritage as a single theme with many variations (Hamlin, A, 1989).
Culture is defined as the common forms of behaviors, relations, rational concepts and moving understanding, which are learned through a course of socialization. These common forms can identify the members of a culture group while also differentiating individuals of other groups.
Anthropologists define the term culture in a variety of ways, but there are certain shared features of the definition that virtually all anthropologists agree on. Culture is a shared, socially transmitted knowledge and behavior. The key features of this definition of culture are as follows. 1) Culture is shared among the members of that particular society or group. Thus, people share a common cultural identity, meaning that they recognize themselves and their culture's traditions as distinct from other people and other traditions. 2) Culture is socially transmitted from others while growing up in a certain environment, group, or society. The transmission of cultural knowledge to the next generation by means of social learning is referred to as enculturation or socialization. 3) Culture profoundly affects the knowledge, actions, and feelings of the people in that particular society or group. This concept is often referred to as cultural knowledge that leads to behavior that is meaningful to others and adaptive to the natural and social environment of that particular culture.
McCann et al. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994, 95-109).
What is culture? Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving
Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects and behavior. It includes the ideas, value, customs and artifacts of a group of people (Schaefer, 2002). Culture is a pattern of human activities and the symbols that give these activities significance. It is what people eat, how they dress, beliefs they hold and activities they engage in. It is the totality of the way of life evolved by a people in their attempts to meet the challenges of living in their environment, which gives order and meaning to their social, political, economic, aesthetic and religious norms and modes of organization thus distinguishing people from their neighbors.
From the Folk songs passed down from father to son, to the literature and tradition, Ireland is held as one of the richest countries in terms of cultural prominence. Ireland has many distinct regional cultures, whereas most places only tend to have one or two, the lives of people living in the city vary immensely to those who live on the country side. Although wherever they may be the Irish keep a lively and upbeat folk culture. The Irish Pub is considered the main focal point of most towns. Where men and women gather to sing songs, tell folk stories or share in the occasional joke or two. While this country is portrayed in the theater as the “loud and obnoxious drunk bunch” it is one rich with culture and a history of warriors as far as the eye can see. Ireland is the place of music and bagpipes, the place where you can hear a good story and share in a laugh with a stranger you just met. A land rich with cultures, traditions and a strong sense of family and pride for