Malcolm Chapman:
The Celts: The Construction of a Myth
Macmillan, London, 1992

Book Review by Patrick O'Sullivan

The first punks were seen on the streets of London in the early 1970s. A few years later they had reached Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides. Clearly, a wave of punks had spread across the intervening countryside, slaughtering all who stood in the way and, breeding at an exorbitant rate, had established the virile but short-lived punkish empire. The hypothesis is supported by the archaeological evidence, for we know that it was at about this time that the peoples of the fragile and delicate Coca Cola bottle culture were eclipsed by the more technologically-advanced Coca Cola can tribe.

This fantasy is suggested by Malcolm Chapman's book, The Celts, and is one of his starting points. He puts into solid form the deep unease we now all feel as we review the fragments of comment on 'The Celts' that have survived in the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, and the ways that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these literary fragments were stitched together with whatever material was then available from other sources: what Chapman calls 'The Construction of a Myth'. It was a process that, seemingly inevitably, worked through dyadic contrasts. And there was a tendency in nineteenth-century culture to see history in terms of then current rivalries, and to categorise art in terms of the national and ethnic groups that produced it. One of the merits of the book is the way Chapman unpacks the language in which these judgements are made: words like 'wave' and the other loaded terms I use in my opening paragraph.

What has happened since (and what is really needed here is a historical sociology of academic disciplines) is that the disciplines which contributed to that nineteenth and early twentieth century 'synthesis' have withdrawn into themselves, have refined their terminologies and methodologies, and have become less and less sure about more and more. Sometimes it is not now clear into which discipline a problem might fall. Larger problems of synthesis are left to popularisers like Frank Delaney who says in his own The Celts, 'The division between the genuine, ancient Celtic peoples and their modern, diluted namesakes remains clear and can no longer be relevantly bridged'. And then, of course, he attempts to bridge it.

Chapman brings two things to this debate: his own intense irritation and the calm good sense of developments in his own discipline, social anthropology. These developments build around ways of understanding classification systems and culture-meetings. The locus classicus is of course Mary Douglas, but Chapman also makes very appropriate and timely use of Edwin Ardener. It is a pleasure to be able, at last, to welcome Ardener into discussion of`'Irish Studies'.

Chapman's is essentially a core/periphery argument. The core shapes knowledge (as the Romans shape our knowledge of 'the Celts') and will do so through a series of oppositions between Self and Other: order/disorder, human/ animal, clean/dirty, intellect/ unreason, religion/superstition, constant/inconstant. Another opposition, of course, is male/female, linking this whole structure with Renan's characterisation of 'the Celts' as 'an essentially feminine race': a quotation which becomes a chapter title in Cairns and Richards' Writing Ireland. Thus, for Chapman, there are unlikely to have been 'genuine, ancient Celtic peoples'.

What then does the word 'Celt' mean? Chapman suggests that it was a generalised term of 'mild abuse': much like the word 'punk' in my opening paragraph. Or, as Chapman says, using objectionable language to stress his point, 'those wogs in the north-west'. A strength of Chapman's argument is that it brings in material and perceptions too often left out. Like the Byzantine Empire's continuing use of the term 'keltoi', 'Celt', to mean peoples now usually categorised as 'German' or 'Italo-German'. Anna Comnena refers to the Crusaders as 'Celts'.

Linked with this oppositional structure is the tendency for fashions, of the arts and the intellect, anything and everything, to move from the core to the periphery. Romanticism then intervenes. being, in Chapman's view, simply a new fashion at the core which decides to value things now found only at the periphery. The core chooses to glamorise the periphery. Chapman notes in passing that this puts an extraordinary moral pressure on those people at the periphery who still speak a threatened language.

Irish specialists may feel that Chapman's book overlaps somewhat with Writing Ireland. Many of the arguments of the latter are here given support from another direction (Ardener rather than Said), though Chapman does not look much at Ireland. His detailed examples come from his field work in Brittany and in the Scottish Highlands. He is sceptical about the Breton 'symbole' and the Scottish 'maide-crochaidh' or 'tessera': is it not time we had a good look at the 'bata scoir'? He notes (and it is an interesting point) how the early development of 'Celticism' depended on forgery - Ossian in Scotland, the Barzaz Breiz in Britanny.

Part of Chapman's scepticism is understandable, and comes out of the patterns of intellectual discourse within universities in recent decades. Some of us have spent many tired years arguing, 'Look, it is not true that Marxism explains everything'. But now, after the collapse of European communism, we find ourselves arguing, 'Look, it is not true that Marxism explains nothing'. One of the political events Chapman touches on as indicating the inadequacy of 'oppression' theories, the Highland clearances, surely demands a class, if not necessarily a Marxist, analysis.

This may not be a specialist Irish book, but it is essential reading for Irish Studies courses, not least because of that irritation with oppressive Romanticism. It is always a great help to find a critical view presented in a clear, lively fashion: this is a book to be read and enjoyed for its rigour and gusto. There are faults. Years of thought have poured into a book written in haste and irritation. Verbal tics (if he uses 'quotidien' once more I'll scream) cloud the argument. But one of the chief merits of The Celts is that it puts the oppositional structure, English/Irish, into a far wider context and relativises it.

My chief complaint would be that there is very little in the way of real politics in this book. If I acknowledge disquiet with 'oppression history' approaches to complex events, I am not, at the same time, convinced that simply putting quotation marks around the word 'oppression' deals adequately with perceptions of oppression. The nineteenth century Irish political and cultural activists had to construct a programme and an identity out of the material to hand. (Bricolage indeed.) There was real debate about how far to accept the oppositional structures developed by Renan and Arnold, and selective readings from those activists (Hyde rather than Sigerson) have left us a problematic historiographic legacy.

Chapman does touch on that historiographic question. 'There is... a potential equality in perception - any group can perceive another in these ways: any inequality is a product of historiography (we know the story from only one side....) The view of these matters from the "Celtic" side, with the Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons or English as marginal categories, must have existed, and partial reconstruction of this might be possible; certainly, an account from the "Celtic" side would be unequivocally welcome.' (p. 210). But this unequivocal welcome is quickly withdrawn in a note (p. 291) which does much to explain Chapman's irritation: 'I do not think however that an authentic version of this would have a great deal of appeal for those who have invested their enthusiasms in the Celt as he is known today; for an account of "Celtic centrality" would, in its own terms, be entirely unglamorous - it would be prosaic, matter of fact, dull, like an account of a day at the office: banality is the price you pay for being at the centre of the reckoning.' But this is a precise summary of the Irish enterprise: to seek the ultimate banality of having a say in the governing of your country and the use of its resources.

Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

A version of this review appeared in Irish Studies Review, No. 4, Autumn 1993