Material Identities: Fixing Ethnicity in the Irish Borderlands

This article explores the problem of fixing ethnicity in a politically violent national context, among a population generally overlooked in the anthropological literature, Northern Ireland's border Protestants. Focusing on narratives of violence and intimidation, it shows how Protestants articulate their identity through a reading of the Irish border landscape that stresses the atrocities carried out there over the last thirty years or so. Place is central to their atrocity narratives and knowledge of the violence associated with specific sites—a particular field, farm building, or country lane—both constitutes and reflects their sense of themselves in the escalating cultural war precipitated by wider political transformation in Northern Ireland since the late 1990s. The emphasis on the materiality of landscape and place, this article argues, is crucial both to the credibility of Protestant claims for social justice, as well as a central element in the passage from personal to public memory.