Emile Durkheim and the Northern Irish violence: anthropological insights upon James Dingley’ The IRA and Durkheim and National Identity in Ireland

This paper is about a detached reading of James Dingley’s understanding of some Durkheimian paradigms and the way they have been applied to explain the ongoing Troubles in Northern Ireland. I would agree with the general argument of Dingley’s books as anthropologically sound, although representing a classical and empirical tradition that post-modernists may disagree with and, by implication, Irish Nationalists, especially Republicans. The conspicuous conventional and unconventional challenges posed by the books, both within and without the academic realm, and the controversies that have arisen in the turbulent post-conflict phase of Northern Irish politics among scholars working there have long intersected my own ethnography.