View from the Traveller Site

‘Traveller-specific’ architecture in Ireland and permanently ‘temporary’ sites in the UK embody an insoluble contradiction – as systems of control, policing and strategic neglect, and as a cultural right, an alternative to housing that recognizes the dignity of choice. View from the Traveller Site explores post-nomadism as an artefact of statecraft in which contradictory processes occur in tandem, legal insecurity persists, and state policies have unexpected consequences, as sites materialize the countervailing tendencies of post-war European states. At conjunctures of camps, courtrooms, sites and council houses, Irish Travellers generate new architectures and revive old ones. Architecture and the body form distributed fields of analogy and metaphor, and are reciprocally constituted as social capacities and sites of personhood and relations. Through ethnographic accounts of sites and camps, funerary monuments and gift cycles of mares and foals, the book reflects on material and performative architectures, negotiations of gendered and generational rights, and the role of women in encounters between the dead, the living and the unborn in camps. The author engages with debates in the anthropology of the state, property, citizenship and the family, and offers a new analysis of Travellers’ concepts of personhood and embodiment, as they negotiate the politics and poetics of citizenship, kinship and sociality, enfolding the ‘settled’ (non-Traveller) world of sites into the collective bodies of ‘breeds’ and ‘back-breeds’. This exploration of the productivity of post-nomadic architecture, culture and sociality will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropology, architecture and material and visual culture.