Traditional Irish prayer quoted in Remembering Peasants:
With the powers that were granted to Patrick I bank this fire.
May the angels keep it in, no enemy scatter it.
May God be the roof of our house.
For all within
And all without,
Christ’s sword on the door
Till tomorrow’s light.
Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: [In Irish houses of the old style] it is bad manners to knock and for the host to keep you waiting at the door. You go into the house to the fire, the fire the centre of the hearth, the hearth the centre of the kitchen, the kitchen of the house, the house of the farm (‘the home place’), and so onwards goes what Glassie calls a culture of centres, one around which cyclical time revolves.
Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: The dwelling is also a constitutive part of the relationship between past and present generations, between the living and the dead. Something handed on, or hoped to be handed on, something to be received. When the dead have a foundational role in human life, as is the case with peasants, then the house takes on a cosmological significance. But the house remains eminently material at the same time.
Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: The means of survival is land. Peasants do not see land like we do. We see land in terms of ‘nature’ , something separated from the artificiality of humankind’s creations, or, if these creations are included, then the natural, the supernatural and the unnatural are distinguished one from another. ‘Nature' does not convey peasant reality, though we like to think it does. It is for peasants a semantically empty category, and there is little iconic or verbal representation of it in what records peasants have left (although educated peasants writing for an audience of non-peasants do embrace the idea sometimes).
Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: We do not easily remember peasants. The realities of their lives are a dim presence in the historical record. We catch only glimpses in the great obscurity that is the centuries-old peasant past of Europe. The first is from the Poland of a century ago: Every field knows its owner, the Earth is indignant at every crime committed on its face. The moon watches and prayers are still said to it.
Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: The free play of patriarchy within the household is arguably conditioned by the free play of patriarchy outside it. At the extreme, this involves a kind of untrammelled and predatory male collective violence - essentially the Viking problem of a heroic-styled warrior culture or of what’s sometimes termed ‘masterless men’. Many societies have recognized the dangers of this and sought ways to counter it.
Happen Films is a great New Zealand documentary film company. Their latest is “The New Peasants,” which follows a family living mostly outside the money economy. Worth watching. The opening of the film, where they imagine their peasant ancestors, is something I’ve been thinking about lately.
I’ve moved my ancestor shrine back downstairs where it can be in a more actively used part of the house. Left to right: A bell used by my maternal grandfather to start Sunday School, which he oversaw for 30+ years. Picture of my dad holding a fish, standing next to the 1977 GMC Caballero which passed from my uncle to my grandfather to my dad to me, until I decided it was a bit too cumbersome for an heirloom and sold it.
Rachel and I are too cheap to be collectors. One exception to this general rule is that we have amassed a collection of statues, typically of the gods. Gives the place a certain air, you understand. Lets visitors know what we’re about. Recently I started looking for a sort of farmerish, gnomish figure to put on our mantle. Silly gnome statues are plentiful but we didn’t want any part of that mess.