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Description: 'A marvellous book - thoughtful, insightful and inspiring: we are greatly
in Lawrence Taylor's debt for this compelling, comprehensive, yet highly
sympathetic study.' Devotional "occasions" or experiences by Irish Catholics form the foundation of this consummate anthropological study of Irish Catholicism. Lawrence Taylor's twenty years of field work in Banagh in south-west Donegal have yielded rich ethnographic material that is illuminated by wide-ranging archival sources, vivid renderings of individual experiences, and sympathetic scrutiny of religious questions and theories. In answering questions central to the study of religion (What is it? How do official and popular religions differ? What is the relation between power and meaning, and the roles of political and religious "regimes" in the social construction of religion?), Taylor draws upon two major theoretical traditions: that of Geertz, Durkheim and Turner, and that of Marx, Foucault and Asad. Basic fears and needs propel the people of south-west Donegal - and all of us, Taylor contends - to respond creatively to strong personal religious experiences and to invent forms to express them.
'The world of Occasions of Faith is the world of Synge's The Well of the
Saints and Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa and Wonderful Tennessee, the
world that provides the central axis for Seamus Heaney's Station Island.
If for no other reason, read it for the light it sheds on those works and
others. But read it too for its own distinctive pleasures.'
'...a delight... Moving with remarkable ease from vivid descriptive accounts
of both landscape and individual action to a syncretistic mode of analysis
that accords importance to local discourse, social context and historical
process, the reader is taken on a voyage of discovery through some of the
principal dimensions of Irish Catholic religious experience. This is a
book that should be read by all those interested in the anthropological
study of religion, in the role of religion in Irish society, in
Catholicism, and in the anthropological study of Europe.'
'A work of major importance. Informed by a deep knowledge of
anthropological writings on religion and a wide-ranging and thorough
engagement with Ireland, it furnishes a compelling and perceptive
exploration of Irish Catholicism.'
THE AUTHOR Lawrence J. Taylor is Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
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