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Paper long abstract

The Ethnographical Survey of Ireland is largely forgotten in anthropology, if remembered seen as preliminary to the main business of AC Haddon's anthropological career and a mere adjunct to the Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom. When it is discussed, typically only the work of Haddon and Browne on Aran is mentioned and, at times, such as in Castle's (2001) work Modernism and the Celtic Revival, it is repositioned in an imaginary history of anthropology. Other components of the survey undertaken by Browne are largely overlooked though at the time Browne's research was cited as exemplary ethnography.

This paper argues, on the one hand, that the Ethnographical Survey of Ireland is part of an invisible genealogy in the development of modern professional anthropology, with Browne an excluded ancestor and, on the other, that the survey was part of an Imperial Science project that ultimately failed to take root in Ireland.