Paper short abstract:

I highlight the experience of enculturation in a Northern Irish council estate where the distinction between legitimate and non-legitimate knowledge is sharply drawn along sectarian lines. I trace how a movement between daily life and the extraordinary became increasingly imbalanced over time.

Paper long abstract:

I didn't realize I was catholic until I was five, which I experienced, rather than spiritually, as a wholly bodily assault. I was skipping along behind an Orange parade, becoming immersed in a carnivalistic event that was reperformed daily in my estate in June. In a pause between the booms of the Lambeg my best friend and neighbour announced that she pitied my religious misfortune which would result in a deep pit in a scorching hell. From that point on Orange parades assumed a demonic presence, an event around which a whole social transformation occurred yearly.

Rathboyle Park is a small protestant working class council estate. I was brought up in one of four catholic families. Irrespective of religious or ethnic affiliation, all families claimed Northern Ireland as their ancestral home. Except mine. My father is from the Republic, a perceptively foreign country that gave him a highly politicized insider/outsider status, topped only by the otherness of my German mother. I highlight the experience of enculturation in a danger-filled environment where the distinction between legitimate and non-legitimate knowledge is sharply drawn along sectarian lines. Yet, this polarization was never complete. Ties of kin and fictive kin criss-crossed historical and political truths, burst forth at particular moments in everyday life to reveal an essential humanity. I trace how this movement between structure and event became increasingly imbalanced over time. I explore the linkages between this imbalance, Thatcherite policies, and the processes involved in becoming and unbecoming a person.