ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores how Ireland has been constructed in anthropological writing and professional practice. It describes how anthropologists have contributed in their own distinctive ways to ‘Writing Ireland’, where writing about Ireland is about inventing Ireland in a manner that distinguishes the Ireland of anthropology from those Irelands constructed by other academic disciplines, and from those invented and reproduced in political institutions and other social bodies. The book focuses on the continuing importance of comparison and the exploration of diversity and difference, which remain at the heart of anthropology. It describes that Ireland had been one of the first sites for the ethnographic study of a modern nation, in field studies conducted in County Clare in the 1930s which helped to redirect the course of world anthropology to the study of rural communities in the developed Western and Northern hemispheres.
