ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what anthropologists have said about how people’s lives are regulated at the local level by the church, the state and other bodies, and about the different responses to this. Anthropologists of Ireland, and many Irish people, including those who were the subject of the study, were shocked when John Messenger published his account of Irish sex and sexuality, based on fieldwork that he and his wife had carried out on the pseudonymous isle of Inis Beag in Galway Bay in the 1950s and early 1960s. Messenger outlines how the Inis Beag islanders were generally coy and embarrassed about their bodies and their sexuality. Anthropologists have also sought to see young people ‘in the round’, situating their activities within the context of their lives more generally in order to avoid the pathologizing of young people’s behaviour that characterizes some media and even some academic debate.
