ABSTRACT
According to Yi-Fu Tuan, place is undifferentiated space that has been made meaningful through ‘the steady accretion of sentiment over the years’. As Jack Santino notes in his Signs of War and Peace, one thing that sets Northern Ireland apart is a preponderance of visual displays and public performances of collective identities. In places where Catholics and Protestants are more interdependent as neighbours, the argument goes, local identity and affiliations matter more than sectarian ones. This argument applies to certain but not all periods and rural locations in Northern Ireland. Moreover, paying attention to how oral tradition contextualises the visual scene points to significant differences between urban and rural ways of imagining and internalising the Irish nationalist cause. Both urban and rural nationalists are mindful of and animated by past subjugation and resistance.
