ABSTRACT
This chapter explores in the Irish context something that has long interested anthropologists more generally, namely, the relationship between people's economic practices and their sense of who they and others are. This linking of economics and culture and society is not as common in contemporary social science as it once was, where even less is said about the relationship between economy and identity. The idea of the ‘other’ economy might also be applied to those who are excluded or exclude themselves from mainstream economic practice and paid employment, and who survive on the margins of Irish economic life. Ireland’s other economies might be seen as ‘other’ in yet a further sense. There are those who are othered by the nature of their economic practice, and who are constructed as culturally different by those who earn their living by other means. The Traveller economy also sometimes entailed the exploitation of other Travellers.
