The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: A Guide for Cultural Analysis of the Irish Land War

During the past thirty years, social history has taken a so-called “cultural turn”: an analytical refocusing on the cultural dimension of social life to explain historical events and processes, collective action, political transformations, and a myriad of other social phenomena. The new cultural analysis seeks to understand the symbolic systems of meaning that underlie all facets of social action, structure, and events. Nowhere has cultural analysis been more prevalent and productive than in the study of social movements, both historical and contemporary. The “cultural turn” in social movement study began with a reanalysis of the French Revolution by such scholars as François Furet, William Sewell, Jr., Lynn Hunt, and Keith Baker.1 Since then, scholars of revolutionary, nationalist, anti-colonial, civil rights, feminist, urban, democratic, and fundamentalist—to name a few—movements have investigated the symbols, codes, discourses, narratives, and rituals of social movements. Their interrogations have led to new understandings of how the construction and transformation of meaning contributes to mobilization, ideology, solidarity, strategies, goals, collective action and outcomes of social movements. One of the most significant social movements in Irish history—the Irish Land War—has yet to be fully revisited through cultural analysis.2 The principal modern studies of the Land War engage in fairly strict structural analyses; both in the movement’s emergence and unfolding, economic and political conditions, interests, and power relations are presented as the major causal determinants.3 While new works on the cultural dimension of the Land War