Arensberg and Kimball and anthropological research in Ireland

For many years Irish rural sociology came to be defined in relation to Arensberg and Kimball’s celebrated anthropological study, Family and Community in Ireland, for which fieldwork was undertaken in Clare between 1932 and 1934. It has been observed that ethnographers in Ireland post-Arensberg and Kimball were strongly inclined to take the community as their unit of analysis, focus their analysis of social life on kinship and social networks, and adopt structural functionalism as their theoretical model of local society. The essay republished here in abridged form accompanied the re-publication of Family and Community in Ireland in 2001. It critically examines the intellectual and political background to Arensberg and Kimball’s ethnographic fieldwork in rural Clare, the manner in which their research unfolded and the subsequent reception of their published work over a period of some sixty years.