THE POLITICAL-GEOGRAPHY OF ANTI-TRAVELER RACISM IN IRELAND - THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLOSURE

This paper places anti-Traveller and anti-Gypsy racism within a wider discourse on progress and development. It suggests that the racial pej orativization of Travellers and Gypsies in Europe was greatly accentua ted by the growth of nationalism and emergence of Social Darwinism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This caused Travellers and Gypsies to be treated as social anachronisms in an increasingly saniti zed and 'sealed' society. This paper focuses on the Irish Travellers, or 'tinkers', and looks at their changing relationships with national society from the colonial period to the present day. It suggests that the modernization and industrialization of Irish society in recent dec ades caused Travellers to be placed at the 'hostile' end of the tradit ion-modernity continuum. More recently still, it is argued, new strate gies of social closure have emerged which are pushing Travellers to th e urban fringes of Irish society. Thus quasi-biological constructs of community as 'kith and kin' here are not unlike the 'blood and soil' n ationalism of mainland Europe, and these are aggravating anti-Travelle r racism. This means that communities in Ireland, as elsewhere in Euro pe, are increasingly perceived as contested terrains inhabited by 'ins iders' and defended from 'outsiders', including, not least, nomadic 'o utsiders'. This genre of racism not only creates Manichean constructs of landscapes as inhabited by 'safe insiders' to be defended from 'cri minal outsiders'. Here, as in Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Rom ania, it constructs Travellers as the opposite to 'settled folk' and i nsists on a radical policing of the borders between safe 'insiders' an d troublesome 'outsiders'. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights r eserved.