HUGH BRODY is the author of Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland. Published by Penguin, London, in 1974, the book received a fanfare rarely given to anthropological texts. Much of the reason for this was the author's standing among the intelligensia of the new Ireland that was encroaching on a culture that had seen better days, and his publisher's clever manipulation of the media (which also desired a new Ireland). An account of an Irish coastal village, it purported to show a place out of step with the emerging modern Ireland, a place where the notion of Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics (to use the title of a later study of mental illness in rural Ireland) appeared to blight every western rural community, a place characterised by the Hollywood image of Ireland. In other words a place that didn't exist.

A World of Fine Difference, Published by UCD PRESS, 2001

In fact, Brody's study village was not one place, it was two - one in Clare, the other in Cork. He took his ethnographic material from each place and then contrived a study to suit his own prejudice and fit his thesis, that the west of Ireland was in terminal decline and populated by pathologically disturbed people. While the east coast intelligensia and others, ignorant of the social reality in rural and coastal Ireland, thought Brody's book great craic, the people he portrayed were not amused. Several years later when he returned to the Cork village, a small coastal community called Allihies on the Beara Peninsula, he was abused and threatened in one of the village pubs. Some people wanted to throw him in the sea. Others, wisely, told him to leave and never return, for fear of his life.

It would be hard to imagine such a fate befalling Adrian Peace, an English-born, Australian anthropologist who has made Ireland his second home and the study of Irish communities his life's work, because he is a godsend to anthropology in Ireland. For two decades, Peace has studied several Irish villages, producing several excellent academic papers and two admirable texts - A Time of Reckoning: The Politics of Discourse in Rural Ireland (1997) and A World of Fine Difference: The Social Architecture of a Modern Irish Village (2001).

Ireland has suffered at the hands of anthropologists, who seem incapable of viewing its people with a clear, unbiased eye. Either they are foreign - the Yank in the Corner, as Michael Viney once put it in a scathing attack on their ethics - and cannot listen to an Irish accent without making some wild assumption, or they are native - third level educated and ashamed of their country people - and reluctant to present their findings, Chris Curtin and his Galway colleagues rare exceptions to this generalisation.

These prejudices are understandable. It must be difficult for a foreigner, no matter how disciplined and ethically-true to their work, to come to a country like Ireland and try to make sense of it, when every individual has an opinion about everything and every community has a different perspective of the world. It is also very difficult for the native born anthropologist, sociologist or writer to step outside their own specific culture and write objectively about Irish places, simply because there is something about Ireland, its culture and its politics that get under the skin. For every Irish writer (and usually it has been left to journalists like John Waters, Fintan O'Toole and Nuala O'Faolain to present an accurate contemporary picture of Ireland and its people) the task has been a thankless one, for the Irish will argue their way out of anything terrestrial or celestial and begrudge everyone else their opinion or fact. But there is a reason for this.

Historians - in Ireland these usually either come from the ranks of the Anglo-Irish or establishment academia - and politicians have taken it on themselves to write about Ireland and its people, without doing any original or primary research work or without reference to the realities that people face during their daily rites of passage. Nowadays this is known as revisionism and it is a thriving business with much success among those who prefer their reality to be presented through tainted glasses. This is not the Ireland of the squinting windows. A good example of this is the recent publication by Ray MacSharry (a kind of politician) and Padraic White (a kind of bureaucrat), The Making of the Celtic Tiger: The Inside Story of Ireland's Boom Economy. It is hard to know whether it is fiction, revisionism or social history. Whatever it is called, it is seen as a false account and it is not trusted.

Sadly then, those whose job it is to tell the truth (anthropologists and sociologists, and journalists), for various reasons, find themselves with a task that is difficult. Would anyone believe what they have written, when everyone knows that every other Irish person is a born storyteller and sure why do we need these fancy academics to interpret our families and communities? Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Chris Eipper's The Ruling Trinity: A Community Study of Church, State and Business in Ireland, plus Peace's two books are rare community studies. Thankfully they do exist and they tell a truth many in Ireland (and elsewhere) seem to have difficulty swallowing lest they choke on the morsels on offer.

It's time that was changed. Ireland, too long at the periphery of academic study, needs strong, authentic voices. Peace himself argues that the anthropological approach to Ireland reveals "more about the positioning of the discipline of anthropology in the power relations between centre and periphery than they informed us about the communities under study". Peace is adamant, as well he should be, that Irish society cannot be viewed, to quote Nancy Scheper-Hughes (author of the aforementioned Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics) as a "small and homogenous ... cultural area". He writes: "To assume a marked degree of cultural homogeneity in this fashion is to erase precisely those social variations which are of significance to the people themselves, and which should be of consequence to the social analyst as well. It is much more challenging (and probably satisfying too) to approach Ireland as a richly diverse and heterogeneous economic and political landscape, a multiplicity of spaces and places in which the proliferation of cultural difference is the order of the day."

A World of Fine Difference, then, has been written by an anthropologist who has somehow managed to combine the discipline of his profession with the role of community member, always aware that he is a blow-in and therefore not a true member of the community because he does not possess the necessary local knowledge that would give him the cultural capital he needs to share the sense of place, identity and belonging of the native-born. This may seem an irrelevant point, but it is not. Until you understand why place, identity and belonging are so important to Irish people you will never be able to understand the Irish psyche. This was Brody's weakness. It is Peace's strength, and the reason why this book must be read by anyone who wishes to understand Ireland, its people and Irish life.

Peace calls his study village Inveresk - "the inlet of the fish". It is a fictional name, as are all the names of the people and some of the other places in the book. It does not matter that Peace cannot identify the actual village, because the social patterns he describes resonate through much of Irish life, rural and urban. Given what he has explained about diversity, Peace is at pains to stress that his study community is unique - hence his "world of fine difference". The members of Inveresk also see themselves as "a different place altogether" from neighbouring communities, which in turn see Inveresk as "a place full of really queer people". But Inveresk is not one community, it is three closely-knit, diverse communities; Peace describes them as country, village and pier. Where Inveresk may differ from other similar coastal fishing and farming communities is that each lives cheek by jowl, with the country folk no further than a few miles removed from the pier folk. Peace describes it thus: "It takes no more than half an hour to walk from the countryside to the cliffs, but within that time one traverses the three distinctly different domains from which the community is made up. It is not necessary to be familiar with the local landscape to discern the physical differences between the domains. Even though the physical boundaries between them are not noticeable, there is evident variation in the means of livelihood in which residents are chiefly involved. What is important, however, is the extent of social differentiation which results; this cannot be read off from contrasts in landscape usage."

This is not unusual and only those who are intimate with a Irish community, whether it is a country townland or coastal village or seaside pier, will be aware of the social differentiation and why it actually matters. Peace makes a great deal about this and he is right to do so. Territory or place to the Irish person, particularly those who live on the coast, is a significant, if not integral, aspect of being. This is a legacy from 800 years of English rule in Ireland, where the indigenous population were denied access to land, sea, river and lake they believed was a birthright. In modern Ireland this often leads to conflict, and disputes about rights - on the land, on the sea and on the pier - are not uncommon. More often than not they are directed by native born people against blow-ins (people from outside the immediate area), who it will be claimed do not have the birthright. While this may seem petty and historically hypocritical, it is a fact of life - and life in rural Ireland can be very hard if a person does not own a house, a pub or shop or business, a bit of land or machinery, a boat or a berth.

Peace portrays this with a keen eye and while he may decry his own methods of ethnographic research he is the kind of observer Irish anthropology needs - in large doses. Few people, Irish or foreign, see the Ireland before them, always content to want to see a different place. Peace has no such inhibitions. He sees Ireland and Irish communities for what they are. In Inveresk Peace shows a community that has no desire to live up to the caricature that rural Ireland is dying or losing its cultural identity to modernity. He writes: "Despite the extent of this sustained induction into modernity, Inveresk retains a strong, indeed pervasive, sense of its own distinct identity, of being a special place in the world. Notwithstanding the many external forces which threaten to breach and subvert it, this sense of distinction is articulated with pride and the residents work hard to sustain it."

So this is a book about a "special" community in rural Ireland, a community that is determined not to lose its distinctiveness, despite the external forces ranged against it, and ready to subvert the very forces that would destroy it for their own ends. Let's put this in perspective. Life in rural Ireland, particularly on the coast, is a struggle. It is a life that has not changed much since the middle of the 19th century. Those with inherited jobs/businesses, property and land stay. Those who haven't emigrate.

It is a depressing reality that the people of the west, in particular, are haemorrhaging from unemployment and emigration, and a feeling that is close to alienation from modern Ireland. The population decline since the famines of the 19th century when Ireland had over eight million people (the 32 counties had 5.2 million in 2000) has been devastating and the predictions for the 21st century are not good. A mid-1990s survey revealed that 800 townlands in the province of Connaught (counties Sligo, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, Galway and Clare) were deserted. This desertion of townlands has continued (with the west's 1990 population of 550,000 expected to fall to around 450,000 by 2010) even though net emigration has slowed because of the lack of work in America and Britain and availability of work in the construction and building trades, and in foreign-owned factories at home. While these figures fall out of peoples' mouths they are based on the reality of life in rural Ireland - which is characterised by a demographic statistic that is obvious to everyone, particularly those who live there. The majority of the population is under 18 or over 50.

Emigration from rural Ireland was a constant fact of life throughout the 20th century, apart from the 1971-79 period - when a combination of state investment, European Economic Community membership and economic stability boosted employment in fishing and farming. But this did not last. While membership of the European Union has benefited some sections of Irish society, others have been left impoverished, significantly the mid-western, north-western and border counties. Before Ireland joined the EEC in 1973 unemployment ran at five percent, inflation was slightly less than five percent. Within ten years inflation was out of control, rising to 21 percent in 1982 and then falling to four percent in 1986. Throughout the 1980s unemployment rose, reaching a peak of 17 percent in 1986.

In the 1990s Ireland's economy was energised by the economic boom that became known as the Celtic Tiger - unemployment falling to an average of eight percent in the later years of the decade and inflation averaging three percent - but rural Ireland did not share the benefits. Behind the facade of the modern bungalow and the glamorous hotel is the stark reality that almost a quarter of the total population is functionally illiterate, that one in six are living, according to the United Nations, in "human poverty", and that Ireland has the highest rate of poverty in the western world after the USA. As Robbie Smyth put it: "The squalid reality of the Celtic Tiger is low paid workers, an underfunded health service, underfunded public transport, house prices out of the reach of ordinary citizens, a chronic shortage of local authority housing, a rampant heroin crisis, rural poverty and environmental deprivation in urban working-class areas."

Much of the low-paid work that exists all over Ireland is in agriculture, retail, catering and services, and in the seasonal service and tourist industries. In coastal communities these - and part-time fishing - are the only jobs on offer, that or casual work or unemployment or destitution. People only survive because they are able to do odd jobs for cash which is not declared for tax - the black economy. Incomes for the poorest sections of society, particularly in the west, are derived from social welfare payments, headage (sheep) payments, part-time wages and profits from casual trade activities.

Agriculture, which used to provide work for two out of five people in the 1950s, employed one in ten by the 1990s. State figures show that an average of 5,000 left farming every year during the 1990s. Several studies showed that many farmers lived on incomes of less than £100 a week and that some farming families got £172 per month, leaving three out of four farmers dependent on social welfare for income support. There is a strong dependency on farming yet most work holdings of less than 30 acres, of largely poor quality land.

Inveresk shares some of these statistics. The land around the bay is fertile enough to sustain both dairy and tillage farming, and the 25 farms that surround the village work one or the other or a combination of both, depending on demographic factors. More than half, 14, of the farms are family run and because they have access to family labour and have heirs they are more profitable than the nine farms run by siblings and bachelors. Fresian are the preferred choice of cattle among the dairy farmers, while the tillage farmers grow barley and sugar beet - both as fodder. Farming is a hard life in Ireland, dairying more so because of the intensive labouring and long hours. Tillage offers some respite from the hard labour but it is less profitable than dairy farming, and harvesting is done by outside contractors - who must be paid.

The village is not untypical of an Irish coastal village. It has four general stores, one victualler, eight public houses (two attached to hotels), one garage, and two fish trading companies and two hairdressers operating from home. The stores trade in same limited produce - milk, bread, tinned foods, tobacco, toiletries and newspapers. The majority of people go to supermarkets in the nearest town for the bulk of their shopping.

The pier is active, with 12 big boats (25-40 foot wooden or metal-hulled vessels), 11 punts (small fibre glass dinghies powered by outboard motor) and one 45 foot trawler. Fifty years ago such boats would have been adequate to bring home the fish, which in those days could be found closer to the shore. Now, with competition from factory trawlers from the ports of continental Europe and dwindling fish stocks, the life is hard. All the fisher people who operate out of Inveresk supplement their fishing income with other jobs and with social welfare payments.

Inveresk also has its share of blow-ins and returning migrants, whose function in community life depends on their degree of skill and expertise. Many of the village's inhabitants work at more than one job and most participate in voluntary activity at various levels, depending on their availability.

The population's housing needs are met by various structures and determined by social conditions, depending on the wealth of each family and individual. Some families share cramped accommodation while others live in mobile homes.

However despite these social factors, Peace argues that the unique community factors which make Inveresk a "special" place may save it from the fate befalling other similar coastal communities. There is, Peace contends, evidence that "recent technological, economic and political developments have encouraged rather than eroded the expression of cultural" diversity, hybridity and creolisation, even if the people of Inveresk themselves are not convinced of this. More significant, Peace argues, is the reality that this small community of 450 adults is aware of possible entrophication, so much that there is a deliberate and conscientious desire to keep "alive the sense of belonging to this particular place at this particular time". In this regard, Inveresk's strength is the "fierce spirit of egalitarianism" and "almost remorseless opposition to political hierarchy". In modern Ireland, with few exceptions (Arainn being one), that is not only unique but amazing.

And that is the real story of this book. It is the story of a community that is aware of the social changes within its environs yet unwilling to shed its cultural diversity to the homogenous pseudo-electronic culture (if consumerism and materialism can be described as a culture) that is eroding urban Irish society. It is the story of a creative and imaginative community that knows its limits but is wise (or cute) enough to realise that cultural diversity, like the change and diversity that is evident in the natural world, depends on an ability to know how to respond to the kind of economic, cultural, emotional, political and social change endemic in all community activity. It is the story of the future of Ireland and how our communities can and should be managed, if we allow them to be.

It is not the story of a quaint, authentic, traditional Irish village with white-washed cottages, thatched roofs, swirls of peat smoke, sawdust strewn floors, pigs in the parlour, chickens in the coup, salmon in the stream, horses in the field, mackerel on the shore, sessions in the pub, pints of porter in hand, comely maidens, gurgling babies, laughing children, bronzed and haggard farmhands, drunken auld fellas, fist fights, and in the twilight dancing at the crossroads. These are the props of earlier days and if you look hard enough you will actually see a place that looks different from generations before but is in fact the same - only modern, in the same way that every generation produces a modern version of its authentic self. Peace writes:

"The traditional Irish community is a figment of the anthropological imagination; it is not part of these residents' cognitive maps. What they mean when they use words like 'true' and 'real' is that Inveresk displays many of the attributes which they and others might historically and contemporaneously understand as constituting community-ness - the centrality of the family, caring for young and old, the combination of intimacy and rivalry, a readiness to help one another, the proliferation of gossip, and so on. There is no particular source from which this construct of the authentic community comes. It is variously assembled from what earlier generations have told them, recollections from their youthful years 30 or 40 years ago, comparable experiences of residence and employment elsewhere in rural Ireland, and even popular cultural representations of Irish life."

The question that must be asked is one that concerns the people of Inveresk. Does this coastal community have a future in an Ireland that is increasingly urban-centered and turning its back on its rural roots? In Irish Urban Cultures, Chris Curtin et al, talk about the value of Irish anthropology. They state that anthropology must provide a view "of how people actually live" in the context of "the actualities of an Ireland entering the 21st century". Well we are now in the 21st century and it seems that it doesn't matter how people actually live, in coastal communities like Inveresk, because the Irish state, business and church (the Holy Trinity so poignantly described by Chris Eipper in his study of Bantry) doesn't care. It certainly doesn't take any notice of anthropological studies.

The reason for his can be found, not in anthropological or sociological study, but in the Irish state's success in turning Ireland into a giant factory for American and British corporate investment, and making sure that the Irish mass media is the principle propagandist in promoting this success while ignoring all criticism. Peace's first book on Ireland, A Time of Reckoning, chronicled the successful opposition to the state's industrial policy in what still remains one of the most effective campaigns mounted anywhere in the world against the threat of globalisation. The majority of people are unaware of this grassroots success because of the censorship imposed by the media on information about community opposition to undesirable developments. According to Peace: "The relevance of these developments here is that the anthropology of Ireland becomes increasingly inseparable from the anthropology of transnational corporations and the global system which is their arena of power."

Inveresk may be a small village on the Irish periphery, without any corporate investment in its environs, but it is not immune, as Peace stresses, from the global factors that determine Ireland's place in the western world. "Whether the focus has been small business, fishing or farming, all are inseparable from the international economic system which establishes the parameters of power within which localised strategies have to be worked out." In Peace's words Inveresk is "a modern place in a late modern society" yet sadly perhaps "also a distinctively peripheral locale in which, one presumes, the negative effects of global marginalization should be especially pronounced".

There is little argument that "the inhabitants of Inveresk share a sense of powerlessness in relation to the politics of government concentrated in the metropolitan core". However that has not stopped this small community of 450 adults from consciously and deliberately attempting to reshape their own small world from within their local environs while keeping an eye on what is going on beyond. As Peace notes: "They may not be successful in some of these efforts; a few may have no impact at all, but that is beside the point. Far from their locality 'moving away from their feet', they remain firmly in command of it and they are proudly aware of the fact."