View from the Traveller Site: Architecture that Begins where the House Ends

Traveller-specific architecture in Ireland and permanently temporary sites in the UK embody an insoluble contradiction - as systems of control, policing and strategic neglect, and as a cultural right, an alternative to housing that recognizes the dignity of choice. View from the Traveller Site explores post-nomadism as an artefact of statecraft in which contradictory processes occur in tandem, legal insecurity persists, and state policies have unexpected consequences, as sites materialize the countervailing tendencies of post-war European states. At conjunctures of camps, court rooms, sites, and council houses, Irish Travellers generate new architectures and revive old ones. Architecture and the body form distributed fields of analogy and metaphor, and are reciprocally constituted as social capacities and sites of personhood and relations. Through ethnographic accounts of sites and camps, funerary monuments, and gift cycles of mares and foals, the book reflects on material and performative architectures, negotiations of gendered and generational rights, and the role of women in encounters between the dead, the living and the unborn in camps. The author engages with debates in the anthropology of the state, property, citizenship and the family, and offers a new analysis of Travellers concepts of personhood and embodiment, as Travellers negotiate the politics and poetics of citizenship, kinship and sociality, enfolding the settled (non-Traveller) world of sites into the collective bodies of breeds and back-breeds. This exploration of the productivity of post-nomadic architecture, culture and sociality will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropology as well as architecture, geography, and material and visual culture.