The Vanishing World of the Islandman focuses on the anthropological and folkloric journey of an indigenous memoir from an island off the west coast of Ireland into a wider world. In this interview AJEC Editor and author M. Nic Craith explores these themes and her experience writing.
There have been four books on hitchhiking published in as many years. The thing is, two of these have been history overviews from North America (Mahood 2018; Reid 2020) and the other a personal account of thumbing rides around Europe in order to visit as many countries as possible in as short a time as can be achieved (Ipavec 2020). As a result my own monograph on this activity, Hitchhiking: Cultural Inroads, is the first contemporary account within the social sciences to holistically examine the meaning of hitchhiking in Europe at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. This short Blog posting gives a general summary to the volume, which is now available as a hardback or E-book and will be published in paperback next year.
In my ethnographic monograph, Nourishing the Nation: Food as National Identity in Catalonia (Berghahn Books, published 2019), I explore the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia through the lens of food. As an everyday object of consumption, food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity in light of recent events, such as the rise in support for secessionist politics and changing identity politics in Spain as a whole. Here I would like to discuss some of my motivations for studying the topic and my approach, and my aims with the book.