Abstract

My title is derived from a quip by the late John Maloney, a wise publican of southwest Donegal. The year was 1973, and we had been discussing the public relations problems of anthropologists in Ireland. No doubt exaggerating, he told me that, according to his sources, neither of two ethnographers of small islands off the west coast could safely return to his research site. I asked him about a rather technical kinship article by another anthropologist who had conducted fieldwork close by in west Donegal; surely that had not upset anyone? His answer: “There are two things that people don’t like to hear about themselves; one of them is lies and the other’s the truth.”