The Spirit Of An Clochan Analysis

Spirit of place is indefinable as it can vary from one view to another. It is created through the passage of time as one lives in a specific place, town, or city for a long time, while experiencing the place. It takes time to know a place as it is made up of experiences such as one’s daily routine over the years. The nature of the place cannot be explained as the feel of the place is registered in one’s memory. Yi-Fu Tuan observed that an individual’s experience to a specific place is closely related to time and proximity, allowing the individual to clearly know the place. Dungloe is a small village in rural Ireland with 461 people living in it; however, most villagers do not live on the main road but are scattered in hamlet (Scheper-Hughes, 1976, p. 77). In a small village, everyone knows the other, resulting in less privacy. The spirit of An Clochan is illustrated through the family, specifically
The Irish people in Dungloe belong to the Christian Catholic church and are very religious, where no divorce or separations occur in such small villages. In Dungloe, its inhabitants have social boundaries, in which they are not allowed to marry their cousins. However, the closest cousin they can get married to is their second cousin. Several religions, such as Catholicism, have banned their followers from marrying their first cousins because first cousin marriages have a high risk of genetic disorders as the parents’ blood are closely related. In Ireland, men marry at an older age—in other words, in their early forties. For example, Brendan a 46-year-old bachelor, is still unmarried and living with his parents. He became the subject of jokes between his friends. As Dungloe is a small village, the couples are not seen together in public, neither showing warmth nor love for each other, avoiding the spread of gossip that would occur among the people living in that