State-sponsored violence and its doppelganger, insurgent paramilitarism, have recently risen to the top of research priorities for many anthropologists wanting to meet the cultural predicament of our times head-on. In Northern Ireland, 2003 electoral triumphs of hard-line unionism and republicanism reminded the world afresh that even in those political landscapes brimming with EU optimism, tenacious, objectifying practices of inclusion in and exclusion from ethnoreligious communities should not be underestimated for their capacity to blunt political reform conceived and hatched at the state and transnational levels. It may be the case for some time to come that anthropologists are compelled to write critical studies of regions whose status among a sanguinely postatavistic “family of nations” has been prematurely assumed.

I was reminded of this ongoing challenge in reading The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William F. Kelleher Jr.’s thought-provoking contribution to a rich and still burgeoning field of Northern Ireland ethnography. Based primarily on fieldwork conducted in the early and mid- 1980s among Catholic employees of the “Drumcoo Glassworks,” the author sets for himself the task of understanding how the socially divided world of one town in western Northern Ireland (the eponymous “Ballybogoin”) is made and unmade, largely through the way people talk about it and about each other. Much of his argument turns on the idea that in investigating everyday discursive practice, anthropologists can better understand the complexity and nuance of decolonization: a process that everywhere staggers along in increments, fitfully, and without clear direction.

For Kelleher, the significance of talk is not a function of message content, narrowly interpreted. Rather, talk is a vehicle for the constitution of a “moral community,” narrating and listening the practices in and through which relationships are built and maintained. By extension, the absence of these practices is read as a sign of unwillingness to fashion social relationships. In Ballybogoin, talk about memory has a key role in shaping subjectivity; how do individuals become crystallizations of “the cultural practices and social forces that make difference”? (p. 15).

The author’s ethnographic exposition of this theme is richly revealed over the course of several chapters and in a variety of contexts that are significant for their “ordinariness.” For instance, Kelleher analyzes the hidden texts encoded in the historical memories of friendly residents. The “same” region torn by a legacy of dispossession in the eyes of local Catholics was for Protestants a site of productivity and industry. In narrative, residents highlighted the ways in which acts of movement were simultaneously acts of memory. Likewise, the power of everyday language to define landscape is revealed in local knowledge about what is signified by the river Bann, which bisects Northern Ireland. Everyday practices of movement and language style in those regions east of the river are seen as “modern, industrial, orderly and valued,” whereas western regions (“Wobland”) are cast as “partially industrialized, disorderly, and less valued” (p. 31). Talk and memory thus mediate knowledge of “the long ago” (the politicoreligious contests of the 17th century) and of recent years (Northern Ireland’s current “troubles”).

Kelleher’s most compelling analysis is reserved for the events surrounding a 1985 labor-management dispute at the glassworks. In its drive to modernize and rationalize production, catholic management was perceived by workers as supplanting a workplace ethic of relationship building through talk with one of silent efficiency and thereby substituting “working work,” entailing self-discipline and order, for “working moves,” which involved a willingness to question and subvert authority but, more significantly, a willingness to establish relations through talk. For many Catholic workers, metonymically merged into the wider Catholic community, the latter of these was perceived and mediated in social memory as an inevitable historical consequence of living under the yoke of a Protestant political–economic establishment. Hence, Irish nationalism and paramilitarism took on the evasive and even mischievous characteristics of “working moves” against those state forces that excluded and marginalized the Catholic population.

Kelleher’s book suffers in places for its failure to analyze a rapid sequence of shifts in power during the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century. Although I have no principled objection to presenting historical ethnography as a “snapshot in time” (provided it does not sacrifice all sense of historicity in the process), the author’s penultimate decision to bring readers “up to speed” on events and personalities as they have changed subsequent to his original fieldwork results in a somewhat strained discussion reminiscent of “Where are they now?” popular journalism. Still, his insights into the workaday roles of language in shaping historical memory and of social memory in specifying meaning in language—particularly as it is employed mundane situations (the pub, the tour, the factory floor)—constitute a welcome contribution to the field.