Bridging Appalachia

In Western cultures, a drive for individualism and accumulation has frequently led to severance of familial and cultural ties, which leaves individuals with a sense of alienation and societies with limited solutions to systemic inequities in healthcare access. Ancestral narratives and lifeways, which emphasize community resilience and stewardship of nature can provide supplements or alternatives to contemporary ideas and promote societal change. Ireland’s strong history of oral narrative captures the legacy of Irish heritage and ancestral knowledge, which can inform these approaches. The Irish National Folklore Commission has developed methodologies for archiving and evaluating folkways, which can be utilized in varied regions to determine how societies have been shaped by their cultural values, how values have evolved over time and how shared or complementary values can be drawn upon to encourage global cooperation in addressing social inequities.

As an herbalist, I am particularly interested in the preservation of traditional healing modalities in folklore and the use of story, itself, as medicine. Irish folklore has been used to caution, teach, recollect and entertain. In what ways has it also been used to heal? In order to pursue this question and its implications for contemporary problems, I have enrolled in the Irish Folklore & Ethnology Graduate Taught Master’s Program at University College Dublin.

You can follow my year-long journey on this page and if you feel called to support my work and travel (or just buy me a drink at the pub), please visit my funding campaign! I hope to share lots of thoughts and observations along the way. Sláinte!