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Abstract
In 1999, an Irish man named Eddie Lenihan protested against a highway construction project that would destroy a fairy tree. He was successful, and the road was diverted. Lenihan’s work exemplifies the potential of supernatural narrative and belief to influence contemporary social life in sometimes surprising ways. As a category of both discourse and experience, the supernatural is present in various forms across the Irish landscape, offering an avenue of social critique and enabling contemporary people to set the terms of their engagement with place or to challenge events that run counter to their understandings of the significances of place. Examining narratives of the fairies from published texts, archival materials, and contemporary fieldwork, this study seeks to understand the discourses that connect belief to place and have influenced Irish people’s thinking about and interactions with specific locales. It is argued that the supernatural is a particularly powerful constitutive force in the formation of local cosmologies, ways of thinking that connect immediate experiences in the world with more abstract levels of social organization and thought.
