Adrian Peace – författare

In 1988, Merrell Dow, an American transnational company, proposed to build a chemical factory in a dairy farming locality in County Cork, Ireland. Local residents organized a social protest movement to defend their economic livelihood and rural way of life. Their campaign forced a public hearing before Ireland's national planning review body, to try to overturn early county council permission to go ahead with the corporation's plan. This anthropological study demonstrates how subtle persuasion in a controlled context helps to create, maintain, produce, and reproduce hegemony in social democratic politics.

This study considers the extent to which economic modernisation has transformed the rural community. In doing so it discusses whether the distinctive character of rural identity has been eroded by powerful and distant political and cultural forces. This is the first full-length ethnography of an Irish community for a number of years. Since the early 1980s, the anthropological analysis of community life in Ireland has been limited to brief articles whilst major community studies have been published in other European countries. The author has regularly worked in Ireland.