Nomads under the Westway, Irish Travellers, Gypsies and Other Traders in West London

Abstract

Between 1984 and 1987, London-Irish anthropologist Christopher Griffin spent a total of 2 years as warden of a large site in north London, 85% of its residents Irish Travellers. He then emigrated to Australia where – with occasional return visits, most recently in 2004 – he has lived ever since. Twenty years on, he has written his observations of life on the site within a context of both personalised (autobiographical) and localised (the geography of the borough, its economic and social history) space and time. That he has done so in plain English, and included long introductions to basic sociological and anthropological theory, suggest that the target audience is general rather than academic. The back cover of Nomads under the Westway promises ‘a detailed survey of cultural practice amongst Travellers and Gypsies today’. This begs two questions, the most obvious of which is how ‘data substantially gathered twenty years ago’ (p. xix) can claim to represent ‘today’ – particularly given the author's explicit criticism, and rejection, of ‘ignoring history in favour of the “ethnographic present” (a portrayal of people “now”, in which history was ignored)’ (p. 21). He squares this circle by confining ‘history’ to the period prior to his stint as warden, 223 pages on which precede his ethnographic descriptions.