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Devotional "occasions" or experiences by Irish Catholics form the foundation of this consummate anthropological study of Irish Catholicism. Lawrence Taylor's twenty years of field work in Banagh in south-west Donegal have yielded rich ethnographic material that is illuminated by wide-ranging archival sources, vivid renderings of individual experiences, and sympathetic scrutiny of religious questions and theories. In answering questions central to the study of religion (What is it? How do official and popular religions differ? What is the relation between power and meaning, and the ro

This article explores the difference and interplay between the border as legal/political fact and the borderland as complex social/cultural reality through the development and application of the theoretical concepts of moral geography and moral entrepreneur. I argue that these concepts provide a bridge between macro, structural views of 'the production of (borderland) space' as used by critical geographers and the more experiential orientation suggested by geographers and anthropologists in studies of cultural landscapes and 'place-making'. My particular concern is to apply and illustrate this argument through the ethnography of the desert borderlands straddling Arizona (USA) and Sonora (Mexico), but it is potentially useful in other contexts.

On the morning of 4 April 1877, estate agent Arthur Brooke drove his carriage up to the gate of Cashel Farm, the residence of John Magroarty in Carrick, a small market town in the mountainous hinterland of southwest Donegal. Brooke had brought sheriff McCrory along with him, but his bailiffs emerged from their nearby homes a bit more reluctantly than usual. It was clear to Brooke that tenant Magroarty would not submit mildly to the impending eviction, for, although warned of the sheriff's intention several days earlier, he had not budged a parcel and a large crowd was gathering to witness the proceedings. Agent Brooke had never been so loath to perform his duty, for Magroarty was not the average evictee. He was the owner of several cows and was a reliable and even "improving tenant." Most of all, however, he was the parish priest. It was Father Magroarty Brooke and his henchmen had come to toss into the streets of Carrick.