Globalization and Localization: “Old” and “New” Irish Rituals in Savannah

Presentation giving at the Southern Anthropological Society Annual Meeting

The annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Savannah, established in 1824, serves to reinforce both local and ethnic identities for members of the city’s historic Irish-American community. However, the development of the parade as a major tourist attraction, accompanied by increasing commercialization, has sparked controversies about the meaning and control of the event. Ethnographic and survey research revealed ambivalence about the parade among members of Savannah’s Irish community, but also, its’ continued importance to most of them. After the city erected a Celtic Cross in a downtown park in 1983, members of this community established an annual “Celtic Cross” mass and ceremony which takes place on the Sunday before St. Patrick’s Day. This new ritual was cited by many informants as more “traditional” than the parade, and as their favorite event of the now month-long St. Patrick’s season in Savannah. In this paper, we consider how the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the Celtic Cross Ceremony may be related to recent anthropological thinking about the simultaneity of processes of globalization and localization wherein “touristicization” and commodification of culture stimulates oppositional action to reclaim or recreate a more “authentic” local group identity.