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.

Adrian Peace has a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex. His early research was conducted among migrant workers in southwestern Nigeria, and focused on questions of ethnicity and class, detailed in a series of articles and a book. Since the mid-1980's, Dr. Peace has spent almost three years researching the changing character of an Irish village, and the politics of environmental issues. He also writes on the anthropology of environmentalism in Australia, particularly conflicts in the native forests of New South Wales.

Adrian Peace's profile page

"A Time of Reckoning provides, in my opinion, an excellent template for a productive way forward for anthropology."

Australian Journal of Anthropology