How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions
Ray Cashman seeks to answer in his new book
Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). Focusing on the singular character of Packy Jim McGrath and the narratives that feature in his repertoire---from personal experience narratives to stories about the supernatural---we are taken into a lifeworld in which Packy Jim struggles with and develops his own answer to questions of authority, power, sacrifice, place, belief, and more, in a world of limited good. As many people told Cashman during his fieldwork (though they mean something slightly different), "If you want
real folklore, Packy Jim is your man."