culture and class among the “large” farmers of eastern Ireland

Since the early research of Arensberg and Kimball most anthropological accounts of Ireland have focused on the lives of post‐peasant small farmers. Commercial farmers with land, wealth and power, known in Ireland as “large farmers,” have remained u investigated in the ethnographic literature. This article explores the ways in which the big farmers of County Meath in eastern Ireland define themselves as members of the various groups of influential farmers. The effect of the modernization and internationalization of Irish society on large farmers has been to make them all increasingly part of a growing national middle class. This portrait of important changes in the culture and class relations of large farmers serves as a departure in the ethnography of the political economy of Ireland as well as an addition to the study of the Europeanization of commercial family farmers within the European Community. 1988 American Anthropological Association