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On the fringe of western Europe, yet fully integrated into the capitalist market, the rural economy of the west of Ireland seems to provide a fascinating object of analysis to the student of European folk cultures. This book concentrates on a particular aspect of that rural economy: the social organization and cultural construction of work in a community of family farms. The concept of work, which is primarily farm work, is taken here as a very elementary set of ideas, images and experiences that enable us to penetrate in the different cultural spheres that intersect life on an Irish family farm. Work, the author concludes, is to this farming community what the Kula ring is to the Trobriand islanders - a kind of Maussian total social fact the analysis of which incorporates a comprehensive description of a particular social system.

Carles Salazar is lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Lleida. He gained his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge, and has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Ireland and Catalonia. His main research has been focused on different aspects of Irish society and culture: rural economy, religious beliefs, family organization and history of sexual morality. He has also done research on the history of anthropology and on the cultural understanding of biomedicine and genetics among infertile couples in Barcelona. His latest publications include Anthropology and Sexual Morality (Berghahn Books, 2006).