My project is an ethnographic examination of a minority Catholic group known as the Irish Travellers, living in their own designated community, Murphy Village, in South Carolina. In the 1960s, the Irish Travellers’s priest, along with the Irish Traveller community, developed Murphy Village as a distinct enclave, separate from the surrounding mainstream society. Irish Travellers are historically peripatetic nomads Indigenous to Ireland and share parallels with Romany1 communities including a history of continuous migration, an autonomous economy, a private culture and language, and discrimination and stigma that come with the problematic “Gypsy” label. Murphy Village Irish Travellers sustain their own society apart from what they view as the broader, non-Irish Traveller world they call “the outside,” or “the country” as they must grapple with being geographically and legally situated within its cultural, state, and federal confines. Conflicts between Murphy Village, the surrounding mainstream society, and the state sometimes result in FBI raids and societal discrimination. The insular human geography of Murphy Village exemplifies this separateness while being constitutive of a cohesive Irish Traveller identity – one which is predicated on a “Travellin’ people,” who are paradoxically “settled.” Roman Catholic identity colors Murphy Village too with iconic religious statues guarding the homes. These cultural icons are emblematic of an Irish Traveller belonging, in addition to adding another dimension of spiritual protection against the outside. Through participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and photography, I examined Irish Traveller perspectives about place and meaning in Murphy Village and in Irish Traveller-designated places in the country. Furthermore, I learned how these places embody what Irish Travellers refer to as “the Road” – a metaphorical space where all Irish Travellers exist and belong.
The Irish Travellers are a historically peripatetic minority people, Indigenous to Ireland. Despite the Irish Traveller diaspora, Irish Travellers share a global collective identity, and maintain their private language, known as Cant, or Gammon. The Irish Travellers of Murphy Village are part of the network of Irish Traveller communities throughout Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. The Central Statistics Office of Ireland estimated an Irish Traveller population of 32,949 in the 2022 Census2. The most recent U.K. Census results through the Office for National Statistics estimated the Irish Traveller population to be 71,440 in 20213. Official population data for Canada does not currently exist. According to demographic estimates in 20204, the range of the Irish Traveller population in the U.S. falls somewhere between 7,000 and 40,000.
There are three Irish Traveller settlement communities in the U.S.: (1) Murphy Village in South Carolina, known for the “Murphy” or “Georgia Travellers,” (2) Oakhaven Village Mobile Home Community in Memphis, Tennessee, known for the “Memphis” or “Mississippi Travellers,” and (3) White Settlement, Texas, known for the “Texas Travellers” or “Greenhorn Carrolls" 5. Outside of Europe, Murphy Village is the largest Irish Traveller settlement in the world, depending on who is counting; Irish Travellers do not participate in U.S. demographic efforts, and any efforts by the government to account for Irish Traveller demographics is in vain. Moreover, the U.S. Census does not recognize Irish Travellers as a distinct ethnic minority (Burke et al. 2008, 470). According to the 2020 census, Murphy Village’s population is approximately 1,7006, and according to Irish Traveller participants in 2021, the approximation is closer to 3,000 people.
In Murphy Village, Irish Travellers maintain a distinct identity from non-Irish Travellers, or as Irish Travellers call them, “Country People.” Irish Travellers sustain their own society apart from what they view as the broader, non-Irish Traveller world they call “the outside,” or “the country,” yet grapple with being geographically and legally situated within its cultural, state, and federal confines. Murphy Village exhibits various pluralities, including its settlement development history, street layouts, intentional concealments, class segregation, and symbols of identity. For this work I ask: What are the underlying cultural forces for this human geography? Does a peripatetic collective identity drive the enclosed nature of the community, or does surrounding U.S. society inform their boundaries, both culturally and spatially?
I first visited Murphy Village in February 2021 for preliminary fieldwork. My primary ambitions were to confirm that Murphy Village still existed and flourished as its own community, to get an assessment of Murphy Village in real-life as opposed to in the media, and to hopefully meet an Irish Traveller who would be open to speaking with me. During this first visit I met and spoke with approximately ten Irish Travellers and shared my vision about this work with them. With time, I developed rapport with and eventually gained the trust of members of the Irish Traveller community. From March 2022 to October 2023, I employed ethnographic research methods including extensive fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews. I implemented participant observation in exclusively Irish Traveller spaces in Murphy Village, North Augusta, South Carolina, Augusta, Georgia, and elsewhere on their journeys.
As per Bernard’s (2017) “Four Types of Field Notes” methods, I collected any “jottings” throughout the day and consolidated the notes into an organized file every evening. I led semi-structured, open-ended interviews with approximately forty Irish Travellers aged eighteen and older, which was enough to reach data saturation as per Hagaman and Wutich (2017). My semi-structured interviews were guided by my research questions and my sometimes unstructured, spontaneous conversations allowed new important topics and questions to arise.
Murphy Village spans two different counties in South Carolina – Aiken and Edgefield; the arbitrary line of the counties splits Murphy Village which runs along and adjacent to the north-south U.S. highway 25. The U.S. Census refers to Murphy Village as Murphys Estates, CDP (Census Designated Place)7 due to its local recognition as a distinct community. In the 1960s Irish Travellers dwelled in traditional tents along Edgefield Road, approximately two miles south of Murphy Village. Rev. Fr. Joseph John Murphy, their priest at the time, bought land and empowered the Irish Travellers to procure a permanent home base – an exclusively Irish Traveller settlement – to encapsulate their shared identity. Since then, the Irish Travellers in South Carolina have remained in what they refer to as “the Village.”
In the early 1980s, Murphys Estates, now described by local outsiders as the “Gypsy McMansions,” was developed across the street. Irish Travellers often lament the old Village as the nostalgic shell of what Murphy Village used to be while being home to the more impoverished Irish Travellers and vacant structures from times past. The old Village and its remnants occupy Edgefield County. Before Murphys Estates came to fruition people in the CSRA associated Irish Travellers and Murphy Village with Edgefield County, which outsiders deem to be less affluent and desirable than Aiken County. The crux of the Estates is positioned in Aiken County. As per participant accounts, U.S. County lines are insignificant to Irish Travellers; their own cultural and societal markers legitimize territories.
Nonetheless, the U.S. geographical demarcation between the two counties closely mirrors Irish Traveller boundary designations. These boundaries denote the sociopolitical class division in Murphy Village, which is fraught with tension and complexity. The Irish Travellers that remain in the old Village are solely the remnants of families who are labeled soots8, a Cant term, meaning “low-class.” Nabobs, or, the “high-class” clans do not live in the old Village. The middle-class residents and nabobs live exclusively in Murphys Estates. Murphys Estates too holds contradictory notions of belonging. Alongside the upper tiers of Irish Travellers some soot families persevered and relocated to Murphys Estates aiming to reform their class statuses. According to participants, these efforts were in vain and caused further anxieties, resentments, and variations of shame within those households. Murphys Estates residents stay within their boasting inner circle and isolating homes, and as a foil, old Village Irish Travellers exhibit a collective pride in living in what all community members regard as the “real Murphy Village.” The Irish Travellers have their own church, St. Edward Catholic Church, which is the heart of the Village. The original church structure now serves as a private event space they call "the Hall," and stands adjacent to the new church building. The new church is on the old Village side of the street and county line and dwells on the corner of Murphy Street and Edgefield Road, at the Village entrance. The church and Hall locations further signify where the heart of the Irish Traveller community was established and Irish Travellers in the old Village imply that these landmarks, along with the lingering elders, keep the old Village alive.
In actuality, both the old Village and Murphys Estates share a collective peripatetic identity, which separates the Irish Traveller community from U.S. mainstream society. Each aspect of the Village’s geographical layout indexes the cohesion and separateness of the culture. When viewed on a map, Murphy Village has an insular, diamond-like shape. Within this orb, one of the first things outsiders notice if they attempt to enter the Village is that each road ends in a cul-de-sac – a circular turnaround that intentionally keeps residents safely inside, while “spitting” outsiders back out. When I first drove through Murphy Village I noticed street names such as “Murphy St.” and “St. Mary Dr.” The street names in Murphy Village are beacons of their history and culture – they are named after their favorite saints, the priests whom they have loved, and esoteric community memories. Within the church, the theme continues – the pews are arranged in circular rows, encouraging the attendees to face inward and focus on one another and on the ambo, which is the centerpiece.
Local Country People gawk at Irish Traveller “blacked out” car windows and obscured home windows. Murphy Village Irish Travellers conventionally shield their inward lives from spectators. This project portrays this in the images of the various coverings throughout Irish Traveller dwelling spaces. The older trailers have tin foil plastered to the full surfaces of the windows. The newer trailers and homes have brown paper or cloth similarly fastened to the windows or permanently drawn curtains. Outsiders fixate on these cultural details and circulate rumors about the potential causes for the mysterious “Gypsy” privatism, which includes a perpetual inward gaze and cohesive seclusion from the outside. Irish Travellers safeguard their clan household privacy from one another as well. Accordingly, owing to the community’s private nature, my project includes few portraits of people. I instead highlight the spaces in which they live, and the religious material symbolism that distinguishes them from the outside.
Adorning each home are the iconic life-sized Catholic statues, which clearly demarcate where Murphy Village begins and ends. Irish Traveller communities show diversity between one another in various ways, including their distinct favoritism for certain saints. Murphy Village culture especially reveres Saint Anthony, to whom they pray when they lose something or are lost – possibly rooted in a previous history of nomadism and poverty. The community also loves Saint Expedite, who quickly resolves urgent causes, Saint Jude, who performs miracles in hopeless cases, Our Lady of Le Leche, the motherhood expression of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Teresa of Avila, who the community prays to for children’s matters and several others. In addition to saint worship, Murphy Village pays homage to imagery of Jesus, such as the Scared Heart of Jesus and the Infant of Prague – a Child Jesus depiction to whom Irish Travellers pray for children, weddings, and other aspects of importance to the community. These statues are representative of their identity and symbolize a guarded stance toward the outside. The Murphy Village geographical space is one of the ideological spheres that contains the Irish Traveller network.
There is no agreed upon universal standard for the distinctions between villages, towns, and cities (De Vries 2013; Ploeckl 2017; Taylor 2013). The two common approaches for defining these types of settlements are economic and institutional (Ploeckl 2017, 272). Such indicators, however, are continuous, and defining the threshold for each is arbitrary and culturally determined. Geographer Michael Woods (2004) observed that “….there are many imagined social spaces occupying the same territory” (11). He instead argues for an understanding of the processes that shape people’s experiences and perceptions of (15) what it means to be [villagers]. Woods’s approach examines how identifying with belonging to a settlement type, such as a village in this case, shapes people’s perceptions and experiences of what a village is. Father Murphy conceptualized Murphy Village as an intentional village for a wandering people based upon a shared peripatetic identity. Now, Murphy Village thrives as a village in its ethos, but the final product is driven by the community’s principles. The community layout attends to two purposes: (1) Making space exclusively for Irish Travellers and (2) making space against others. This is how Murphy Village was shaped. In this way, the geography of the Village dynamic perpetuates a private, Irish Traveller collective identity.
During my research, Irish Travellers would refer to a space they called “the Road.” At first I thought this was an actual tangible road, but I soon realized it was an all-encompassing space exclusive to Irish Travellers everywhere. A participant once explained, “No matter where you're at, you're on the Road. The Road is an ethereal space where Travellers are connected.” Murphy Village Irish Travellers have arranged all aspects of their culture to exist on a continuum of the Road. Irish Traveller cultural survival is incumbent on collective responsibilities to sustain these customary ways of being. The persistence of maintaining an autonomous Irish Traveller world in South Carolina informs the interplay of discrimination and collective identity in Irish Traveller lay perspectives.
My work is one of the only academic studies of Murphy Village. Anthropologist Jared Harper (1969, 1971, 1973, 1977, 1981) conducted an ethnographic overview of Murphy Village in his doctoral dissertation, and Amanda Boundy (2007) and Crystan Dowds (2013) focused their undergraduate honors theses on surface observations of the community. The literature on Murphy Village is sparse and geographic research has yet to explore Murphy Village. Geographic work on Irish Traveller communities in Europe is also a niche and developing topic for exploration. Peter Kabachnik examined the cultural geography of Irish Traveller accommodation, space, and movement in England. Kabachnik’s (2007) discourse about geographical imaginations and conceptions (120-121) and his argument to “challenge the myth of the placeless Gypsy” (2010) inform my analysis of the significance of Murphy Village as an imagined space of Irish Traveller belonging. The existence of Murphy Village and the Road highlight the agency and spatialities of resistance (Kabachnik 2014) in the American Irish Traveller community.
While many Irish Travellers still travel in the U.S., some also create their own private settlements, including Murphy Village. This is the modern continuation of resisting dominant society and acculturation. This resistance in part feeds the discrimination against Irish Travellers. One can see the Village’s changes and evolution over time in the visual transition from the old Village to the newer Murphys Estates. Nonetheless, some customs remain unchanged – what once were campers with tin foil on the windows might now be “Gypsy McMansions” with drawn curtains and tinted luxury cars in the driveway -- all of which are dotted with statues. Despite contemporary class divisions and changes over time, the Village remains an enclosed, separate sphere which exists on the eternal Road. The existence of Murphy Village and the Road indexes places of resistance in the American Irish Traveller community.
1 Fraser (1992) suggests using the term Romany when referring to the people and the alternative, Romani, when referring to the language. I will follow this recommendation for clarity and convenience.
2 https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpp5/censusofpopulation2022profile5-diversitymigrationethnicityirishtravellersreligion/irishtravellers/#:~:text=Census%202022%20Results&text=The%20number%20of%20Irish%20Travellers,per%201%2C000%20of%20the%20population
3 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/articles/gypsyoririshtravellerpopulationsenglandandwales/census2021#:~:text=71%2C440%20people%20identified%20as%20Gypsy,high%2Dlevel%20ethnic%20group%20category
4 https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/who-are-irish-travellers-us
5 This information comes from my informal interviews with the Irish Travellers about their history and networks in the United States.
6 https://data.census.gov/
7 https://data.census.gov/profile/Murphys_Estates_CDP,_South_Carolina?g=160XX00US4548900
8 All “Cant” words in this work are self-fabricated to protect the community’s private language.