It is a paradox of the ethnographic imagination of the Revival that Synge's Playboy of the Western World is in some ways a more disciplined attempt to deal with the complex problems of cultural representation than The Aran Islands. This is due largely to the dramatic structure of The Playboy, which leaves Synge little opportunity for the expression of an autobiographical desire. But, in some very important ways, these two texts are linked, for Synge's dramatic development of folklore material in The Playboy constitutes a further performative phase of an ethnographic enterprise that began with The Aran Islands. Moreover, the structure of this continuing enterprise extends beyond the performance of the play to include public reactions to it. By staging his ethnographic fieldwork in The Playboy, often in exorbitantly unrealistic terms, Synge effectively challenges the primitivism on which he had himself relied in The Aran Islands and develops further the contours of an Irish anthropological modernism by calling into question the way tradition typically furthers the aims of the modern artist.