In his Introduction to The Aran Islands, John M. Synge writes, “In the pages that follow I have given a direct account of my life on the islands, and of what I met with among them, inventing nothing, and changing nothing that is essential” (AI, 48). This disclaimer might well serve as an expression of the attitude toward culture that was emerging among anthropologists like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, it raises questions about representation that are central to ethnography and that deepen the difficulties of establishing rapport and credibility with native communities. Synge strove to establish himself among the Aran Islanders and managed to establish the distance proper to ethnographic observation and to write something like an ethnographic account. But this account is destabilized in ways that suggest a modernist sensibility at odds with the mode of ethnographic redemption that has been called into being as an anodyne for his sense of dissociation and alienation. In this respect, Synge's Aran Islands develops still further certain aspects of Yeats's Revivalist project.