Constructing the Cultus Deorum

This chapter surveys the literature on identity in Northern Ireland and reads it through the lens of the Rancièrean emphasis on equality. I suggest that dominant strands of ways of thinking about Northern Ireland reproduce the very sectarian methodology that they seek to analyse. In part, this is a product of the blatant division of the North into two communities. The chapter attempts to resist the temptation to pluralize and draw synergies between those two communities; instead, I suggest that that very methodology—of distinguishing categories and characteristics, competencies and beliefs—is emblematic of the distribution of sensibility. I draw, again, on Rancière’s typology of political philosophizing to describe how that reproductive cycle persists.