Reimagining Culture

Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance

Sharon Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Since the 1960s, policies to 'revive' minority cultures and languages have flourished. But what does it mean to have a 'cultural identity'? And are minorities as deeply attached to their languages and traditions as revival policies suppose? This book is a sophisticated analysis of responses to the 'Gaelic renaissance' in a Scottish Hebridean community. Its description of everyday conceptions of belonging and interpretations of cultural policy takes us into the world of Gaelic playgroups, crofting, local history, religion and community development. Historically and theoretically informed, this book challenges many of the ways in which we conventionally think about ethnic and national identity. This accessible and engaging account of life in this remote region of Europe provides an original and timely contribution to questions of considerable currency in a broad range of social science disciplines.

1

‘A Quest for Culture’: On Anthropology, Authenticity and Ambivalence

On one of ray first evenings in Carnan, in the Summer of 1983, Màiri, the Gaelic teacher with whom I was staying, took me for a walk along the dramatic cliffs near her home. Màiri was well-practised in catering for visitors with an interest in Gaelic and traditional culture and as we walked she told me Gaelic names for the landmarks we passed and local stories about them. It was a weaving together of place and significance, of local accounts, such as the Indian woman who was said to have been blown off the cliffs when a sudden gust of wind caught her sari, and more temporally distant folklore, such as the meaning of a small hillock—Dun Dearg — named after a red-haired warrior. Her talk then turned to strange beliefs about solids bioraich, inexplicable ghostly lights seen by the older people of the townships — lights which portended doom, or even drew people towards it. In a serious tone she began to tell me of an elderly crofter who had followed a light one night and had never been seen again. However, she was evidently finding it hard to keep a straight face and soon we were laughing. The vision she had been trying to conjure up for the naive anthropologist was somehow out of keeping with that bright and calm evening. She knew too, as she told me as we laughed, that had her mother known what she was telling me, she would have shaken her head and told her not to be 'so foolish'.

Summoning up exaggerated or exotic images of Gaelic culture and rural life for outsiders is a game which many local people liked to play. They shared many jokes about outsiders' views of Highlanders as uneducated, untravelled rustics — jokes in which the Highlanders' superior wit, learning and cosmopolitanism invariably triumph. However, the triumph is subtly achieved: it mostly entails an apparent acquiescence with the outside vision until the tables are turned in the punch line. The jokes show local people confronting externally-produced imagery; and remind us both that such imagery is part of the reality with which they deal, and that all is not what it seems.

This play with images is one of the means by which local people define themselves. Yet although it may mean highlighting aspects of the traditional as fictional, it does not mean that they necessarily reject all aspects of what they see as distinctive or traditional in their culture. Màiri, with her university-training, fashion-sense and frenetic life-style could easily have made herself at home on the mainland. However, she, like others, had chosen to return to the Island; like the majority of people over thirty, Gaelic was the language she spoke at home with her mother and that she spoke with most of her peers in the local townships; she listened regularly to the Gaelic radio and took a keen interest in Gaelic events; like most others of her age she attended a local church, knew most of the people of the area and to whom they were related. Her world was both local and cosmopolitan.

It is not surprising that Màiri, like other Highlanders, should be acutely aware of outsiders' images of Gaelic culture. The Scottish Highlands have long been the subject of others' romantic imaginings. The Isle of Skye, with its legendary mists, imposing mountains, and abundant history, is perhaps the most romanticised of all. It is the seat of the Lords of the Isles, home of Flora MacDonald, place of escape for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and home of the ancient MacCrimmon pipers. Thousands of tourists arrive each year apparently in search of the cultural authenticity and refuge from the heartless processes of modern society that the tourist brochures and enormous literature on the Highlands seem to promise. Those who are referred to as 'incomers' or - in a colonial idiom which is increasingly taken for granted rather than accompanied by an amused smile — 'white settlers', also arrive to live out what they expect to be a more wholesome, healthy life. In this escape from the haste, change and anonymity of modern society, Gaelic culture is imagined as a place of traditional community. Its geographical marginality, empty spaces, lack of urbanisation, the Gaelic language, Highland hospitality, crofting, the apparent relatedness and closeness of the inhabitants, and the alleged slowness of everyday existence are all taken as evidence of a way of life which modernisation has largely passed by.

The Highlands have not, however, been untouched by modern developments. At one level this is obvious and many tourists and incomers lament the ubiquity of Mother's Pride, corn flakes, fish fingers, Ford Escorts, polyester clothes, Neighbours and 'kit' bungalows. More than this, however, many of the features which give rise to the appearance of 'backwardness' — crofting, depopulation, the poor public transport system, the lack of other facilities — are consequences of the workings of capitalism, urbanisation and market forces (cf. Ennew 1980; Parman 1990). Although there clearly are longstanding elements in contemporary 'Gaelic culture', much of what is now regarded as distinctive about the Highlands was formed not outside, but as part of, the development of the nation-state and modem society (Chapters 2 and 3 below). And the renaissance of 'traditional' culture, witnessed, for example, in the more up-market tourist souvenirs such as hand-knitted 'Icelandic' jumpers, Celtic jewellery, and yellowed maps with Gaelic place-names, is also thoroughly part of wider social and cultural developments.

Tradition, Modernity and Authenticity

Identifying some aspects of Gaelic culture as traditional or authentic and dismissing others as 'foreign' imports is typical of writings about the Highlands. However, the complex history of appropriation and imagining Gaelic culture makes such categorisation extremely difficult and clearly a matter for which we need a more subtle classification than one of authentic/inauthentic or traditional/modern. For example, how would we label the Norse importations into the Gaelic language, the nineteenth century introduction of sheep, Hebridean psalm intonation or recent 'revival' of waulking songs? Although this book charts the historical development of various aspects of contemporary Gaelic culture my aim is not to adjudicate on what is or is not authentic. I am, however, interested in the classifications of 'authentic' and 'traditional' and the effects that they have.

If it is only the traditional which is described as 'authentic', Màiri's cultural identity is likely to be perceived as at least to some extent inauthentic or alienated. For although she speaks Gaelic (one of the prime markers of authenticity) at home, she mostly speaks English with her colleagues in the High School staff room, she is a fan of Coronation Street, enjoys Jean Rook's column in the Daily Mail, and would feel stranded without her car.

In many ways, this quest after the authentic - and the kinds of locations in which it is thought to be found - can itself be seen as 'modern' (MacCannell 1989). That 'tradition' and 'community' are perceived as 'authentic' is only possible in light of a contrast with something posited as inauthentic, namely 'the modern' and 'society'. In its way, then, 'tradition' as a semantically conspicuous category is itself a product of modern society That the Scottish Highlands have so frequently been described as 'traditional' and regarded as a potential source of authentic cultural identities is not evidence that they have been left out of modernity's equations. On the contrary, it is a part they play within them. In this ethnography, although much of what I describe is at one level specific to the Highlands, this is not a case for regarding them as 'non-modern'. Rather, it is an argument for seeing modernity as more heterogeneous, and more characterised by tensions and ambivalences, than it is sometimes depicted as being.¹ This book is a description of a particular kind of experience of modernity: that of an area which has been cast as 'traditional' and 'remote' within it.²

Seeing modernity as heterogeneous and ambivalent runs counter to modernity's own self-image. The modernist 'quest for order' (Bauman 1991: 1) propels attempts to segregate the traditional and the modern, and to judge between authentic and inauthentic. 'Cultures', 'communities' and 'identities' - all conceived as properly bounded, singular and distinctive — are modernist products. This is not just to say that cultures, communities and identities are 'individuated' within modernity. As Charles Taylor has written in his analysis of the development of 'the modernist [personal] identity', individuals come to be conceived not merely as different or distinct, but as endowed with 'inner depths' and a kind of 'calling' to express their individuality:

Just the notion of individual difference is, of course, not new.... What is new is that this really makes a difference to how we're called on to live. The differences are not just unimportant variations within the same basic human nature; or else moral differences between good and bad individuals. Rather they entail that each one of us has an original path which we ought to tread; they lay the obligation on each of us to live up to our originality .... Expressive individuation has become one of the cornerstones of modern culture. (1989: 375-6)

This notion of 'expressive individuation' is formulated particularly clearly in relation to nations which project themselves as 'communities' (cf. Anderson 19B3) with their own distinctive 'culture' and 'identity'.³

One of the principal means through which modernist conceptions discount alternatives is through categorising them as pathological. Ambivalence becomes a scandal (Bauman 1991: 18). Cultures whose elements do not 'cohere' appear dysfunctional; communities in change are depicted as 'dying'.⁴ Identities which are not unified and singular—identities which cannot express that which is authentically self - are medicalised as 'split', 'repressed', or 'schizophrenic'.⁵ This can readily be seen in discussions of Highland and of Scottish identity, where, as McCrone notes, 'psychiatric disorders are a . .. speciality' (1992: 176). The overwhelming concern with a possibly ailing identity and culture in the Scottish context is sourced in particular by Scotland's peculiar political and cultural position as a 'stateless nation' (ibid.) and the fact that this 'nation' consists of at least two historically and linguistically distinct 'cultures' (or nations) — Lowland and Highland.⁶

In many ways, the fact that Gaelic culture has furnished so many of the most visible symbols of Scottishness - tartan, bag-pipes, whisky - is puzzling. Until, and in many quarters long after, Highland culture began to be romanticised in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Highlanders were mostly regarded by their Lowland neighbours as something near a different race with nothing culturally to recommend them whatsoever. Tartan, bag-pipes and whisky have all, at various times, been banned by Lowland authorities. However, the same cultural conspicuousness which could lead to their outlawing, was also a potent marker of difference which, once domesticated, could be appropriated as a symbol of Scottish distinctiveness. If any part of Scotland was different from England — that niggling 'Other' — the Highlands surely were. The symbolic appropriation of Highland culture could, however, only take place once the substantive social barriers that the symbols formerly marked had receded into the past: i.e. once the Highlands had ceased to be a threat to the Lowlands (cf. Lynch 1992: 363).

Part of the attractiveness of Gaelic cultural symbols seems to be the imagery of the Highlands as a 'whole' and socially cohesive society — one with a sure sense of its own difference and a willingness to patrol its boundaries. A distinctive language, romanticised as a nation's 'collective treasure, the source of its social wisdom and communal self-respect' (Herder, in Barnard 1969: 165) in the expressive individuation of nations, was a clear, though problematic, symbol of the qualities of nationhood which the Highlanders seemed to possess. Historians have argued, however, that 'Gaeldom' was never internally cohesive and that antipathy within the Highlands was always as great as that with outsiders (e.g. Smout 1969: 20). Nevertheless the myth of a unified 'close' or 'clannish' society provides a reservoir for borrowing such an idea for Scotland as a whole.

However, the Highlands - which have not remained 'untouched' and 'traditional' - often do not live up to the symbolic role which they have been accorded. The myth of a whole society and a singular, unified identity and culture constantly creates a sense of disappointment and failure about the present. Not only is this medicalised, it is also (as illness often is, of course) moralised. The 'decline' of Gaelic culture is taken not only as evidence of 'illness' it is also seen as a moral failure — though there is sometimes ambiguity as to where responsibility lies. In perhaps the majority of histories, the moral failure is located outside the Highlands. Decline is a result of a history in which Highlanders are victim to external forces. Yet this view of history as something which 'arrives like a ship' (Sahlins 1987) from outside deletes any agency which Highlanders may have had. They become flotsam and jetsam tossed up on the externally driven wave of history. While this may accurately characterise some periods of history, it ignores the subtle ways in which local people appropriate and shape the developments which face them. It is an approach which renders them passive. Yet, the dominant alternative in discourses about the Highlands — an alternative which does accord local people agency — tends to go to the other extreme by attributing decline to Highlanders' own failure to 'look after' their culture and support the initiatives taken to save it. This is a view which often surfaces in discussions among exasperated policy-makers (see especially Part III), particularly in relation to the Gaelic renaissance developments. Both of these alternatives effectively subscribe to a view of 'real' culture and identity lying only in the 'traditional' — the authentic is that which has been, or is in danger of being, lost.

Gaelic Renaissance

The Gaelic renaissance refers to the growth of interest in the Gaelic language and Gaelic culture in Scotland, especially since the early 1980s.⁷ It is not, however, an unprecedented phenomenon, being in some ways a continuation of the appropriation of Gaelic culture into Scottish identity which began in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, there are two periods which stand out in the shifts to a more positive evaluation of Gaelic culture and language within Scotland, both of which can be seen as of particular significance in the articulation of Scottish national identity and its place in Britain and Europe more widely. The first is the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth century, a period during which nation-states were being formed throughout Western Europe and during which there was a good deal of 'tradition invention' as nations sought to declare their inevitability through writing themselves back in history.⁸ These developments, and the Romantic movement itself, were thoroughly modern.⁹ The second is the more recent Gaelic renaissance, whose beginnings are largely outside the Highlands, during the 1960s, and which has come to be translated into policies affecting Highland populations more directly during the 1970s and especially since the 1980s. This is a period of ethnic revival and ethnonationalism throughout Western Europe, a time of challenge to the claims of those earlier nation-states to represent the identities of all their inhabitants, and a period of fostering cultural difference in anticipation of greater integration within the European Community.

The more recent renaissance has been characterised by a flourishing of policies aimed at reversing the decline of numbers of people speaking Gaelic; a decline which saw less than 2 per cent (1.71) of the Scottish population reporting as Gaelic-speaking in the 1981 Census (and only 1.37 per cent in the 1991 Census). These policies have included the establishment of Gaelic arts, bilingual and Gaelic education schemes, Gaelic playgroups and Gaelic media (see Table 2.1). At the point when I carried out my ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 'A Quest for Culture': On Anthropology, Authenticity and Ambivalence
• Part I: Histories
• Part II: Identities
• Part III: Cultural Renaissance
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index