Music and national identity in Scotland: a study of Jock Tamson's Bairns

Abstract

The subject of his article reflects what Robert Crawford has called ‘a growing wariness of notions of an essentialist Scotland’ (1994, p. 57). The article has been written partly as a contribution to the critique of ‘essentialist’ notions of national identity in gerneral and ‘Scottishness’ in particular. I share the concern of Stuart Hall (1990; 1995) and others (Massey 1991; Rose 1995) to challenge ideas which reproduce notions of the ‘boundedness’ or ‘purity’ of territorial and national identities; whilst recognising that such identities are, by definition, only likely to change slowly (Therborn 1995). My approach to the analysis of national identity is to try to follow the ‘social construction of reality’ thinking which informs much current writing on the relationships between ethnicity, place and identity (Jackson and Penrose 1993). From that point of view, regarding Scottish national cultural identity in the late twentieth century,