Relocating the British subject: Ethnographic encounters with identity politics and nationalism during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum

Abstract

In this article, the author uses an ethnographic encounter in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum to explore questions of identity and nationalism in Scotland. During that encounter, he was confronted by his own, sometimes contradictory, thoughts and feelings about Britain, Britishness and Scotland. Taking inspiration from a genre of social scientific writing called ‘ethnographic memoir’, the article is his attempt to work through, and make sense of, those thoughts and feelings, by drawing on the work of both social anthropologists and sociologists who have written about identity, nationalism and legacies of empire in the UK. Following particularly the work of the social anthropologist Georgie Wemyss, who argues that contemporary discourses around ‘Britain’ legitimate what she calls ‘the invisible empire’, it is suggested that affirmations of Britain during the independence referendum helped empower an insidious, but largely taken for granted, discourse of imperial nationalism. This insight allows the author to locate the source of his own disenchantment with the identity label ‘British’. The article concludes with consideration of some of the wider implications this might have for a subdiscipline that calls itself the Anthropology of Britain.