Scottish Culture Research Articles

Reconstructing the Future: Contemporary Scottish Literature and the Nation

This article examines the recent development in Scottish literature and criticism, away from the critical commonplace that describes how Scottish culture has, in the decades since the 1979 referendum, been aligned with Scottish nationalism. Starting from the definitions of nationalism given by Michael Billig, Michael Ignatieff, Ernest Renan, and the analyses of Scottish historians and cultural nationalists, it shows how what it calls the “representational trope” is at last being abandoned. This renewal of our critical perspective involves looking at the various ways the future can be envisaged, and at the variety of responses to what Riach describes as the fundamental goal for the arts—to further our understanding of our common humanity. Those responses involve for artists the necessity to (re)construct the future rather than to represent the people. By focusing on the works of artists such as James Kelman, James Robertson, Alan Riach, Tom Leonard, Jackie Kay and Kathleen Jamie, but also on some artists’ comments on an independent Scotland, and by using the theoretical framework of Jacques Rancière’s politics of literature, his notions of the various modes of identification for the arts, and of the partition of the sensible, the paper traces the way that Scottish writers today engage with a renewed, more fluid myth of Scotland, and focuses on literature’s capacity to build what Rancière describes as the hermeneutics of the social body.

From The Adoption Papers to Fiere: Jackie Kay's Writing and Scottish Multiculturalism

The essay discusses Jackie Kay’s writing in the context of her complex Scottish-Nigerian identity. Despite the marginalisation in terms of race, ethnic origin, sexuality which she describes in her texts, she has not only become a mainstream author but was also appointed as the Makar, the National Poet for Scotland in 2016. Thus the essay seeks to situate Kay in contemporary Scottish culture, which has moved to a high appreciation of voices coming from the margins. It focuses on the role that Kay has played in reinventing Scotland, a nation rapidly losing its recent homogeneity, where the peripheral has moved towards the centre. Furthermore, it examines the representations of ethnicity in Kay’s works and to explore the powerful theme of identity and difference in Scottish society refl ected in her work, demonstrating how the cultural identity represented in her writing involves being both inside and outside Scotland.

Richard Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious. Joyce and Scottish Culture, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017

Enseignant-chercheur a l’Universite de Nanyang a Singapour, Richard Barlow, specialiste en etudes croisees irlando-ecossaises, propose dans The Celtic Unconscious une approche inedite de l’influence qu’eut l’Ecosse sur l’ecriture de James Joyce, et en particulier sur celle de Finnegans Wake. Objet de trop rares investigations critiques, la presence ecossaise dans l’œuvre et la pensee de Joyce est ici abordee par le biais de micro-analyses et d’exercices de ...

A phenomenological investigation of altruism from the perspective of counsellors in Scotland

AbstractAim/PurposeThis phenomenological investigation sought to describe how counsellors (n = 9), residing in Scotland, experience altruistic caring in their personal and professional lives. This study is an extension of a research line of qualitative studies focused on a model of altruism development. The purpose is to focus on practising counsellors’ common experiences as they relate to altruistic caring and to describe the phenomenon that occurs within the context of the Altruism Development Model (ADM) (Curry, Smith & Robinson, 2009).MethodologyThis study is a phenomenological research design. The research team obtained permission from the institutional review board (IRB) to conduct in‐depth interviews and record observations. A diverse group of practising counsellors, living in Scotland, were interviewed. Moustaka's (1994) transcendental approach was used to analyse the data, to provide a new perspective from previous studies. More specifically, the research team conducted horizontalisation and developed structural and textural descriptions to describe the phenomenon.FindingsThe findings provide support for the ADM. The textural description of participants’ experiences of altruism is that their experiences are complex, and sometimes conflicting. The structural description of participants’ experiences of altruism is that it is a part of themselves. Counsellors in Scotland experience altruism as part of everyday life and view it as an expectation, and counsellors in Scotland recognise that altruism can include wellness and self‐care and that these are important to be an effective counsellor.Research LimitationsAll the participants were members of a professional organisation and self‐selected to be a part of the study. Additionally, the researchers’ culture may have influenced the way they analysed the findings.ImplicationsAltruism is a socially learned attribute, and it is highly regarded in Scottish culture. Therefore, counsellors may want to explore the influence of culture within a client's life, in relation to altruism. Additionally, exploring the constructs of altruism and self‐care for clients may be an important step in a holistic assessment.

Alliteration, America and Authorship: The Television Drama of John Byrne

Creative polymath John Byrne enjoys a secure and substantial international reputation within the graphic and theatrical arts, and as a seminal figure within late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century Scottish culture. Yet Byrne’s sustained engagement with screenwriting and screen directing practices between the late 1980s and late 1990s constitutes a critically under-examined aspect of his career to date. Moreover, such neglect is also symptomatic of a wider lack of attention paid to television within the study of modern Scottish culture. This article casts light on an important aspect of, and period within, Byrne’s creativity to date. In doing so, it also seeks to offer an illustrative demonstration of television drama’s relevance to the questions of changing identity politics – national, subnational and supranational – that have dominated Scottish cultural studies in recent decades. The article achieves those aims through extended textual analysis of Byrne’s two best-known screen works, the television serials Tutti Frutti (1987) and Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990). It identifies and discusses a range of common thematic preoccupations (the influence of American culturewithin post-Second World War Scotland; changing patterns of Scottish gender identities) and authorialapproaches (intense linguistic experimentation; use of popular cultural intertexts to impart narrativestructure and substance) shared by the two works. In this way, the article establishes both some of the idiosyncratic defining terms of Byrne’s televisual practice and some of the reasons why these have rendered him such an important figure within Scottish culture since the late 1970s.

Divided We Stand, United We Falter? Social Movements in Scotch Whisky Distilling, 1680 – 1940

Organizational forms rarely go uncontested, with various societal actor groups seeking to influence forms’ legitimacy, thereby affecting organizational vital rates. Yet our understanding of the effectiveness of social movement coalitions (SMCs), the banding together of these actors to jointly pursue shared goals, remains limited. Our focus is on the professional whisky distilleries of Scotland, from their emergence in 1680 until their mothballing in 1940. During a centuries-long struggle, temperance associations, the Church of Scotland, and Liberal Party politicians challenged distilleries on moral and legal grounds, framing them as sources of societal depravation and erosion of the moral character of the Scots. As a countermovement, whisky industry associations, in coalition with industry-sponsored charities and Conservative Party politicians, highlighted distilleries’ important economic role and their symbolic value as emblems of Scottish culture. Our analysis shows that both groups of actors, when acting alone in either societal or political arenas, had intuitive negative and positive effects on the survival of whisky distilleries. However, when banding together in coalitions, the net effects on organizational failure rates wane.

Learning a New Language, Taking up a New Culture: Language and Culture Differences between Scottish Highland and Lowland in the 18th Century Reflected in R. L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped

<p><em>R. L. Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped takes Scottish Jacobite rebellions as its background and reflects resistance of Scottish people under British rule in the first half of the 18th century. Though within the same Scottish nation, the two heroes, Lowland boy David and Highland rebel Alan, have shown sharp contrasts in languages, political stands, moral standards and cultural values. Their contrasts reveal the binary opposition of Lowland and Highland cultures in the 18th century and can be explained by Fanon’s theory about language and culture differences within the same nation. In Kidnapped, the Lowland characters despise their own native culture, and regard the Highlanders who still keep traditional Scottish culture and language as “savage”. Therefore, they reject their own native culture and language, and have to completely depend on the English language and culture. The main goal of this article is to illustrate that learning a language also means taking up a culture, and it is essential to cultivate cultural awareness for English language teaching and culture teaching for foreign languages learners.</em></p>

Access, Place and Australian Live Music

The role of place in cultivating artistic practice, communities and audiences is well established and the economic, social and cultural benefits that flow from this are becoming better understood. By contrast, the factors impacting and influencing access to these places is poorly theorised. This paper identifies and examines these factors as they apply to live music in Australia, through a qualitative survey of live music patrons and venues. We compare the themes identified from our data with existing theories of access in the arts, with a particular focus on the ways in which place-based music scenes may encourage or exclude participation. We address the question of how access affects participation within these scenes, as well as how access might be improved.

From the individual, to the relational and communal: the Kirk’s influence on three Scottish thinkers: Ronald Fairbairn, John Macmurray and Ian Suttie

ABSTRACTThere has been growing interest in recent years around Scottish intellectual history, especially those ideas associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. There has been less attention given to the possible influence of the established church, the Church of Scotland, in this history. Indeed, ‘the Kirk’, when it is mentioned, can be assumed to have imposed a narrow and repressive influence on Scottish life and culture. This article seeks to introduce some nuance to this view. It takes as its starting point, the fact that significant Scottish thinkers have grown up in and have been deeply influenced by their religious upbringings. It begins to explore some of the similarities in the thinking of three Scottish thinkers, the psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn, the philosopher John Macmurray and the psychotherapist Ian Suttie, whose lives were contemporaneous. Their ideas all evince a view of humankind, perhaps drawing on their religious beliefs, not as disparate individuals but as members of a community with intentions to carry out good acts.

Scottish Cultures of Collecting on the Northwest Coast of North America, 1820s to 1860s

This article presents two Scottish museum collections as case studies for exploring cultures of collecting on the mid-nineteenth-century Northwest Coast of Canada. The collections of fur trader Colin Robertson (1833) and geologist James Hector (1861) reflect the transformations in value of Indigenous material culture from the Enlightenment to the Victorian period in Britain, and this article examines the uses to which they were put. Exploring the motivations of the collectors, the article argues that collections researchers should look beyond these privileged ‘cultures of collecting’. Rather, official collectors could be productively used as entry points into the stories of those who brokered collections, whose contributions to knowledge of the social and cultural dynamics of colonialism have been overlooked.

The network of Scottish newtonianism from David Gregory to Thomas Reid

How and when the Newtonian science came and won his intellectual battles in Scotland, during the Eighteenth century? This case-study try to answer with an historical research about the relationships between Newton's science and Enlightenment Scottish culture, also rethinking the works of so many protagonists of the academic life, in the period 1680-1800: a true geography of the Newtonian scientific and philosophical legacy, during a central century for the developments of the European modern thought, also in the Continent.

Jockey and Jenny: English Broadside Ballads and the Invention of Scottishness

This essay examines the images of Scots portrayed in English broadside ballads of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, ballads on political themes most often portrayed the “blue caps” of Scotland as traitors and rebels. On the other hand, the wooing ballads of the period promoted an idealized “north country” as backdrop to the amorous adventures of “Jockey” and “Jenny.” Adam Fox argues that the “Scotch” tunes composed for songbooks, plays, and broadsides in London during the late seventeenth century came to be adopted by the popular press in Scotland as it developed over the following generations. As a result, melodies of English provenance were naturalized north of the border and entered the repertoire of “Caledonian airs” that were to become such a defining feature of Scottish culture in the Georgian age.

Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealandby Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon

Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand, by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon. Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. xx, 412 pp. $100 Cdn (cloth). Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand is an inter-disciplinary exploration of the Scottish emigrant experience in New Zealand. While historians have long claimed that New Zealand was more influenced by Scottish culture than anywhere else outside of Scotland, this is the first work to examine these claims in-depth and analyze the ways in which Scots negotiated with and affected their new environment. With the recent increase in ethnic and migration history, principally with regards to the Scottish diaspora, this book provides a particularly welcome, indeed needed, addition to present scholarship. The book is roughly organized into four parts. Following the first chapter, which explains the work's rationale and methodology, chapters two and three examine the statistical research used for the project. They provide a rigorous analysis of the movements, demographics and communities of Scots in New Zealand over different phases of settlement. Through a series of comparative studies of Scottish communities in New Zealand and Scotland, these chapters provide the quantitative groundwork for the more focused case studies that follow. The following section, encompassing chapters four through seven, looks at the impact that Scots had on New Zealand society, through examinations of their economic successes in relation to other British emigrants (particularly the English), their participation in civil society, their impact on the New Zealand environment, and their participation in Scottish ethnic associational culture. Chapters eight and nine examine the ways in which Scots maintained (or relinquished) their Scottishness within the private sphere; exploring the ways that the Scottish emigrants engaged with Scottish and colonial literature, religion, leisure activities and folkways. Finally, Chapter ten places the experience of Scots in New Zealand in a global context. Each chapter challenges long-held stereotypes, explaining why they were created and presenting the realities. One of the main contributions of this book is its successful demonstration of the duality of the Scottish New Zealand experience, one of two conflicting, yet at the same time congruous, cultures--Scottish and British. By primarily employing case studies, this work provides a robust analysis of the ways in which Scots shaped their identity in relation to the land of their ancestors, but also to the land they lived in. Not driven by generalizations based on stereotypes but by quantitative and qualitative data and research, this work provides an unrivalled examination of the Scottish migrant's understanding of themselves in the New Zealand landscape, society, and culture. …

Winifred Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy: a case study in the overlap of psychotherapy, Christianity and New Age spirituality.

The activities of both Winifred Rushforth (1885-1983), and the Edinburgh-based Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy (1941-73) which she directed, exemplify and elaborate the overlap in Scotland of religious discourses and practices with psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Even as post-war secularization began to affect Scottish culture and society, Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic attempted to renew the biographical discourses of Christianity using the idioms and practices of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Furthermore, alongside these Christian-inflected activities, Rushforth promoted a psychoanalytically-informed New Age spirituality. This parallel mode of belief and practice drew on Christian life-narrative patterns, preserving them within psychoanalytic forms grafted onto a vitalist worldview informed by the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

OA14 Good life, good death, good grief: changing scottish culture.

Social harms are caused in Scotland because of a cultural reluctance to be open about death, dying and bereavement, and there is growing recognition of the importance of promoting culture change relating to these issues. Good Life, Good Death, Good Grief (GLGDGG) was established to make Scotland a place where there is more openness about death, dying and bereavement. Led and supported by the Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care, GLGDGG follows an "assets-based" approach-engaging, supporting and enhancing the assets of others. GLGDGG has: assisted in mobilising the assets of communities (eg through establishing small grants schemes and focal points of activity like To Absent Friends.) influenced policy (eg key messages incorporated within significant publications) found innovative ways of achieving impact on minimal resources (eg Death on the Fringe) A national alliance to encourage and guide activity is helpful in engaging communities and shaping policy.

Scotland the Brand – Marketing the Myth?

The paper considers the role of Scottish culture and history, real or imagined, in the commercialisation of iconic Scottish creations such as tartan and Scotch whisky. It notes that many of the forms of legal protection available to the producers of such products were developed to encourage individual innovation, not designed to address communal interests in the preservation of national or group identities and heritage. This may be one reason why, as is illustrated by the case of tartan, these rights offer patchy and incomplete protection to ‘authentic’ Scottish products. Over time, however, the UK has developed various forms of collective protection for cultural products such as Harris Tweed, the effectiveness of which is explored in this article. The final part of the paper considers the importance, in a globalising world, of European Union and international protection for valuable cultural ‘products’. But protection, whether at the national or international level, necessitates a difficult balance to be drawn between the interest in cultural innovation and development, on the one hand, and cultural preservation and the protection of the commercial interests of specific communities, on the other. The article concludes by exploring some of the practical and conceptual challenges associated with determining whether a product should be considered part of the cultural patrimony of the world or, rather, the property of a specific nation or cultural group. ‘…cultural diversity is strengthened by the free flow of ideas, and…is nurtured by constant exchanges and interaction between cultures…’ (Preamble to the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions)

'Placardes and Billis and Ticquettis of Defamatioun': Queen Mary, the Mermaid and the Hare

Placards circulating in Edinburgh following the murder of Henry Darnley in 1567, depicting Quuen Mary as a seductive mermaid and Darnley as a timid but lecherous here, are shown to copy details from two emblems in Claude Pardin's Devises heroiques. Once stripped of their Latin mottoes, these emblems are not easy to make sense of, and the two variant copies of the placards which are preserved in the English National Archives at Kew raise issues of meaning, from and function surrounding such public documents, which are explored in this article. The historical circumstances of their display in Scotland are examined, together with documents identifying James Murray as their 'deviser'. This leads to a wider discussion of the place of emblems in Scottish culture at this period in relation to other forms of political and judicial publication, variously known as 'placards', 'bills', 'libels', German 'Schandbilder' and Scots 'baffles', these being genres which have not hitherto been identified as strongly emblematic or indebted to printed emblem books. The scholarly and often erudite basis of emblems is always likely to have problematised their use in such popular, public displays, and the iconography of the 'Mermaid and Hare' must not only have challenged early viewers unfamiliar with the emblems on which it was based, but remains unclear in a few of its details even now when its sources in Paradin have been identified. Its political effectiveness in its own day is not, however, in doubt.

Militia Chieftains: Profiling the Founders of the "Canadian Scottish"

Little academic study has been conducted into the backgrounds of the men who chose to found regiments of Canadian militia in the pre-1914 period which were influenced on Scottish military traditions. This article seeks to redress the balance by profiling the backgrounds of the founders of the four militia regiments which contributed officers and men to the 16th Battalion, CEF in 1914. By examining key areas such as place of birth, ethnicity, wealth, religion, military experience, and political affiliation, the article shows the “types” of men who became involved in the formation of Scottish-themed militia regiments and highlights the importance of Scottish associational culture in the regiments’ establishment.

The Paradox of Scottish Political Culture

Scottish political culture adhered to a form of universalism from the Enlightenment until quite recently. In that sense, it denied its own distinctiveness, asserting as part of the very definition of the nation that national distinctiveness ought to be subsumed into liberal principles that are applicable everywhere and at all times. These universalistic ideas changed as society changed, and became more truly universal with the advent of universal democracy and the end of Empire. They are one reason why Scotland remained attached to the British union, and indeed Britain itself came to embody the concept of universalism from the middle of the eighteenth century until well after the middle of the twentieth. Recent Scottish political assertion has, however, moved away from this self-confident universalism. The article discusses the implications for the current debate about Scottish independence of both the longer history and the recent change.

Glasgow, Anti-Urbanism and the Scottish Literary Renaissance

This paper examines the origins, characteristics, defining role and continuing legacy of the anti-urban discourses of the Scottish Literary Renaissance. As part of the endeavour to revitalise Scottish culture, some writings by Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and George Blake represent Glasgow in particular as a victim and agent of industrialisation and modernity, and characterise the city as a threat to a supposedly more authentic conceptualisation of ‘Scottishness’. Anti-urbanism continues to condition the trajectory of modern Scottish urban writing. Later writers – such as Edward Gaitens, Archie Hind, Alasdair Gray and Alan Spence – often ‘write back to the Renaissance’ by confirming the multifaceted reputation of Glasgow as a source of both despair and creative inspiration, as something to write about and against.