Each year, tens of thousands of people flock to Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and to more than two hundred other locations across the country to attend Scottish Highland Games and Gatherings. There, kilt-wearing participants compete in athletics, Highland dancing, and bagpiping, while others join clan societies in celebration of a Scottish heritage. As Celeste Ray notes, however, the Scottish affiliation that Americans claim today is a Highland Gaelic identity that did not come to characterize that nation until long after the ancestors of many Scottish Americans had left Scotland. Ray explores how Highland Scottish themes and lore merge with southern regional myths and identities to produce a unique style of commemoration and a complex sense of identity for Scottish Americans in the South. Blending the objectivity of the anthropologist with respect for the people she studies, she asks how and why we use memories of our ancestral pasts to provide a sense of identity and community in the present. In so doing, she offers an original and insightful examination of what it means to be Scottish in America.

Helen Glenkerry shook her hair back, scooping it up into a ponytail and fastening it with a lace from her sandal lying on the bank. The water in the burn was icy cold and crystal clear. Rolling her white cotton trouser legs up, she pushed some pebbles along the sandy bottom with her toes as the grasses caressed her feet. Closing her eyes and breathing the cool clear air deeply, she knew she would love living here. The horse stood like a statue as James Mcklinross watched the girl. What was she doing here and where had she come from? There was danger here; she would have to go. He walked his horse to the edge of the burn. As she turned and saw him, he blinked; he thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. His voice sounded stern: ‘Where do you think you are going and where have you come from? Don’t you know you are trespassing?’

Festschrift in honor of William Robert Geddes, anthropological field worker.

There has been much academic interest in the role of museums as places where understanding of the past is shaped and legitimised for a wide and increasingly diverse public. This book focuses on the museum representations of the Highland Clearances - a much neglected aspect of one of the most disputed and politically-charged issues in modern Scottish history. Drawing together a range of inter-disciplinary themes and notions, it considers the cultural legacy of the period, brings to light the socially and historically conditioned meanings and values encapsulated in museum narratives of the Clearances, and shows the significance of collective memory in the negotiations inherent in heritage work. Examining both national and local museums in Scotland and concluding with comparisons with Australian museums of migration, Dynamics of Heritage contributes to our understanding of the processes of heritage construction, and its relationship to issues of memory and other modes of engagement with the past.