Abstract
This is a book about people and place, Scots and Scotland. More precisely it is about place in time, about remembrance and Scottish memory. It is an elegantly written volume and the product of major scholarship, original research and great discernment. There is an easy way of reading it and a much more challenging one. The easy way is to treat it as a collection of disparate essays, some of which make especially innovative use of films and photographs when analysing visions of Scotland. The more challenging is to accept it as a book organized around a unifying claim which will appeal to many Scots but which is hard to verify, namely that the way Scots are Scottish is qualitatively different from the modes of belonging other nationals have with their homelands.
In the first essay, Blaikie considers the legacy of Adam Ferguson, and in particular his conception of civil society as the locus in which citizens must work out how to live an ethical life in the modern world. The institutions and practices of a civil society distinct from England’s were to secure for stateless Scots not just their national identity but also, Blaikie implies, a moral outlook of their own. The second essay examines the ‘sociology’ of John Grierson, the Scot who was central to the development of British documentary film-making. Grierson’s films showed how ordinary people lived in peace and war. Seemingly realistic, they were actually, as Grierson himself said, an interpretation of how people lived, and one consistent with his belief that ‘It is only through the State that the person and the will of the person can be greatly expressed’ (quoted, p. 81) – not a sentiment Blaikie, the admirer of Ferguson, could ever endorse.
There follow two essays on ‘placing identities’. In ‘Among the wee Nazareths’, Blaikie examines myths of moral community – variations on the ‘parish paradigm’ – associated with, inter alia, Kailyard literature, Hugh MacDiarmid’s repudiation of metropolitanism, the depoliticized cultural subnationalism that has so exasperated Tom Nairn, the homeliness that marks the output of the Dundee publisher D.C. Thomson, and the ‘urban kailyard myths’ of not-so-wee red Clydeside. Critics of these variations deplore their popularity because, as they see it, preoccupation with the parochial is an impediment to the development of national political consciousness. Blaikie is not so dismissive: ‘since myths of community run deep in social memory, the representation of neighbourhood feeling plays a considerable part in evoking the lineages and lineaments of identity’ (p. 129). The other essay on landscapes, cultures and belonging includes incisive comment on Highlandism, H.V. Morton’s travels in Scotland, the ‘emotional geography’ of belonging, and the artifice of ‘unspoilt nature’.
The last two essays on ‘local visions’ draw upon photographic archives of the Western and Northern Isles and of the Gorbals to explore such issues as the deconstruction of invented tradition, the recognition of staged authenticity, and ‘the cultural topography of remembered experience’. What Blaikie makes of his material is highly sophisticated but it is a pity he never asked any focus groups of locals or other Scots what they made of them.
Blaikie’s introductory and concluding chapters address more directly the big question that underlies the essays: ‘Is there something peculiar about the Scots, rather than the English or the French or whoever?’ (p. 1) – peculiar that is with respect to shared remembrance, collective being and national belonging. Blaikie suspects there is but never quite confirms it. This is partly because the concept ‘social imaginary’ is an amorphous confection of the who, how and what of imagination, and partly because the question is unanswerable without comparative study. A singularly Scottish civil society proved key to sustaining Scottish difference and thereby Scottish nationhood, and the salience of ‘not English’ in being Scottish has not an equivalent in many other nations. But much else Blaikie discusses – moral community, fluctuating or attenuated loyalty to the state, and iconic representations of landscape, for example – is not peculiar to Scotland.