Abstract
With a referendum on Scottish independence proposed for 2014, American Scots is a timely intervention into discussions about Scottish identity. It focuses on the Scottish diaspora, primarily within the United States, and positions this community within the context of global diasporas, comparing it with other émigré groups in Australasia and, closer to home, in England. Methodologically, Sim takes an ethnographic approach, providing excerpts from interviews conducted in 2003 and 2007 with, respectively, 21 American Scots in Colorado and 15 in New York. Two ‘homeland Scots’ are also interviewed. These findings are juxtaposed with a well-balanced literature review and US Census data.
The book is well organized and clearly written. Theoretical frameworks pertaining to diaspora studies, incorporating writing by leading figures such as Cohen, Safran and Butler, provide Sim with the basis to explore reasons for historical emigration from Scotland to North America. These are similar to those found in other diasporas – voluntary and involuntary resettlement, the latter the result of the Jacobite rebellions and Highland clearances. Assessing US understandings of ‘hyphenated identities’ – a phenomenon widely discussed in American academia – Sim illustrates the evolution in attitudes towards immigrants from the assimilationist principle of the ‘melting pot’ to current articulations of multiculturalism with their emphases on searching for ancestral ethnicity. Highlighting the position of Scots in the United States, Sim draws on Novak’s (1971) concept of ‘Saturday ethnics’, the complex idea of ‘symbolic white ethnicity’, and notes similarities with both Welsh and Irish diasporic communities. Historically, Sim maintains, Scots met the idealized American ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ identity, enabling faster Americanization than that available to immigrants from elsewhere.
Sim’s historical overview is comprehensive, detailing Scottish immigration and community formation in North America and the roles of heritage organizations and associated festivities. American Scots emphasizes the changing fortunes of Scottish ethnicity in the United States. Unpopular until the 1990s, Sim suggests the recent increase in American adoration for a distinctly Scottish identity and culture with a Celtic flavour as being largely due to the success of Hollywood blockbusters such as Braveheart. Among the most popular heritage activities for today’s American Scots are Highland Games, clan society events, Gaelic language courses, St Andrew’s balls, Burns Nights, and Tartan Day celebrations. Given this upsurge in Scottish-identifying American residents, Sim examines the increasingly complicated issue of how Scottish identity is understood in North America. On a variety of issues, including the very perception of Scotland, the interviews demonstrate divisions within the American Scottish community between those identifying as Scottish American by ancestry and those that were Scotland-born. Quoting one of his interviewees, Sim notes that some American Scots feel that rather than being Americanized, they are more Scottish than those ‘people who lived in Scotland … [that] became far more anglicised in some ways’ (Ch. 11, p. 140). Another respondent argues for subdividing American-born Scots into ‘Scottish Americans’ and ‘Americans of Scottish descent’ depending on the degree of assimilation (N6, p. 122).
A ‘disjunction between the activities and traditions of American Scots and homeland Scots’ (p. 128), argues Sim, is pervasive, and he describes major differences between these two subgroups in their interpretations of, amongst other things, the ‘invented traditions’, largely unobserved in Scotland, of the Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan – ‘a prayer service that generally begins with a local pipe band leading a procession of officers and members of the St. Andrew’s Society’(p. 126), Tartan Day – a Scottish American festival established by US Congress in 1998, and even dispute over traditional Scottish dancing styles. Canadian examples are briefly recounted, such as that of Nova Scotia where, between 1933 and 1954, the ‘impact of a single individual in promoting a personal vision of “Scottishness”’ (p. 57), saw premier Angus Macdonald build a Scotland-themed provincial identity.
American Scots is a robust analysis of the Scottish community in the USA, providing a substantial overview of its historic formation, its current state, and projecting a future in which events like Homecoming strengthen Scottish American ties to Scotland. Unlike other recent books on the Scottish diaspora (e.g. Devine 2011), Sim’s ethnographic approach provides a detailed description of the diaspora’s current state, the viewpoints of its members, and relations with the homeland. This is both its strength and weakness: the number of interviewees, their geographic distribution, and socio-economic statuses, are far from being exhausted, and Sim misses one of the largest areas of Scottish American identification – the American South. Despite this, American Scots is a valuable addition to discussions of the multiple understandings of Scottish identity, and will appeal to scholars of diaspora, ethnographers, and others interested in the life of émigré groups.