Transatlantic Scots

welcomed.

Introduction

Celeste Ray

Most Americans have no idea that April 6 is National Tartan Day and would probably have to be told that tartan is what they might call plaid. Those who know are avid in their knowledge. Scottish Americans organize tartan balls, bagpipe parades (the ten thousand pipers strutting through New York City in 2002 were hard to miss), and Scottish heritage weeks (the St. Andrew’s Society of Baltimore, Maryland, declared a Scottish-American History and Heritage Month for April 1999). Local Scottish-American heritage societies put on Kirkin’s of the Tartan (church services) like that I attended on Tartan Day 2003 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The venue was Chattanooga’s First Cumberland Presbyterian Church, an imposing modified gothic structure of local quartzite. After receiving a few welcoming hugs from tartan-draped acquaintances, and having resisted their inducements to participate in similar garb, I slipped into one of the back pews just before 11 A.M. As the local bagpipe band played Highland Cathedral, members of the city’s Scottish society solemnly processed down the central aisle carrying pieces of their clan tartans. After a roll call of the clans represented, the congregation was reminded that whatever their ethnic origins, all are part of Clan Dia, the children of God. The remainder of the worship service was decidedly typical of the sedate Cumberland Presbyterian denomination (originating in 1802 in Scots- and Scots-Irish-settled Tennessee and Kentucky).

The minister’s main reference to the aberration in that Sunday’s liturgy was to note, with some amusement, that the Chattanooga event had been mentioned the previous evening on the BBC in London. That a Chattanooga happening would be of interest to Londoners surprised many participants who have had much more exposure to British marketers peddling a tartan heritage than to Scottish (and English) criticisms of their penchant for the same. Most were unaware that their claims to a hyphenated identity would be met with anything but goodwill, that they would be part of what the British media dubs America’s Tartaneers,¹ or of the debate churning in the British newspapers and journals over North Americans’ use of Scottish symbols in the name of heritage.²

Having monitored or engaged in these debates, the contributors to this volume are academics from the disciplines of history, anthropology, folklore, sociology, and literary criticism. Most have pursued the subjects they cover for over a decade, and some for three. Our conversations began with a panel I organized at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco in 2000.³ Considering different facets of the Scottish heritage movement in the United States and Canada, and often from opposing viewpoints, the product of our discourse is not a united perspective. Our shared interests lie in examining the public performance and creation of tradition as well as the renegotiation of history and cultural memory into heritage. We seek to understand the ways in which historical moments are selected to shape identity and how the Scottish heritage movement relates to the wider surge of interest in ethnicity in North America since the 1960s. In this introduction I wish to provide a brief summary of scholarship on Scots in North America and to discuss the challenges of studying those who will read what we write about them.

Transatlantic Scots as Subjects

If Scottish accounts of hyphenated Scots abroad have recently become more voluminous and critical, Scottish Americans and Scottish Canadians have been the subjects of domestic, if mostly filiopietistic, scholarship for at least a century and a half. President Woodrow Wilson famously remarked that every line of strength in American history is a line colored with Scottish blood. Prior to the ethnic revivals of the 1960s and 1970s, few other ethnic groups had received as much scholarly, or popular, attention.⁴ By the mid-nineteenth century, North American scholars had begun to document Scottish influences on their respective nations. In the United States in 1856, George Chambers published one of the first, and much emulated, works on the Principles, Virtues, Habits and Public Usefulness of the Scots-Irish settlers of Pennsylvania. Intellectual accounts of Scots in British North America proved popular by 1880. In that year Sir James MacPherson LeMoine delivered a paper to the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec titled The Scot in New France: An Ethnological Study, and William Jordan Rattray published the first of three volumes titled The Scots in British North America.⁵

The long tradition of examining the seemingly disproportionate influence of Scottish and Scots-Irish intellectual thought on North American culture and politics includes Charles A. Hanna’s The Scotch-Irish (or the Scot in North Britain, North Ireland and North America) (1902); Wilfred Campbell’s The Scotsman in Canada (1911); George Fraser Black’s Scotland’s Mark on America (1921); John H. Finley’s The Coming of the Scot (1940); James A. Roy’s The Scot and Canada (1947); and T. J. Wertenbaker’s Early Scottish Contributions to the United States (1945), to name but a few. These volumes provide long lists of Scottish inventors, scientists, millionaires, celebrities, and politicians of Scottish origins: thirty-one U.S. presidents are claimed to have some documented Scottish ancestry; as are twenty-one of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence (only two being native Scots, John Witherspoon and James Wilson); and two-thirds of the first thirteen governors of states.⁶ The repeating motif of such publications is America’s intellectual and cultural debt to Scotland.⁷

Similarly, in March 2003 the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, Sir David Steel, could recite a similar litany of Scottish influences in Canada during a talk with Scottish community representatives in Ottawa: over 4 million people, or 13% of the Canadian population, list themselves as being of Scots descent in the census . . . Not only should we acknowledge our shared history, we must celebrate it . . . The first governor in what is now Canada was Sir William Alexander of Scotland . . . The first two Canadian Prime Ministers were both native-born Scots, and so on. Stories of influential Scots are similar in other former British colonies, and while their influence was not always benign regarding native inhabitants, their successes have allowed diasporic communities to put a bright face on the traumas of exile and immigration (Harper 2003; Calder 2003; Hewitson 1998; Reid 1976).

In Canada, recent publications on notable Scots and their roles in Canadian history include Jenni Calder’s Scots in Canada and Matthew Shaw’s Great Scots!: How the Scots Created Canada (both 2003). Those popular with hyphenated Scots across the continent include Duncan Bruce’s hagiographic The Mark of the Scots: Their Astonishing Contributions to History, Science, Democracy, Literature, and the Arts (1996); Stewart Lamont’s When Scotland Ruled the World: The Story of the Golden Age of Genius, Creativity, and Exploration (2001); and Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001). (Herman’s book has been much debated in the media on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in Scotland—perhaps as Scots, harboring a lingering Presbyterian fear of pride, hate to be admired.⁸) In the United States, Billy Kennedy’s The Making of America: How the Scots-Irish Shaped a Nation (2001) and Michael Fry’s Bold, Independent, Unconquer’d, and Free: How the Scots Made America Safe for Liberty, Democracy, and Capitalism (2003) appear at Scottish-American community events.

The last, by Fry, is the most recent installment crediting Scots for inspiring American independence. Much has been made of the influence of Scot John Witherspoon (first president of Princeton University) on the Declaration of Independence. (He did get Thomas Jefferson to remove a condemnation of Scotch and other foreign mercenaries from a draft.) In Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978), Garry Wills suggested that the document drew more on the Scottish than the French Enlightenment (Howe 1989, 572). Similar arguments followed Wills. Archie Turnbull (1986) suggested that despite his aversion to Scottish Tories, Thomas Jefferson modeled the Declaration of Independence on the 1320 Scottish Declaration of Arbroath.

Yet, contrary to the celebrated influence of Scottish thinkers, Scots in America were often reviled in the colonial period. Jacob Price noted that in the tobacco-growing Chesapeake, Scots were disliked for their business success and the influence of Glasgow firms on the tobacco trade in Virginia and Maryland (1954, 198–99; see also Brock 1982, 48–49; and Devine 1975). Margaret Sanderson and Alison Lindsay assert, It could almost be said that Scotland ‘exported’ administrators to the American colonies. The Scots Governors and Lieutenant Governors, generally efficient and hard-headed, were no more beloved as a rule than their merchant fellow-Scots (1994, 4). During the American Revolution, a Williamsburg pamphleteer, Scotus Americanus, wrote acidly about Scottish Highlanders and their reasons for emigrating to remind them why they should not be Loyalists (as so many Highlanders were) (Meyer 1957, 144). Andrew Hook notes that the American revulsion against the Scots lasted at least as long as the war. From a statute passed by the Georgia Assembly in August 1782, Hook quotes, the People of Scotland have in General Manifested a decided inimicality to the Civil liberties of America, and as a result, no Scot was to be allowed to settle, or carry on any kind of trade, in Georgia, unless he had supported the patriotic side (1975, 69). In view of the popularity of all things Scottish in the United States today, this strong resentment against the Scots might seem surprising; especially when it is considered that Georgia was the state where Scots constituted the highest proportion of the population.

By the close of the War of 1812, however, anti-Scottish sentiment had mellowed to the point that Sir Walter Scott’s Hail to the Chief was played to honor the end of hostilities and the late George Washington. The Scottish song has announced the arrival of the American chief executive to formal occasions since 1828.⁹ How did Scots, so maligned as economically grasping, unpatriotic, and supporters of tyrants in the eighteenth century, become idealized for their contributions to American independence and culture less than a century later? A partial answer to this question lies in understanding the contrasting experiences of the three different Scottish ethnic groups who came to the colonies (Highland, Lowland, and Ulster Scots). While in British North America the Ulster Scots were simply known as Irish, in the United States they became Scots-Irish. As I will detail in chapter 2, for the United States, each group had different settlement patterns, cultural traditions, and politics. In Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, Highland imagery had come to represent the Scottish national identity, so that by the time Chambers wrote of the Scots-Irish public usefulness and virtues in 1856, he was writing for an audience well versed in Sir Walter Scott’s novels and notions of things Scottish as romantically Highland; an audience that had begun to perceive their Highland, Lowland, and Ulster Scots ancestors as collectively and similarly Scottish in a fashion their ancestors might not have recognized. When Scottish contributions to early American life began to be examined academically, the ethnic divisions so important in that time period had long since diminished or been forgotten. By this time, too, more foreign immigrants were arriving on U.S. shores, making Scots seem very American indeed.

In 1954 the William and Mary Quarterly devoted an issue to examining links between Scotland and America. Providing a survey of writings in Scottish-American history, George Shepperson noted that to examine the Scottish contribution to American development may seem, at first, a well-worn theme (1954, 163). Shepperson would perhaps not be surprised that five decades later, scholars of many disciplines still debate the subject as if it were fresh.¹⁰ This collection’s novelty lies in addressing popular perceptions of Scottish heritage and the shape of transatlantic Scottish communities as indicative of the meaning of ethnicity in an age of multicultural awareness and globalization.

Cultural Relativism at Home

Much of the analysis in this book considers how history and heritage diverge. However, we do not critically examine the heritage lore of hyphenated Scots as a hollow exercise in deconstruction; instead we wish to explore how heritage is created and why some historical events, rather than others, shape public ritual and familial memories. That a tradition is invented does not detract from its present meaning to those who emotionally invest in its practice. While historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) prompted a scholarly fad in debunking the invention of tradition, all traditions are invented at some point and are continually reinvented in different contexts (see Giddens 1991, 150). Rather than simply highlight the inventiveness of symbolic ethnicities, and of multiculturalism more generally, we strive to examine the reasons behind the selection of traditions and hyphenated identities.

Maintaining objectivity is perhaps easier when examining the cultures of others far from home, and offering a neutral analysis of cultural viewpoints within our own cultures has been a challenge for contributors. The interdisciplinary and international team of authors in this volume have varied reasons for becoming interested in Scottish heritage movements (as will readers). While all ideas of culture and ethnicity are to some extent reified, some contributors write with objections to the particular style of reification and objectification of their national or regional identity. What the Scottish diaspora conceives as Scottish can be excruciating for Scots. While we research a common subject, our disciplinary training and approaches do sometimes position us in opposing camps. For example, some contributors (Vance, Hook, McArthur) contest the applicability of diaspora in referencing the transatlantic Scottish experience, while those contributors who emphasize fieldwork, especially with descendants of Highland, Gaelic-speaking Scots (Basu, Bennett, Dembling, Ray), are more likely to describe transatlantic Scots as they describe themselves, as a diaspora. Some contributors write with the judgment and critical viewpoint of historians, but none are apologists, and most strive for the respect folklorists grant their subjects.

Until recently, anthropological ethnographers had remained reticent about studying at home, and scholars, largely from literary criticism, began studying our culture without the fieldwork methods or cultural relativism of anthropology. Culture Studies developed in the 1980s with perceptive scholars who wanted to examine culture without spending the time ethnographic fieldwork demands. Cultural critics, who are often trained as literary critics, try to avoid what in literary study has been called the intentional fallacy—the fallacy being the assumption that the meaning of a text could be discovered by determining the author’s intention. Cultural critics trust the tale, not the teller, while ethnographic fieldworkers particularly seek the intentions and experience of those performing and participating in public rituals.¹¹ Rather than document ethnic boundary markers employed in the claiming of identity and then condemn or condone cultural practices and beliefs according to what we think we know about such symbols, ethnographic fieldwork requires that we ask with an open mind what those who employ symbols believe themselves to be communicating. To write about cultural events as if they were text and to trust only the tale and not the teller can be an exercise in mythmaking itself. Historians rightly question the value of sources relying on secondhand material, and anthropologists likewise question cultural studies scholars’ reliance on Web sites and second- or third- or fourth-hand reports without being there in the field (see Nugent and Shore 1997; Knauft 1996). It is perhaps more appealing to be in the field when one is a novelty in another culture and so certainly marginal. Respectfully studying the bizarre beliefs and practices of one’s own neighbors (with whom one is presumed to share some common cultural ground and expectations and therefore with whom one may become more readily frustrated or annoyed) is a different type of challenge.

Scholars, and perhaps westerners in general, are more willing to be tolerant of folk beliefs of other people. We also tend to be intrigued and charmed by folk beliefs in our own societies of other periods (folk usually implying pre-modern). We are interested in arguments such as Alexander Carmichael’s that songs and poetry modeled on a Celtic liturgy survived in the Western Isles into the nineteenth century (1992). We are amazed that John Lorne Campbell recorded tales from the Fenian Cycle on South Uist in the 1950s (D. Smith 2001, 36; Campbell 1990). We allow ourselves to be fascinated by antiquarian accounts of fairy belief surviving in Britain and Ireland into the twentieth century. However, we are dismissive, embarrassed, and even outraged at what we could call folk beliefs about heritage in our own societies today. After almost two decades of academic deconstruction, we self-righteously determine to disabuse people of their beliefs. Story collectors of one hundred, or even forty, years ago took delight in finding the most isolated of people in their own societies and learning about how they perceived the world. What makes the difference?

Unlike the folklore collectors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, today we assume that there is always a political, perhaps even racist, reason for the creation of heritage lore and urban legends. Perhaps because of our own privileges of education, technology, and exposure to the media, we expect unemotional rationalism of everyone in our own societies—it is obligatory. Any belief—for example, in fantastic ancestral origins—that seems retrograde or unsupported by contemporary scholarship is assumed to be held for ill-intentioned motives; hence the invective against white ethnics in the 1960s and 1970s and the righteous tone of many whiteness studies in the 1990s. Or perhaps scholars become so irritated at those like themselves who choose to believe, for example, that Native Americans never crossed the Bering Strait but were created in the Grand Canyon,¹² that Mexico’s Olmecs and their monuments are really African in origin, or that Clan Gunn discovered America,¹³ because of the pseudo-academic language and style in which such stories are often presented. Perhaps scholars are more skeptical because the medium of communication is no longer the local storyteller at a hearth, but more often the seemingly legitimacy-granting Internet. Perhaps having the luxury of sitting around thinking about and critiquing others’ thoughts, we cannot imagine believing as they do and cannot imagine why anyone like us would either. Each generation of scholars refashions history, yet the lag between popular culture and the truth, as academics currently preach it, can frustrate attempts at relativism in the study of heritage and identity politics (see Englund 2002; Baron and Spitzer 1992; and Jenkins 2002).

Before literacy was common and before ethnographies were read by their subjects, storytellers imitated others they most respected. It is therefore no surprise that today’s storytellers imitate the academic style adopted by money-making television networks that purport to be educational (for example, The Learning Channel or The Discovery Channel). How much time do academics spend in the classroom undoing the scholarly television productions on pseudo-science fantasies like those of Barry Fell (who claimed that Egyptians, Celts, Libyans, and Basques colonized America by 800 B.C.) or of those who are still looking for an Atlantis that Plato invented as a model Utopia. And what scholar has not groaned at such a production in his or her field only to hear colleagues in other disciplines remark on how fascinating they found it?¹⁴ As in the past, the more fabulous the tale, the more often people want to hear it.

Scholars and culture critics critique contemporary conceptions of heritage as inauthentic, fallacious, or even absurd, yet heritage is not history nor even necessarily historical. Heritage may make history happy, grievance-ridden, or appealingly tragic, but it is always in flux; it is difficult to pin down and, like expressions of ethnic identity, it varies according to context. Why do people want to believe in a particular vision of heritage? Perhaps for some it is a belief that their origins are superior to all others; for some this belief may become political and may structure their alliances and social activities. Sometimes ethnic identities are primarily political and need to be examined as such. However, except in the case of ethnic supremacists and nationalists, ethnic identities are not always political, but endure or revive to fill other needs (for familial harmony, for a sense of self, for community, for the pleasure and fun that their celebration brings). For many, having any sort of ancient origins is emotionally appealing—even if they be tribal, a-literate, supposedly battle-mad, origins of an agro-pastoralist Highland clan. Commenting on representations of Scottishness in the film Braveheart (which has sparked debates about Scottish identity as if it had been a documentary rather than a movie), Tim Edensor noted it may be emotional authenticity rather than historical accuracy that satisfies audiences (2002, 156; for more on the use and abuse of Braveheart, see McArthur 2003).

At the Kirkin’ I described in the beginning of this introduction, I was asked to walk with a family member of the local Scottish society’s president and carry their clan tartan (our surnames being similar). While I felt complimented that he should ask and wish to involve me in this way, any pleasure in parading and being on display faded with my last tap solo in junior high school. Even had I not been raised a back row Baptist (a dancing one at that), I often have a difficult time convincing Scottish Americans that I am repeatedly present at their gatherings to observe, not as a hyphenate myself. While I have not been tempted to go native, I have had to suspend criticism of the tale to appreciate the deeply held beliefs and worldviews of the tellers. As I remind my students, cultural relativism begins at home. Of what use is it for a North American to claim to appreciate the finer points of Zen Buddhism and yet refuse to try to understand one’s fundamentalist Pentecostal neighbor?

Tolerance or respect is much easier to extend at a distance. Cultural relativism was the chief anthropological ethic for the generations trained in the mid-twentieth century, when a goal in fieldwork was to impact the culture one studied as little as possible. As humans observing other humans, relativism has limits. We obviously lack cross-cultural agreement on what constitutes human rights; for many societies such rights are still limited, even ideologically, to sex, caste, color, or class. Increasingly, some cultural studies scholars are willing to critique customs that violate human rights, while others still attempt to defend them in the name of sacred, reified culture or hallowed tradition. However, culture is not always good; in fact all cultures basically rot—each in its own particular way. Culture keeps some people in positions of power and others powerless. It is often easier to be a cultural relativist about what is least familiar, novel, and not actually impinging on one’s self or loved ones. At home one must sometimes be reminded to balance the unquestionable value of historicist inquiry with accounts not only of the spectacular and historic, but also with a respectful focus on the quotidian aspects of popular culture (Edensor 2002, 10; see also A. Jackson 1987 and Glassberg 2001). Historians Marjory Harper and Michael Vance (1999, 37) paraphrase a particularly salient line from David Lowenthal: ancestral loyalties often ‘rest on fiction as well as truth,’ we must learn to face its fictions.

Intentions and Case Studies

While some cultural studies scholars and anthropologists (especially those leaning toward ethnopoetics) would privilege what people believe about their past, the historian privileges facts and the deconstruction of myths.¹⁵ If not through individual essays, then as a whole, this volume attempts to balance a respect for both and to complement the natives’ perspectives with those of the outside observer. No cultural phenomenon can be understood without a diachronic perspective—without historical background. It does matter that two hundred people were evicted in a particular clearance of a Highland clachan rather than the one thousand of folklore. This collection does not seek to validate myths nor to insult those who hold them dear, but to understand how historical events are mythologized and why people want to believe, or uncritically repeat, mythic visions of history cast as heritage.¹⁶

While some authors are more critical of the heritage movement than others, most, but perhaps not all, of us would agree with anthropologist Anthony Cohen’s suggestion that it is less important . . . to cast academic aspersions on the authenticity of a group’s putative lineage than to attempt to understand why a distinctive . . . identity should be so compelling to its members (some of whom are only voluntary affiliates) (1986, 341–42; see also A. Smith 1998). This volume compares the development of hyphenated Scottish identities in the United States and Canada, and, by considering both transatlantic Scots for whom a Scottish ethnicity is symbolic and voluntary and those for whom an awareness of a Scottish heritage is familial and transgenerational, more generally examines the legacy of diasporas and the multiple levels of meaning invested in ethnic identities.

In the next chapter, I examine the meaning of ethnic identity in popular and scholarly discourse and consider Scottish Americans as an ethnic group. In two subsequent chapters Canadian historian Michael Vance and I consider Scottish immigration to North America and Scottish ethnic organization in both the United States and Canada as an introduction to contributors’ essays that examine the regional expressions of Scottish heritage movements.¹⁷ Scottish folklorist and ethnologist Margaret Bennett examines the evolution of Hebridean identities in Canada’s Eastern Townships from Quebec-Hebrideans to les Écossais-Québecois and the French style of Scottish events and commemorations there (see also Bennett 1998). Michael Vance examines the appeal of a Scottish identity in Nova Scotia and how a sentimental vision of Scottishness has come to symbolize the region and subsumed other ethnic identities in the area (Mi’kmaq, Acadian, and African). As he has done elsewhere (1975; 1999), Scottish literary critic Andrew Hook examines the tension between a rosy, heritage-based vision of Scottish contributions to American life and the actual experience and reception of Scots in colonial America. Hook focuses on the negative influences of perceptions of Scottish heritage on American culture and also recounts the appeal of Scottish motifs for neo-Confederate and American extremist groups. My chapter on Bravehearts and Patriarchs, examines masculinity on the pedestal in hybrid celebrations of a Highland Scottish and southern regional identity. Robin Cohen (1997) has noted that the creation of hybrid cultures is typical of the diasporic experience. While the large numbers of Scottish and Scots-Irish immigrants to the colonial South helped shape what it means to be southern, today’s heritage enthusiasts are Scottish in a southern fashion.

Cohen describes diasporas as dispersals from a homeland to two or more foreign lands. Such emigration is often traumatic, or may be for colonial purposes or for economic betterment (1997, 118–37). He notes other characteristics of diasporas considered through essays in this volume: the maintenance of transnational relationships and the desire to return to the homeland. Two essays consider the nature and social roles of transnational tradition; its invention and renegotiation; its transmission and performance.¹⁸ Scottish sociologist Grant Jarvie, who has written about the nineteenth-century re-creation of Highland games in Scotland (1991), examines the role of the games in producing social capital and fostering local and transatlantic communities. American anthropologist Jonathan Dembling discusses assertions that Cape Breton Gaelic language, dancing, and musical traditions are more authentic than those in Scotland itself and considers the current trend for learning Cape Breton music and dance in Scotland. He argues that Scots learning Cape Breton styles are participating in a wider debate about what it means to be Scottish now.

Considering heritage pilgrimage to the homeland, British anthropologist Paul Basu and American anthropologist John Sheets describe efforts by the Scottish diaspora to reestablish connections to particular hills and glens and develop friendships with their current inhabitants. Sheets writes of the transatlantic network between American and Canadian descendants of emigrants from Colonsay with the island’s current community. Heritage tourists’ knowledge of clan-specific history allows them to achieve a certain intersubjectivity with their real or presumed ancestors at sites featured in clan lore. Basu considers roots-tourists and respectfully explores hyphenated Scots’ experience of place as an anchor for identity.

Considering Scottish influences on North American politics and culture, Scottish historian Ted Cowan examines Scottish responses to Tartan Day celebrations. A Canadian invention, Tartan Day is now celebrated by hyphenated Scots across the continent. Wanting a day designated in honor of Scots’ contributions to Canadian history, Jean Watson led a personal campaign to have the first Tartan Day ratified in Nova Scotia in 1987.¹⁹ Other Canadian jurisdictions followed in the first half of the 1990s, including Ontario (1991) and New Brunswick (1993), and even Quebec had passed an act proclaiming Tartan Day in time for the 2004 event. April 6 was chosen as the anniversary of the 1320 Scottish Declaration of Arbroath.²⁰ Following the Canadian lead, several American states began proclaiming Tartan Days in the mid-1990s (Tennessee in 1996 and North Carolina in 1997). In March of 1998 the U.S. Senate passed Resolution 155 making April 6 National Tartan Day, (also approved by the House of Representatives on March 9, 2005).

At first Scots in Scotland seemed bemused, but it was not long before journalists initiated cringing over the flamboyance of events and before critics began to question possible motives behind such a holiday (McArthur 1998; Ray 2001; Hague 2002a, 2002b). The Scottish diaspora is far larger than the current population of Scotland (just over five million), and as Scotland has recently regained its own parliament (1999) and tries to revise its national imagery, the diasporic celebration of Tartan Day is of significant interest if not concern. Cowan suggests the best way for Scots to reconcile themselves to the events is to stop feeling responsible for them and see Tartan Day as a North American phenomenon, not a Scottish one. In 2004 the Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman featured editorials about whether Scottish politicians should make appearances at Tartan Day festivities in North America (which they do). On April 6 the paper also published a letter from Robert More of the Clan Muir Society in Coos Bay, Oregon, in which he informs the readership, We couldn’t care less if Scottish politicians want to join the fun . . . The event has already taken on a life of its own, and will continue to grow in this country. Indeed it has.

In his concluding piece, Scottish media scholar and culture critic Colin McArthur ruminates on a question he has considered for over two decades: why such a limited repertoire of images and tropes about Scotland continues to resonate through the centuries and throughout the international Scottish diaspora. Commenting on how narratives of the past shape cultural identities, Stuart Hall (1990) has noted that different cultural identities develop according to whether we passively receive narratives of the past or whether we position ourselves within these narratives through individual agency. Using Hall’s distinction and favoring determination over agency, McArthur posits a Scottish Discursive Unconscious, a "preexisting and hegemonic bricolage of images, narratives, subnarratives, tones, and turns of phrase" that hinders novel perspectives on Scottishness. His essay challenges other contributors’ emphases on transatlantic Scots’ agency in negotiating their heritage and reminds us that as Scots increasingly debate their own identity, they will increasingly scrutinize and contest that of the Scottish diaspora.

Trading on Highland motifs, imagery, and what McArthur calls the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, the North American Scottish heritage movement of the past half-century has only gained momentum in the last decade. While this has benefited the Scottish tourism industry, the images on which it thrives hardly represent, or please, Scots themselves. As debates over Scotland’s contested national identity continue to unfold in the twenty-first century, will transgenerational (as well as relatively new and carefully constructed) transatlantic links endure? Only the next few decades will reveal if hyphenated Scots continue to revere the tartan monster and shortbread tin imagery, or if transatlantic connections keep the diaspora from perceiving the past as home and the new Scotland as a foreign