Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South

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.

Author: Celeste Ray
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 03/12/2001
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780807849132

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/26/2001 pg. 77
Choice 10/01/2001 pg. 352
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/2002 pg. 17 - Recommended/Special Interest

About the Author
Celeste Ray is associate professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.