Stigma and separation: parian status and community persistence in a scottish fishing village
This paper addresses the problem of how and why a small, dependent, and stigmatized occupational community may maintain its social identity long after the material basis for its existence has disappeared. It examines the life history of Ferryden, an east coast Scottish "fishing village" which does not fish. It will argue that the ideology ofthe fisherfolk, who have historically been marked as a distinct and low-prestige occupational, residential, and kin-based group, has been used to redefine and preserve village unity in the face of drastic ecological change. It argues further that this means of cultural adaptation contains the seeds of its own destruction and will, in the long run, prove fatal for community identity. Studies of occupational communities in complex societies suggest a strong link between work, residence, and social image (Horobin 1957; Dennis, Henriques et al. 1969; Lummis 1977). The example of Ferryden suggests the possibility ofa consider? able lag between the ecological and the symbolic transformation ofa community's status. The dynamics of boundary-making between fisherfolk and nonfisherfolk will be placed within a context of economic and political dominance and dependency in eastern Scotland. The discussion is based upon data collected during a year of fieldwork and archival research in Ferryden and Montrose in 1975 and 1976. Villages may now have surpassed tribes as archetypal anthropological units of study. They have become our preserve in the sociological wilderness of complex societies. There is even some concern that villages, like tribal societies, might be endangered (Mead 1980). However, the term "village" suffers from very nearly the same epistemological ambiguity as "tribe" (Fried 1975). That is, everyone uses it, and few bother to define it. Villages may be large or small, isolated or enmeshed in an urban matrix. Villages may house semi-autonomous rural cultivators or industrial wage-slaves. They may be found in tribal, capitalist, or socialist economies (Halpern 1967:122-123). Often, however, it is assumed that villages share a crucial attribute which is often considered to be lacking in the urban setting: a sense of community, of emotional as well as interactional boundedness. Cohen (1982) stresses this affective component in the introduction to his edited volume on rural British communities, which he aptly titles Belonging. However, the literature on British communities also informs us that not all who live in villages "belong" (Fleming 1979; Strathern 1981; Elias and Scotson 1965; Jenkins et al. 1960). As Strathern (1982:249) points out, "an unwarranted
Making place, resisting displacement: conflicting national and local identities in Scotland
In recent years, many commentators have stressed that cultural diversity and immigration are integral features of British history (e.g. see Hall 2000; Kushner 1992; Merriman 1997; Ramdin 1999; Walker 1997). Furthermore, ‘four nations’ histories of ‘the Isles’ have highlighted the fault lines of an internally divided series of cultures, which are emphatically hybrid and riddled with conflict (Samuel 1998). Nevertheless, the cultural fault lines that lie within and across the imagined national cultures making up the British Isles tend to be ignored or smoothed over in the context of museums and the presentation of archaeological and architectural heritage. Discourses of national heritage routinely focus on normative cultures which are presented as contained, coherent and homogeneous in essence (see Handler 1988; McCrone 2002), and Britain is no exception (Kushner 1992, Hooper-Greenhill et al. 1997). Admittedly, the ‘Celtic margins’ have been portrayed as a locus of cultural and racial difference in opposition to an English core lying at the heart of Britishness (Norquay and Smyth 2002; Harvey et al. 2002). But this tension has in turn often been associated with an emphasis on smaller-scale, normative, Scottish, Welsh, English and Irish national cultures (e.g. for Scotland see Cooke and McLean 2001; McCrone et al. 1995); a tendency that devolution threatens to enhance. Within these imagined national entities, cultural difference is almost always situated in relation to ‘minority-“non-white”-immigrant’ communities, with the ‘majority-white-indigenous’ population regarded as culturally homogeneous and unproblematic in this respect (Hesse 2000: 10; see also Hall 2000). Not surprisingly, strategies of social inclusion, which play a key role in the contemporary political discourse and social policy of New Labour, tend to mirror this dichotomy in the sphere of heritage and museums. Cultural difference is seen as a basis for exclusion and alienation amongst ethnic minorities, but amongst the majority ‘white’ population exclusion and marginality is attributed to economic depravation or physical factors, such as ill-health and disability (Sandell 2002: 3). The result of these combined strategies is that a core underlying homogeneous national heritage is maintained, with the ‘problem’ of cultural difference located either at national boundaries, or in terms of ‘non-white’, post-1945 immigrant multicultural heritage. Thus, Britishness (and increasingly, in the context of devolution,
Migration, Labor Mobility, and Relocation Assistance: The Case of the American Indian
This article, an example of "indirect" program evaluation, utilizes a 1/100 public use sample of American households from the 1970 U.S. census to examine family welfare levels among three categories of Indian families: (1) nonmigrant families living in traditional areas of Indian population concentration; (2) families in areas not receiving relocation assistance through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA); and (3) migrant families moving to urban areas with BIA relocation assistance. The article concludes that the population of migrants receiving relocation assistance has a substantially higher level of economic welfare in both absolute and relative terms and that earnings are the principal source of increased welfare. It is suggested that such assistance might be utilized on a wider basis to assist other migrating populations.