[LINK] I am not a Scotsman

[rfmcdonald]

Roger Hutchinson reviews James Hunter's new book Scottish Exodus: Travels Among a Worldwide Clan, an engaging history of Clan MacLeod, at The Scotsman. The title sounds interesting, not least because Hunter apparently takes a critical approach to this the most artificial of constructed identities.

"We're still who we always were," a Clan MacLeod Society member in North Carolina tells Hunter, meaning that he or she is still the same as their MacLeod antecedent who migrated to British America in the 18th century.

The only sensible, logical answer to that is: No, you're not. Not in any regard worth considering. Not in culture, language, health, diet, upbringing, possessions, occupation, clothing, hobbies, literacy, expectation, income, civil and political rights, not in your past, your present or your future. Your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a different person in an entirely different world. She would laugh to hear you say that you were similar, let alone identical.

But if this sparkling book tells us anything, it tells us that the global cottage industry of Scottish clan societies is neither sensible nor logical. They have been based partly on a romantic fiction, on an invented past. Laced into this, however, there are and always have been threads of a true diasporan identity.

This identity is most appealing when it accepts that history has done its inexorable work, that life in 19th-century Skye was less attractive than is life in modern California, and that they - we - never really want to go back. The fleeting, engaging, argumentative presence of Jim Hunter in the worldwide web of MacLeod societies will have done much to bring them up to scratch. His book should do even more.

Hear, hear.