Relocating the British subject

Ethnographic encounters with identity politics and nationalism during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3564372
AutoresAlexander Thomas T Smith (The University of Warwick, UK, autor correspondente)
Ano2017
Volume65
Fascículo1_suppl
Páginas54-70
Data de publicação2017-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0081176917693538
OpenAlexW2604009540
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas20

In this article, the author uses an ethnographic encounter in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum to explore questions of identity and nationalism in Scotland. During that encounter, he was confronted by his own, sometimes contradictory, thoughts and feelings about Britain, Britishness and Scotland. Taking inspiration from a genre of social scientific writing called 'ethnographic memoir', the article is his attempt to work through, and make sense of, those thoughts and feelings, by drawing on the work of both social anthropologists and sociologists who have written about identity, nationalism and legacies of empire in the UK. Following particularly the work of the social anthropologist Georgie Wemyss, who argues that contemporary discourses around 'Britain' legitimate what she calls 'the invisible empire', it is suggested that affirmations of Britain during the independence referendum helped empower an insidious, but largely taken for granted, discourse of imperial nationalism. This insight allows the author to locate the source of his own disenchantment with the identity label 'British'. The article concludes with consideration of some of the wider implications this might have for a subdiscipline that calls itself the Anthropology of Britain

Aesthetics · Disenchantment · Ethnography · Identity (music) · Independence (probability theory) · National identity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Referendum · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Irish and British Studies · Law · Political Systems and Governance · Scottish History and National Identity