Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper looks at how established diaspora communities in former colonies maintain their identities through participation in traditional arts organisations. These populations are linked with early imperial settler populations and which drew from ongoing immigration over generations from the former imperial centres with which they are associated. These groups displaced indigenous populations in the Americas and Australasia. Their languages, religions and cultures became dominant in their colonies and successor states. Bryce, Murdy & Alexander (2017), looking at motivations and consumption habits amongst ‘returning’ ancestral tourists to Scotland, have theorised that an ‘authentically imagined past’ is brought by such long-established diaspora groups to ‘homelands’ from which they are separated by generations. This paper takes that study forward by examining the practises through which that imagined ancestral past and the identities that flow from it are produced and reproduced through participation in the traditional arts of ‘home’. A series of interviews was undertaken amongst Canadians of Scottish descent in British Columbia, Canada, a location of concentrated historical Scots settlement in Canada. The paper explores anxieties about ‘dying’ cultural forms, as Scots and other British and French settler populations in Canada become less numerous and immigrants from other parts of the world establish themselves, as well as hope for renewal through outreach to younger generations and the appeal of Scottish culture to non-Scottish descended participants through a capacious view of ‘affinity Scots’.