Twenty-second International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

This paper takes forward work by Bryce, Murdy & Alexander (2017) by linking the phenomenon of how ancestral identities are carried, enacted and experienced by visitors to the destination (Scotland) itself with how versions of Scottish identity are produced and consumed at home by hyphenated ‘Scots’ within the diaspora (British Columbia, Canada). By drawing on the oral history collection at the Research Centre for Scottish Studies, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. I explore how they celebrate, maintain and perform their ‘Scottishness’ as a form of ‘returning’ and determine how the imagined Scotland may serve as a ‘symbolic anchor’. Findings highlight conflicting views of a contemporary ‘real’ Scotland shaped by mythologies of place and narratives of exile and migration. Through analysis of stories of individual and group consumption, we examine how this Scotland of the individual and collective imagination shapes the needs of diasporic Scots as a set of anchor points in the maintenance of Scottish identity across time and space; the construction of other versions of ‘Scotland’ at some remove from Scotland itself and the intersection of both of these with other facets of identity production in the overseas diaspora.