Abstract
The experiences of significant emigration of national and sub-national groups and their cohesion around symbols and practises, often over generations and centuries, signifying ‘homelands’ left behind is a phenomenon not fully understood in the territories they left behind. Bryce et al (2017) noted a particularly heightened example of the co-created authentication, in both object-based and existential terms, in the practise of ancestral tourism. This production produced collaboratively by ancestral tourists and museum curators and other heritage practitioners, has particular implications for their professional practice but is disrupted by the historically dubious ‘imagined pasts’ that many such visitors bring with them (Carnegie, 2011). If sensitively handled, opportunities exist for museums and the heritage sector to bridge the gap caused by such visitors’ feelings of subjective belonging and the temporal/spatial distance between diaspora identities and those of the ‘homelands’ they left behind. If researchers do not dismiss such narratives but take them seriously as deeply felt identities of collective pasts performed elsewhere, then these questions may be asked: what, how and why do communities produce, consume and enact their diaspora identities and secondly how does this shape their desire to ‘return’ to a homeland long lost and their engagement with the reality of its history, as inscribed in its museums and heritage sites? We seek to begin to answer them through the contexts of Scotland’s diaspora communities in North America by entering into conversation with Scottish-Americans and Scottish-Canadians about their consumptive practises around notions of ‘Scottishness’, real and imagined.
Presenters
Elizabeth CarnegieAssociate Professor, Business School, Northumbria University, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ancestral-tourism, Museums, Imagined-past, Scotland, Canada, USA
