The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory

by Andrew Blaikie

Andrew Blaikie explores how different, but connected, ways of seeing infuse relationships between place and belonging. He argues that all memories, whether fleeting glimpses or elaborate narratives, invoke imagined pasts – be these of tenement life, island cultures, vanished moralities, even the origins of social science. But do these recollections share a common frame of reference? Are our perceptions conditioned by a collective social imaginary?

We see the impact of modernity on Scottish culture in visions of nation and community from the late eighteenth century on, from Adam Ferguson’s ideas on civil society through John Grierson’s pioneering of documentary film to structures of feeling in popular fiction. Landscape as the symbolic ‘face of Scotland’, with its attendant mental contours have been produced and debated in genres including travel literature, social commentary, novels and magazines, but it is the changes in how we capture and present images, particularly given recent technological changes in photography, which have affected the ways we identify and remember.

Broadly sociological in approach, the range of Blaikie’s analysis lends itself equally to those interested in social history, cultural geography and visual or memory studies.

275 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Andrew Blaikie is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His publications include Illigitimacy, Sex and Society: Northeast Scotland 1750 - 1900 (1994) and Ageing and Popular Culture (1999). He is co-editor of the journal Cultural Sociology.

Reviews

[Graeme · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned a lot from this book, particularly about the ideology of John Grierson and the work of photo-journalists in the Gorbals. I found some parts of it very interesting. Others eluded me. Coming from a background in the natural sciences, I sometimes find the perspective of sociologists perplexing.

I did feel that there were some surprising lacunae, most glaringly the absence of any reference to Barbara and Murray Grigor's 'Scotch Myths' exhibition (1981) from the discussion of Kailyard and Tartanry. Also, a look at the North-East fiction of Lorna Moon and Jessie Kesson, and the rural South-West of John McNeillie's 'Wigtown Ploughman' (1939), might usefully have expanded the exploration of the Kailyard and reactions to it. The Borders and Dumfries and Galloway don't feature at all in Blaikie's picture of the nation! John Galt gets a nod because he includes the word 'parish' in the title of one of his best known novels, but probably deserved more attention given that he explicitly set out to write novels about social change. Neil Munro's Erchie MacPherson stories and Cliff Hanley's Dancing in the Streets (1958) offer a more celebratory perspective on tenement life in Glasgow. But gripes based on personal literary recollections are probably an inevitable reaction to a book of this kind.