Paul Basu

My own island home - The Orkney homecoming

The notion of ‘home’ has become a powerful motif in the contemporary popular and academic project to (re)locate identity in a globalized world of movement. Home is, however, also materialized in ‘homeland’ and, as the discourse of ‘diaspora’ has been ever more widely appropriated by a diverse range of dispersed populations, so the phenomenon of diasporic ‘ homecoming’ has burgeoned – journeys, that is, in which members of diasporic communities ‘return’ to lost homelands as heritage-tourists and pilgrims. This article provides an account of ‘The Orkney Homecoming’, a packaged event in which over 150 Canadians of Orcadian descent travelled to their ancestral islands off the north coast of Scotland. Drawing extensively on the comments of participants and organizers of the event, the author argues that, through its materiality, the Orkney heritage-landscape provides a fertile soil into which the Canadian homecomers can root their identities.

Introduction: Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures

While much scholarly work exists on both migration and material culture, there is remarkably little literature explicitly concerned with how these areas of study converge. In this introduction we suggest a number of points of departure for the exploration of the relationships between ’migrant worlds‚ and ’material cultures‚ and we link these points with the contributions to this Special Issue. We hope thereby to shift the theoretical framing of migrancy into some areas of concern that have been of long-standing importance within anthropology (the gift, temporality, translation), but have not necessarily been those raised most frequently in relation to migration studies.

Macpherson Country: Genealogical Identities, Spatial Histories and the Scottish Diasporic Clanscape

This paper explores the intertwining of personal or autobiographical narratives with broader cultural and historical narratives associated with particular regions, nations and diasporas. More particularly, it is concerned with the intertwining of surnames, place names and ‘place-stories’, and with notions of clanship, clanlore and clanlands, as resources used in the negotiation of self-identity among members of the transnational Scottish heritage community. Using the spatial histories and mnemonic practices of the Clan Macpherson as examples, it demonstrates how the ‘romantic ideology’ of Highland clanship serves to re-root members of an ‘unsettled’ settler society in what is perceived as their ancestral homeland. This (re-)establishment of kinship ties to a particular territory is effected through various enunciative acts: for instance, becoming acquainted with the clan’s origin myths, slogans, stories and symbols; visiting the clanlands and those collective ‘sites of memory’ associated with events in clan history; participating in clan marches and ceremonials; and tracing the family tree. Whilst this ‘sedentary poetics’ of Highland clanship entails a re-essentialization of identity that has become morally untenable in the contemporary West, it is argued that, in the context of Scottish diasporic roots-tourism, the assertion of a close bond between blood and soil is more benign. For those who, by virtue of a particular surname, or through the labours of their genealogical research, have identified themselves as members of a Scottish Highland diaspora, the ideal of Highland clanship provides a powerful ‘answering image’ to that represented by the indigenous peoples and cultures of the countries in which their migrant ancestors settled. Sensing their own (vicarious) complicity in the violences of colonization and thus questioning the legitimacy of their right to belong in lands historically appropriated from indigenous populations, the clan provides its diasporic members with the possibility of recovering their own indigenous identity.

Utopian archives, decolonial affordances:Introduction to special issue

Colonial archives constituted a technology that enabled the collection, storage, ordering, retrieval and exchange of knowledge as an instrument of colonial governance. It is not surprising that when such archives were inherited by independent nation-states they were not given the authority previously granted them and have often been neglected. What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations? How should we rethink these archives in relation to decolonial futures? This essay introduces a collection of articles that explore the repertoires of action latent in archives and how colonial archives are being reconfigured to imagine decolonial futures.

N.W. Thomas and colonial anthropology in British West Africa: reappraising a cautionary tale

As the first government anthropologist to be appointed by the British Colonial Office, Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868-1936) has earned a place in the footnotes of anthropological history. Historians of the discipline have discussed his career in West Africa in their wider explorations of the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration in the early twentieth century. Through this work an orthodox account of Thomas has emerged as an eccentric dilettante who damaged the reputation of the discipline, setting back its adoption as a practical science of value to colonial governance by a generation or more. Adopting a micro-historical approach, closer scrutiny of the archival evidence challenges this orthodoxy, and places Thomas more centrally within the professional networks and practices of British anthropology in the period 1900 to 1915. As well as correcting the record concerning Thomas’s professional reputation, a more complex picture emerges regarding the colonial authorities’ attitudes towards anthropology and the reason why this early experiment in colonial anthropology failed.

Recasting the National Narrative Postcolonial Pastiche and the New Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument

In February 2011, as Sierra Leone prepared to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its independence, a new national monument was opened to the public at the very center of Freetown. Actually, this was the second formal opening of the monument: the first had taken place twelve months earlier, on a newly instituted annual “Armed Forces Day,” when President Ernest Bai Koroma officially unveiled it before members of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF). In the period between these two unveilings, the banner over its entrance gates, which originally bore the name “Monument in Remembrance of Our Fallen Heroes and Heroines,” was replaced with another that reads “Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument.” In this way—enunciatively at least—a military war memorial was transformed into a civilian monument promoting peaceful coexistence through a shared national culture and history (Fig. 1). A year in the making, and then another year “under wraps” while it was transferred to civilian management, the monument had attracted a great deal of attention from passers-by, who marvelled at the gigantic cement sculptures that took form (and then seemed to languish) behind guarded fences. Photographing the monument, even through the iron railings around its perimeter, was strictly prohibited. Alas, now that it has finally been opened to the public, the passers-by appear to have lost interest, no doubt put off by the advertised entrance fees: between Le500 and Le2,000 for children, Le5,000 for adults, and Le10,000 for non-nationals. Impressive though this colorful cement fantasia may be, with over 75% of Sierra Leone’s population currently surviving on less than

Anthropology education and public engagement: Where do we go from here?

2 a day (currently about Le9,000) (United Nations 2009), it is hardly surprising that few would consider spending what little cash they have on something so ... “symbolic”? Already the paint is peeling from the cement statues and basrelief sculptures that visually narrate this particular iteration of Sierra Leone’s national history. And yet, despite its seemingly questionable value to many Freetownians, the monument represents a fascinating assemblage through which to reflect upon how public art—and public space—is being used (or at least sanctioned) by the State to promote political agendas and forge a shared national consciousness in this West African society still coming to terms with the profound divisiveness of its recent civil war.

Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora

This guest editorial considers educational initiatives in the field of anthropology, with a particular focus on what has been learnt from the RAI experiences in setting up the now aborted A-level.