The study sets out to examine how formulations of national identity emerge in the interplay between large scale/public and small scale/private domains of social interaction. This poses a significant research and theoretical challenge. This dual focus on public and private formulations of national identity requires a suitable investigative framework that can accommodate and assist in making sense of how national identity works across different scales and contexts of social life. What this involves for this study is twofold: the application of insights from a range of fields in cultural studies, folklore studies, migration, anthropology, sociology and history; and an analytic frame for understanding identity that can usefully embrace these insights.
The study’s overarching theoretical stance is that nations, groups and individuals interpret and construct identities in various ways within available cultural representations and within a larger social context. Identity is both constrained and enabled by those contexts and can only be understood in terms of those contexts. The emphasis is on the social and cultural contexts in which national identities are constructed and interpreted. The study adopts a situated view of identity, that is, it seeks to understand how identity arises within and through social interaction. It reflects the direction taken in recent cultural studies scholarship and in approaches to identity in folkloric and performance studies, anthropology, sociology and history, and the work of theorists such as Stuart Hall, Benedict Anderson, John Storey, Margaret Somers, Hearn, McCrone, Berger and Del Negro, Anthony Cohen, and Richard Bauman. The proposal that nations and persons construct and express identity through narrative is developed through this analysis.1
A number of implications, relevant to this study, flow from these accounts of identity:
° cultural identity draws upon the received past and memory in a creative, constructive and emergent process;
° individuals and groups personalise national identity in ways that are shaped by both the immediate and wider social and cultural context in which people operate;
° cultural representations of national identity mediate how personal national identity is constructed, interpreted and expressed;
° cultural representations have context and history, and therefore an understanding of how those representations have been shaped and interpreted over time will help to shed light on what they might mean in the present;
° culture is not a form of consumption, but a form of production. Individuals and social groups appropriate, interpret, make meaningful, and use cultural forms in the lived practices of everyday life.2
As noted above, it will be proposed that the cultural resources that my family drew upon, in particular Scottish songs, acted as important referents to their identity and gave shape and meaning to their formulations of Scottish/Australian identity. This means a focus on the interplay between formulations of national identity inscribed in the songs and the family’s formulations of identity. The history and social context that shaped my family’s songs is integral to an understanding of what those songs came to mean for the family. That context is relevant for two reasons.
Firstly, it helps to explain the broader cultural meanings that these songs have carried over time, the changing characteristics and cultural status of the songs, the
circumstances in which they came to be available to the family, and how they might have had appeal to the family.
Secondly, that context was also my family’s cultural context prior to their migration to Australia. It was within that context that the songs first became part of family life and within which my family’s Scottish identity first evolved. It was also in that context that the decision to leave Scotland was made. But that prior context provides only part of the picture of how my family formulated its Scottish identity in Australia. What the songs came to mean for my family in Australia also requires an examination of the changed context and circumstances in which my family continued to draw upon those songs - the ways and extent to which that new context shaped or informed the role of the songs for the family and their sense of identity.
A key focus for this study will be the role of music in the public narrative of nation. The perspectives of Anderson, McCrone, Cohen, Somers, Hearn, Richard Middleton, and Pickering and Green will be particularly useful for establishing how cultural representations, such as music, participate in and construct pervasive ideas about national and cultural identity. An appreciation of the role of these songs in the wider narrative of nation poses questions, but not yet answers, for how these collective ideas of nation are appropriated and customised at the local and personal level. This question will be addressed through several levels of analysis, through investigation of theoretical accounts of the relationship between public and personal dimensions of identity, the dynamics between public song culture and local song culture, the role of music in formulations of migrant identity, and the application of these insights to song performance in a migrant family. Through this multi-level analysis it will be argued that the experience of migration provided a specific ‘contextual motivation’ for drawing on the resource of national identity in song.3 Drawing on the work of Somers, Hearn, and Anthony Cohen, the study will examine how the experience of migration was an important mediating influence that had implications for how the songs were used and the meanings that they came to have in family life. Hearn’s ‘embedded nationalism’ provides a particularly useful conceptual frame for bridging the gap between national
identity as a cultural resource and national identity as an expression of self. He proposes that the relationship between the social and personal dimensions of national identity is mediated by specific contexts; and that the contexts in which individuals draw upon the cultural resources of social (national) identities and incorporate them into their own self- understandings are crucial to understanding how identity works. A key social context, that of family, is one in which national identity comes to have personal relevance.4
Family life is also shaped by the experience of migration. Studies of migrant experience identify families as a key part of the migrant’s social world through which they ‘articulate the world they have left with the world they have entered’.5 It is often through family life that the processes of change and adaptation, that are part of being a migrant, are played out and mediated. Families also play a significant role in the complex of ways in which migrants define their sense of identity and belonging, and in the perpetuation of homeland cultural traditions.6 The centrality of family in the migrant experience also underscores how migrant identities can be ‘influenced by family dynamics as much as attachment to national heritage and loyalty’.7 This study will examine how a particular family dynamic, revealed in song performance, served to articulate and reinforce attachment to both family and heritage, and how the Scottish songs that were assimilated into family life became a resource for constructing a new sense of home and identity in Australia. This will also draw on studies of the particular role of music in the migrant experience, which suggest that the music of the homeland can serve to connect the past with present, and to support new identities.8 Slobin suggests that music is central to the diasporic experience, and that migrants ‘identify themselves strongly, even principally, through their music’.9 For migrant groups, it is often through musical performance that images of homeland and hereland are ‘enunciated, dramatised and maintained’.10 For many migrants, it is the music of the homeland that provides sources of tradition and origin, creates crucial linkages with a distant homeland, and provides the building blocks for identity.11
In studies focusing on the affective and experiential aspects of migration, particularly diaspora and transnational studies, attention has been given to the role of memory, story,
and relationships between past and present in the migrant experience - what Paul Gilroy refers to as issues of ‘temporality and historicity, memory and narrativity’.12 In studies with this orientation a focus has been on how migrants ‘imagine’ and construct a sense of community and belonging, using ‘memory of place to construct imaginatively their new lived world’.13 It is well recognised that the family plays an important role in shaping our memories and our identity.14 Mary Chamberlain and Selma Leydesdorff’s account of transnational migrant families examines how families use and understand their memories to construct ‘coherent narratives of the self and kin’. Chamberlain and Leydesdorff argue, that in the context of migration, the family narrative can ‘reveal how migrants reflect on their lives and on the families that surround them’; a process that ‘often (and often only)’ is expressed in the emotional and imaginative world of narrative.15 In this sense, especially for migrant families, the family story or family narrative plays a central role. Storytelling, or narrative, may be manifest in many forms, not only in the more literal sense of telling a story.16 As Somers’ and Hearn’s analysis of narrative, and Anderson’s ‘imagined’ nation suggest, the narratives of nations, families or individuals can be expressed in various symbolic forms, not only through language, but also through other expressive forms such as music and song. It will be argued that music and song provided the key narrative plots and themes through which our family story was enacted.
It is this notion of a family’s cultural identity as constructed in story that will provide a means of examining the functions that song performance served in our family. Kristin Langellier and Eric Peterson argue that family storytelling assumes a particular significance for migrant families in narrating the ‘we’ of family and cultural identity. As they note, ‘immigration is a narrative disruption of roots, language, and social connections that anchor family and cultural identity’. The challenge for migrant families is in constructing and reconstructing ‘their complex history and positioning in terms of cultural uniqueness’ in a new multicultural setting.17 For migrant families, in particular, storytelling serves to ensure the survival of family culture. For migrant families, such as ours, the goal of cultural continuity and survival can be considered as one of the key motivations for drawing on the symbolic resource of national identity in song.
An examination of the cultural history of the song traditions that my family drew upon will address where conceptions of being Scottish have come from, how they are generated and reproduced, and how this plays out in family life. The study will bring together relevant insights from historical accounts, popular culture studies, folk music and folkloric studies to shed light on the complexity of these Scottish song traditions.18 It will be shown that these songs represent a complex of overlapping song traditions and song types, that have themselves been subject to shifting ‘articulations’, having being ‘made over’ and also subject to shifting valuations of their cultural meaning and merit over time and context. Through an examination of contemporary discourses that posit that Scottish cultural traditions are relics of the past, and evidence of a stagnating culture, it will be argued that they continue to act as important referents to Scottish identity in both public and private domains of life.19 Of particular interest here will be the re-evaluations of the traditional and popular culture of Scotland that my family drew upon for its singing entertainments.20 This argument will also be supported with evidence from migration, folklore and cultural studies that suggest that drawing upon the past, from tradition and custom, is not simply a matter of conservation, nor cannot it be reduced to a nostalgia for things gone before. Deborah James’, and Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s studies, for example, demonstrate how the music of migrants can be both a source of connection to tradition and origins, and also a means of anchoring and validating the present, and of constructing the future, or articulating aspirations.21
Middleton’s analysis of ‘articulation’ together with Pickering and Green’s analysis of the ‘vernacular milieu’ will serve to highlight the dynamics, the differences and intersections between public song traditions and personalised/localised traditions.22 In the light of their analyses it will be argued that the cultural repertoire of music and song that is available to be ‘made over’ in any particular context is already the product of ‘cultural work’ and its forms and meanings mediated through historical/social processes and through modes of production, dissemination and consumption. The meanings and cultural significance that a song brings with it thus affect how it is perceived, understood and ‘made over’ in new contexts. While cultural forms, are not ‘absolute determinants of consciousness or culture’, as Pickering and Green argue, the symbolic associations that
arise out of their use in new or local contexts are mediated by them, as Middleton argues. In this way the forms and meanings of music are re-shaped, and their meanings shifted in different contexts. But, as Middleton argues, while the new context mediates more precise meanings, the overall ‘parameters of meaning’ move with it and are not lost. This has particular relevance for the songs that my family sang since they carry with them what Middleton would describe as ‘connotation clusters’ shaped by their particular social and cultural histories, or as Pickering and Green would describe them, ‘symbolic associations’, that mediate any new reception, and are, in turn, also mediated by that new context.
Drawing on this rationale, the study will examine how long established Scottish song traditions and contemporary songs were ‘made over’ in the particular context of family singing and migration. It will seek to demonstrate that in the process of incorporating popular and traditional songs into the day-to-day life of family singing a new context was set up that mediated the forms, meanings and reception of the songs. It will be argued that while the family songs share many of the features of the songs that are their sources, the selection and shaping of the songs over time within the family has produced a particular repertoire of songs with its own characteristics and local familial/cultural meanings.
The examination of the family’s song culture will be informed by approaches in folklore, performance and cultural studies that emphasise the performative and narrative dimensions of identity.23 This core area of the study will analyse the characteristics of the family songs, how they were used and the role they played in the family’s life in Scotland and in Australia. While the performance context is an important consideration, the patterns in the song material itself - the collective and cumulative qualities of songs that have been sung and shared over time - can provide a useful focal point for performative analysis. Drawing on the work of Barre Toelken, Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, and, Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, the patterns in song material, in the repertoire of family songs, will be examined as part of the larger analysis of the role of the songs in the family. That analysis will be based on the conception that
a song repertoire that is common to members of a group may be understood as a form of shared narrative that gives expression to the cultural preoccupations and sense of identity of a group.24 Moreover, when songs are sung and shared, they are, as Stokes suggests, ‘a patterned context in which other things happen’.25 Drawing upon these writers and insights from performance theory, the study will analyse the performance of the songs in the family - the ‘patterned context’ - to examine how the singing of these songs served to construct crucial senses of cultural continuity, family and belonging.