Finding Their Place: Islands in Social Theory
The Island of Ven, Sweden, 27–30 August, 2010
ABSTRACTS PARALLEL PAPER SESSION B1: Identity, culture, tradition and knowledge
‘The Furthest Hebrides’ : Critical reach from contested shores
Kathryn A Burnett & Ray Burnett
University of the West of Scotland, UK
Scotland’s islands are paradoxically peripheral yet conceptually central to an
understanding of the layered complexity of issues relating to land and identity in
contemporary 21 st century Scotland. Through a specific focus on Scotland’s
western isles, this paper traces the authoring of the layered constructions and
reconstructions of space and place that has produced a dense and variegated
palimpsest; the process of the ‘making’ of the Hebrides. It examines visual and
documentary representations to draw out some of the issues of ‘belonging’ and
ownership, appropriation and dissemination, in the context of the nationalidentitarian
functions of culture, that are embedded in the complimentary and
contradictory ‘ways of seeing’ the contested terrain of island cultural landscape(s).
Through a grounded multi-disciplinary approach to the issues raised and the
exemplars elaborated on, the paper opens up several overlapping and inter-related
issues of concentric and conflicting identities, delineation of the field of cultural
discourse, the inscription of meaning and value and the production of cultural
landscapes, and the deeper processes of complicity, self colonialism and
subalternity.
The paper concludes by advocating that a detailed study of how these processes
of ‘making’ are mediated at local (island), national (Scottish) and supra-national
(UK) level opens up new channels for further research in the intricate waters of
the cultural dynamics of authorship, ownership, ‘belonging’ and power in the
politics of land and identity.
Scottish Centre for Island Studies 
