Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South.

By Celeste Ray. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xxii], 256. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-8078-4913-8; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-2597-2.)

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the yearning of postmodern Americans to rediscover what Alex Haley popularized as "roots" has driven a resurgence of interest in heritage. Through a complex dialectic between continuity and invention, heritage links past with present, creates identity and group cohesion (communitas), and cushions the impact of social change, all the while continuously evolving. Currently, heritage interest is especially drawn to genealogy and family history, heroic episodes commemorating a shared past (e.g., Pearl Harbor and D-Day), heritage tourism, and identity politics.

Anthropologist Celeste Ray, attracted by the persistence of ethnic identity that links Scotland with North Carolina, offers a fascinating portrayal of the Scottish American manifestation of this heritage movement. As a colony, North Carolina received more Scottish immigrants than any other. (Extrapolating liberally from that statistic, former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt liked to claim that more people of Scottish ancestry lived in his state than anyplace else on earth.) Ray's chapters explore the origins of Scottish American beliefs about what it means to be Scottish; the revival of Scottish heritage in North Carolina and the characteristics of its contemporary Scottish American community; heritage events like the Highland Games; heritage pilgrimages, both within North Carolina and to the "auld country"; the influence of Highland warrior traditions; and the regional twists that southerners have given to Scottish heritage celebrations.

The heritage embraced by contemporary Scottish Americans grew out of Victorian romanticizing of kilted Highland clansmen in the aftermath of the failed Jacobite rebellion aimed at restoring Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Stuart dynasty to the British throne. The resulting themes of Highland history--betrayal, military defeat, breakup of the clan system, destruction of a traditional way of life, and forced diaspora--resonate in the American South, where they parallel regional attachments to kinship and lineage, sense of place, militarism, and lost causes.

Ray's historical research is thin, and her discipline's fieldwork methodology, based on maintaining a precarious relationship between informant and researcher (the "insider/outsider" paradox), can seem zealously collaborative to historians ("I circulated drafts of these chapters and repeated parts of interviews, lest my informants feel their words were taken out of context or that I had misinterpreted" [p. xv]). And she is not interested in proving or disproving the authenticity of traditions, only in understanding their meanings to the community. But the responses that she has elicited from her informants are richly informative about the power of heritage in postmodern society, where so many alienated individuals seem capable of achieving a sense of belonging through membership in "imagined communities." Readers interested in the creation and power of heritage, whether Scottish or not, will find this a stimulating book.

H. TYLER BLETHEN
Western Carolina University