Mì-thuigse, Dìth Tuigse, Tàthagan: Buannachd nam Mearachd ann an Cruinneachaidhean Beul-Aithris Alasdair MhicGille Mhìcheil

The field notebooks of Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912), now transcribed, catalogued, and available at www.carmichaelwatson.lib.ed.ac.uk, allow us to eavesdrop on interactions between a major Highland folklore collector and his informants. Carmichael noted names, ages, locations, and occupations of interviewees, along with dates of interviews, allowing us to trace continuities, breaks, and developments in his collecting career over more than half a century. Carmichael’s cluttered and sometimes chaotic notebooks free us from the notion of a formal encounter between performer and audience (or collector), and allow us to take in the multiplicity of voices heard in the Highland céilidh house. The paper focuses upon the miscommunications, misunderstandings, mistaken inferences, confusions, and communicative breakdowns recorded in Carmichael’s notebooks, and explores what these may reveal about relations between the recorder and his informants

Some Heathenish and Superstitious Rites: A Letter from Lewis, 1700

No abstrac

Negotiating sustainability across scales: Community organizing in the Outer Hebrides

This paper represents voices of community organizers on Barra, a small island in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Although, arguably Barra is geographically and socio-politically located in the peripheries of Scotland, Britain and Europe, the island has been a center of North Atlantic maritime trade networks for centuries. In the current phase of Europeanization and devolution of powers within the United Kingdom, the community finds itself in the position of having to attend to multiple scales: the European Union, the United Kingdom, Scotland and the island itself with its various interest groups. We draw on ethnographic interviews with community organizers that were elicited for the research project Sustainability on the Edge to illustrate some political challenges and possibilities of such scalar realities. We show that community organizers construct a voice that emphasizes a historical quality of what it means to live on Barra while inflecting this quality with worldly knowledge that enables access to resources from outside the island. Our findings remind us that centers and peripheries are neither fixed categories that could simply be mapped on geographical visualizations nor notions independent of discursive practice