The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory

Andrew Blaikie explores how different, but connected, ways of seeing infuse relationships between place and belonging. He argues that all memories, whether fleeting glimpses or elaborate narratives, invoke imagined pasts, be these of tenement life, island cultures, vanished moralities, even the origins of social science. But do these recollections share a common frame of reference? Are our perceptions conditioned by a collective social imaginary? We see the impact of modernity on Scottish culture in visions of nation and community from the late eighteenth century on, from Adam Ferguson's ideas on civil society through John Grierson's pioneering of documentary film to structures of feeling in popular fiction. Landscape as the symbolic "face of Scotland", with its attendant mental contours have been produced and debated in genres including travel literature, social commentary, novels and magazines, but it is the changes in how we capture and present images, particularly given recent technological changes in photography, which have affected the ways we identify and remember. Broadly sociological in approach, the range of Blaikie's analysis lends itself equally to those interested in social history, cultural geography and visual or memory studies.

Andrew Blaikie is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Aberdeen.