The Sea is Wide 2012
Courtesy of Brian Boggs and Shirley McAnelly, this image is cropped from a larger scene from an oil painting. The original seemingly shows the ship in the middle of a regatta or a larger fleet going all parts of the compass. The Adam Lodge herself is in full sail while buffeted by high seas – if accurate an extremely uncomfortable experience for the passengers?
How alike are you to your Irish or Highland Ancestor?
In the absence of family narrative to say what ancestors were really like, a proxy method has been devised to look at how Celtic traits have survived generations. Find out more with Identity Exploration (no cost attached, based on PhD research, no Freudian quackery).
http://www.identityexploration.com/ipseus_output.asp
Primordialism (identity that is formed by sense of personal history and attachment to a piece of soil or place of origin) is in the first two columns.
Situationalism (identity does not depend on the past and is more to do with present characteristics and is in the ‘here and now’) is in other columns.
|
Resonance Domain |
Markers Domain |
Traits Domain |
Dynamics Domain |
Response Domain |
|
History |
Location |
Bond |
Affiliation |
Defence |
|
Race |
Culture |
Sentiment |
Striving |
Survival |
|
Ancestry |
Rights |
Temperament |
Authority |
Conflict |
|
Memory |
Folkways |
Entitlement |
Conformity |
Entity |
|
Narratives |
Religion |
Disposition |
Congruence |
Assimilation |
|
Symbols |
Values |
Emotion |
Empathy |
Adaptation |
A way of finding out a person’s current Q-Celt (Hebridean or Irish) identity, whether primordialist or situationalist, or some combination of both, is to measure the person’s identification with famous or notorious role models from the past in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands.
For the Highlands, these are General Hugh MacKay, Colonel Gordon, Governor Macquarie and Doctor McNeill, as explained in the book (see Smashwords) ‘New Celts from Old Horizons’. For Ireland, these are Dr William McNevin, Archbishop Troy, Ambrose McGuigan and Viscount Castlereagh.
The purpose of the exercise is to show how identification with these characters can be mirrors to a person’s own current Q-Celt (Irish or Highland) identity.
How to Find Out Even More
Place your anonymised request on this page (your email address will register you with the administrator of the site who will get back to you).
BREAKING NEWS
‘The Sea is Wide – New Celts from Old Horizons’ , the companion volume to this website, is again available again on Amazon and Smashwords as a Kindle ebook (price $4.50 or £3), downloadable onto Kindle, iPad, iPhone, PC, Mac, Blackberry, Android and many more
. http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/75880/120/the-sea-is-wide-new-celts-from-old-horizons
Sample downloads at no cost can also be viewed and give a flavour of the contents of this book which will shortly also be for sale in paper version at National Trust outlets in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere. The contributors are all highly acknowledged experts in their field. Please do not be put off too much by some formatting problems in the meantime in the Introduction section of the ebook. This is due to some quirk with Smashwords which will be corrected soon. Anyone who chooses to purchase the ebook now will be able to download it later without these minor glitches and at no extra cost. The chapters themselves appear in the meantime in their proper page format exactly as you would expect.
Target Readership
The hope is that the book will have a broad appeal to thousands of family researchers in US, Canada, Australia and at home, as up to 60% of ancestry tourists to the British Isles from abroad declare an interest in knowing more about the social history of the times in which their ancestors lived. This is a very considerable number as about 120,000 visitors come from North America to Ireland in an average high-season month, to take one example, with similar numbers for Scotland.
The book will give both sedentary and peripatetic readers a better informed sense of that part of their identity that is Irish or Scottish Highlander, albeit they may have accrued a different ethnic or national foreground. It will present the broad sweep of social and personal circumstances that prevailed upon those ancestors who were ‘forced’ to emigrate and those who ‘chose’ to stay. An attentive reader will pick up that there is little in this book about the famines of the 1840s – surely the most obvious cause of mass emigration (more so from Ireland than Scotland) to the New World? The famines have been left out because the aim of the book is to explore the reasons for emigration at times when the element of choice was still a factor.
The book also explores how that essential part of personal identity which is ethnic can be lost when people leave their ancestral home. But long after an ancestor has deceased, family roots still run deep and descendants who are five generations on and oceans removed often still continue the search. The book explores the relationships between ethnic identity and the limited number of possible responses when people are faced with catastrophic scenarios such as occurred in Ireland and Scotland during the period 1798-1858. These dilemmas and responses are universal and the ability of people today to identify and empathise with kith and kin from previous generations is what keeps sense of ethnic identity alive.
The issues are even more pertinent today wherever there is a clash between cultures that may have to compete to find their place. Some people accept a strained co-existence with a new culture that is ‘here to stay’; some adopt an alien set of social values and mores wholesale; others come to be displaced or removed, often at great distances. Or conciliation may become possible in a gradual manner with passage of time. Some people retreat instead into their geographical or psychological hinterlands. In extreme form, change is not only unaccepted but entrenchment in older ways becomes even more pronounced, or there may be outright rebellion. All these outcomes are illustrated within the book.
Editor
Dr Donald MacFarlane
External Evaluators
Prof Brian Graham (UU)*
Prof Jim Hunter (UHI)**
Dr Eric Kaufmann (Birkbeck and Harvard)
* University of Ulster
** University of the Highlands and Islands
Line up of contributors
Compromised Identity 1798-1858
Highland Diaspora Prof. Eric Richards PhD Adelaide
The Big House Dr. Annie Tindley PhD Glasgow
A Hole in the Fence Prof. John Sheets PhD Missouri
Conflicted Identity 1798-1858
Ceathrar air an Urlar Dr. Donald MacFarlane PhD Belfast
A Price on His Head Peter Gallagher Sydney
Young Ireland Prof. Christine Kinnealy PhD New Jersey
The Murder of Annie Beaton Dr Douglas Malcolm PhD PEI
Displaced Identity 1798-1858
The Adam Lodge Brian Boggs Canberra
The Highland Soldier Prof. Edward Spiers PhD Leeds
Ethnic Violence in Conception Bay Prof. Willeen Keough PhD Vancouver
Oppressed Identity 1798-1858
Base and Clever Prof. Malcolm Prentis PhD Canberra
Rogues and Fools Dr. Christine Wright PhD Canberra
Three Hundred Lashes Merle O’Donnell Brisbane
Reconstructed Identity 1858-
John 1678 Victor Barnett Ohio, U.S.A
Irish Bamboo Dr. Chad Habel PhD Adelaide
Lost Places Dr. Carol Glover PhD Melbourne
Present Pasts Dr.Laurie Gourievidis PhD Clermont-Ferrand, France
Loosen the Knot Dr. Donald MacFarlane PhD Belfast
An informal writing style has been adopted throughout. The text of the book has a length equivalent to over 250 A4 pages, with close on a thousand references – all presented in an informal and non-intrusive manner to encourage readers into further study.










