Public and private: national identities in a Scottish Borders community*

Abstract

Abstract. This paper is an exploration of national identities among sports people in a community in the Scottish Borders. This group experiences a split in their identities. Publicly, they are ascribed an ambiguous national identity by the surrounding national communities. Privately, and among fellow community members, they unambiguously assert national identity. This paper examines the way this split is managed, arguing that the performance of public ambiguity is expected, but is supported by the private performance of nationality. National identity is analysed specifically as a performance, and sport is the context in which this performance takes place.

Alien species: the discursive othering of grey squirrels, Glasgow Gaelic, Shetland Scots and the gay guys in the shag pad

“…Given her earlier comments about Scots language belonging to the mainland, and aligning her instead with Shetland, one might expect this to be echoed in what she says about identity (see also Gill, 2005). It is, eventually, but only after some prompting.…”

From Enmity to Rivalry? Notes on National Identity Politics in Competition States

“…Within human geography, the list of issues studied from the 'identity angle' includes landscape (Johnson, 1995;So¨rlin, 1999;Ha¨yrynen, 2000), geopolitical narratives (Sidaway & Power, 2005), geographical imaginations of danger and threat (Dalby, 1990;Sharp, 2000;Megoran, 2005), territorial conflict management (Newman, 2001), regionalism and regional movements (van Houtum & Lagendijk, 2001;Bialasiewicz, 2002;Jones, 2004), territorial construction of nations and nationality (Knight, 1982;Kaplan, 1994;Paasi, 1996;Herb, 2004;Jansson, 2005), regional planning (Raagmaa, 2002;Jensen & Richardson, 2004) and the borderland phenomenon (Kaplan, 1999;Meinhof & Galasin´ski, 2002;Gill, 2005;Stieve, 2005).…”

Between the devil and the deep blue sea: nationality, power and symbolic trade‐offs among evangelical Protestants in contemporary Northern Ireland1

“…The symbolic (cognitive and normative) richness and variety of nationalisms has been thoroughly discussed at the level of elite discourse and national narratives (Smith 1986(Smith , 1999Greenfeld 1992). In the recent period it is also being explored at the everyday level (see recent work on 'everyday nationalism' in Scotland and England, Billig 1995;Edensor 2002;Gill 2005;Kiely et al 2005;Reicher and Hopkins 2001;Condor 2000). The 'content' of national identity for ordinary nationals tends to be diverse.…”