The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland
The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland
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传统的发明：苏格兰高地传统
DOI：
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发表时间：
2012
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
H. Trevor
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作者：
H. Trevor
今天，每当苏格兰人聚集在一起庆祝他们的民族身份时，他们都会通过某些独特的国家机构公开维护这一身份。他们穿着用格子呢编织的短裙，其颜色和图案表明了他们的“氏族”；如果他们沉迷于音乐，他们的乐器就是风笛。他们认为这种装置非常古老，但实际上很大程度上是现代的。它是在英国与英国结盟之后制定的，有时甚至是很久之后才制定的，从某种意义上说，它是对英国的一种抗议。在联邦成立之前，它确实以残存的形式存在。但这种形式被绝大多数苏格兰人视为野蛮的标志：无赖、游手好闲、掠夺性、敲诈勒索的高地人的标志，他们对文明的、历史悠久的苏格兰来说，与其说是威胁，不如说是一种滋扰。即使在高地，即使是那种残存的形式，它也是相对较新的：它不是高地社会的原始标志，也不是高地社会的独特标志。事实上，独特的高地文化和传统的整个概念是一个回顾性的发明。在十七世纪后期之前，苏格兰高地人并没有形成一个独特的民族。他们简直就是爱尔兰的溢出物。在那个破碎而荒凉的海岸上，在那片大大小小的岛屿群岛中，海洋团结在一起而不是分裂，从五世纪末，阿尔斯特的苏格兰人在阿盖尔登陆，直到十八世纪中叶，雅各布派起义后“开放”，苏格兰西部被山脉与东部隔开，总是与爱尔兰联系在一起，而不是与撒克逊低地联系在一起。从种族和文化上来说，它是爱尔兰的殖民地。
Today, whenever Scotchmen gather together to celebrate their national identity, they assert it openly by certain distinctive national apparatus. They wear the kilt, woven in a tartan whose colour and pattern indicates their ‘clan’; and if they indulge in music, their instrument is the bagpipe. This apparatus, to which they ascribe great antiquity, is in fact largely modern. It was developed after, sometimes long after, the Union with England against which it is, in a sense, a protest. Before the Union, it did indeed exist in vestigial form; but that form was regarded by the large majority of Scotchmen as a sign of barbarism: the badge of roguish, idle, predatory, blackmailing Highlanders who were more of a nuisance than a threat to civilized, historic Scotland. And even in the Highlands, even in that vestigial form, it was relatively new: it was not the original, or the distinguishing badge of Highland society. Indeed, the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention. Before the later years of the seventeenth century, the Highlanders of Scotland did not form a distinct people. They were simply the overflow of Ireland. On that broken and inhospitable coast, in that archipelago of islands large and small, the sea unites rather than divides and from the late fifth century, when the Scots of Ulster landed in Argyll, until the mid-eighteenth century, when it was ‘opened up’ after the Jacobite revolts, the West of Scotland, cut off by mountains from the East, was always linked rather to Ireland than to the Saxon Lowlands. Racially and culturally, it was a colony of Ireland.