At Home in the Hills - Sense of Place in the Scottish Borders

To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of the Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England, developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community. Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place, and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.

List of contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: Place-Making and Family Farms in the Scottish Borders

Chapter 1. Reivers of the Marches: The Borders as Frontier

Chapter 2. Tenants on Landed Estates: Capitalist Agriculture in the Middle Shires

Chapter 3. Sheep Farming in the Community: The Borders as Rural

Chapter 4. Forms of Tenure: Establishing Relations between Farm and Family

Chapter 5. Sheep and Land: A Political Economy of Space

Chapter 6. Hill Sheep and Tups: Emplacement through Farm Work

Chapter 7. Lamb Auctions: Spectacles of Hill Sheep Farming

Chapter 8. Ram Auctions: Tups of Value, Men of Renown

Chapter 9. The Big House: Farmers and Shepherds

Chapter 10. The Farmhouse: Keeping the Farm in the Family

Afterword

References

Index

About the author

John Gray was Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at Aberdeen University in Scotland from 1962 to 1980. He published books on Middle Eastern archaeology and culture, as well as commentaries on several Books of the Bible. At his death in 2000, he left a manuscript of a commentary on the Book of Job which was published posthumously in 2010. He also left a manuscript of his poem, Job in a Cheviot Plaid.

Summary

To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of the Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England, developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community. Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place, and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.

Additional text

"... a fascinating history of the Borders as space defined through exercises of power ... The absorbing history of space provides the setting for a fine-grained ethnograpy of place ... It also has the great virtue of being most readable."  · The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Product details

• Authors: John Gray, John N Gray
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.08.2000
• EAN: 9781571817396
• ISBN: 978-1-57181-739-6
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 145 mm x 222 mm x 18 mm
• Weight: 491 g
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); Anthropology (General)