The Orkney Islands are an archipelago located off of the northwest coast of Scotland. Heavily rural and exceptionally isolated, Orcadians have practiced the traditional occupations of fishing and farming dating back thousands of years, and are noted even among other Scots as being especially resilient and self-sufficient. The challenges they face - rural community destabilization, the slow death of traditional occupations, an identity in flux as the world becomes ever more interconnected - are not unique to Orkney, but the ways in which Orcadians have confronted these challenges are.
This dissertation explores cultural and community resilience through three case studies. The first chapter is devoted to the role that traditional occupations play in North Atlantic fishing communities and Orcadian society more broadly, and how that role is evolving to meet the changing demands of a more globally integrated world. It focuses on the attitudes of fishers and farmers toward their work, and the ways that these groups are working to make sure their occupations remain relevant well into the future. The second chapter shifts focus to the budding tourism industry in Orkney, exploring some of the ways that Orcadians have worked (sometimes in vain) to manage the global tourism industry. This chapter is concerned with the impact that mass tourism is having on smaller Orcadian communities, and the creative ways that some island residents have attempted to seize on the tourism market for future economic stability as the operations of North Sea Oil wind down and traditional occupations continue to play less of a role in the island economy. The final chapter dives into questions of identity, exclusion, and group membership and focuses primarily on the place and experiences of Incomers - internal migrants from other parts of the United Kingdom - in small Orkney communities. This chapter navigates the fraught “incomer” category and explores the ways in which Orcadians of all varieties - native and incomer alike - are grappling, and will need to continue to grapple, with the problem of inclusion, the importance of belonging, and the uncertain nature of group membership in these isolated rural communities.
As a spiritual successor to the community-focused ethnographies of the 1970s and 1980s, this dissertation seeks to revisit North Atlantic communities 30 years on and to examine what has (and ultimately has not) changed. While these earlier works sought to document and preserve what the authors saw as a fading way of life, it is my hope to rather engage in a conversation centered on change and transformation. To this end, this dissertation foregrounds the lived experiences of Orkney residents and seeks to highlight the self-conscious ways they are trying to carve out a space for traditional culture in a world where sameness is highly valued and questions of identity are often fraught.
Additionally, this dissertation explores some of the self-conscious strategies that Orcadians have embraced in an effort to preserve those elements of traditional culture and identity that locals feel form the core of Orkney culture. It seeks to ground analysis in local perspectives and to document Orcadian approaches to the challenges facing their communities within the context of a more globalized world.