The Sea is Wide - New Celts from Old Horizons

By Donald MacFarlane
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Published: July 23, 2011
Words: 166,655 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781466031036

Short description

This book will give both sedentary and peripatetic readers a better informed sense of that part of their identity that is Irish or Scottish Highlander, whether they are still living in their original homelands or dispersed across the globe as a result of the nineteenth century diasporas.

Extended description

This book will give both sedentary and peripatetic readers a better informed sense of that part of their identity that is Irish or Scottish Highlander, whether they are still living in their original homelands or dispersed across the globe as a result of the nineteenth century diasporas. The common thread is that they are all of Atlantic Celt origin, albeit they may have over the centuries accrued a different ethnic or national foreground.
The book 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 there was still the element of choice.
Relationsh.. (Read more) This book will give both sedentary and peripatetic readers a better informed sense of that part of their identity that is Irish or Scottish Highlander, whether they are still living in their original homelands or dispersed across the globe as a result of the nineteenth century diasporas. The common thread is that they are all of Atlantic Celt origin, albeit they may have over the centuries accrued a different ethnic or national foreground.
The book 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 there was still the element of choice.
Relationships are explored 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 book explores how that essential part of personal identity which is ethnic can be lost when people leave their ancestral home as, long after an ancestor has deceased, family roots still run deep and descendants five generations on and oceans removed still continue a search.
The issues that drove some people to leave and others to stay are even more pertinent today wherever there is still a clash between cultures that may have to compete. As in the nineteenth century, so it is today, that some people accept a strained co-existence with a culture that is ‘here to stay’; some adopt new social values and mores wholesale; others are displaced or removed, often at great distances. Or proper conciliation may become possible with passage of time. Some people retreat instead into their psychological hinterlands and, in extreme form, change is not only unaccepted but entrenchment becomes even more pronounced. All these outcomes are illustrated within the book.
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Tags

ireland, scotland, diaspora, celtic, emigration

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