Scottish Heritage Southern Style

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Scottish Heritage Southern Style

by Celeste Ray
Southern Cultures, Vol. 4, No. 2: Summer 1998

"Scottish and southern heritages meld into a new kind of southern identity, one founded on lost causes but refashioned for today's South."

During the past four decades, growing interest in Americans’ cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland has produced hundreds of new clan and heritage societies and a steadily increasing number of Scottish Highland games. Scottish American ethnic awareness and organization has had other, briefer, periods of popularity in our nation’s history. However, the growth of Scottish cultural groups and gatherings has proved most dramatic in die late-twentieth-century South, where a unique and distinctly regional style flavors events and perceptions of Scottish origins. Today, approximately half of all Scottish American societies base their associations in the South and more than one-third of the over two hundred annual Highland games/Scottish festivals occur in the region.

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