Tartanry
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Tartanry is a word used to describe the kitsch elements of Scottish culture that have been over-emphasized or super-imposed on the country first by the emergent Scottish tourist industry that grew up with the British state in the 18th and 19th centuries, and later by an American film industry.
Tartanry refers to often mispresented or invented aspects of Scotland such as clan tartans, kilts, bagpipes, Scottish Gaelic and Highland culture more generally. It takes what is essentially a misrepresentation of the 17th century Highlands and projects this misrepresentation of a single region onto the whole country.
While Scotland has a rich and varied history, including its own nation-state institutions, an education system distinct from that of its southern neighbour and a long history as a nation of outward looking traders, merchants and lawyers, the popular image of Scotland as a reduced version of the Highlands is a popular image that sells well to tourists and the global movie industry.
While the Highlands were relatively peripheral to the functioning of the Scottish nation-state, the Hanoverian ascendency and the British government, which followed from the Act of Union between the Scots Parliament and the English Parliament in 1707, selectively promoted aspects of Scots Highland identity for both sentimental and practical reasons. The British state co-opted the military tradition of the Highlands and used this to create crack Scottish infantry regiments wearing Crown approved uniform tartan. In this way, the recruiting of the poor into an imperial military thus became a selling point of British Scotland. Similarly, recent Hollywood representations of Scotland such as Mel Gibson's Braveheart perpetuate a myth of Scotland as place that was only relevant in so far as it is tartan.
The restoration of the Scottish Parliament in 1997 has gone some way to regaining lost ground for Scotland against the encroachment of tartanry, but other identity pressures such as the 'new regionalism' of such projects as Silicon Glen provide limited opportunities for ensuring a strong and coherent identity against the encroachments of globalisation.
