Imagining Wales and Welsh identity in three contexts

Jody R. Taylor Watkins, Purdue University

Abstract

This study explores its central question—How do people imagine Wales and Welsh identity?—by examining three contexts: (1) the relationship between Wales and its neighbor England, frequently treated as definitive of the British state; (2) the often contentious relationship of the Welsh to one another over the meaning of the Welsh language for identity; and (3) the equally contentious relationship among the Welsh over regional economic inequalities and how to weigh economic need against political/cultural nationalism in the context of devolutionary politics. National identity is treated here as an ongoing construction at the individual and collective levels, yet one that relies upon a "received" symbolic base of historical events, traditions, and other elements that, while constructions themselves, shape identity. The three contexts collectively reveal two common ways of imagining Welsh identity: (1) a sense of struggle against political, economic and cultural inequalities, whether directed against the British state/England, or against the many internal disparities of wealth, regional development or cultural power; and (2) an internal competition between competing views of identity that, in their polar forms, could be described as "romantic versus realistic." In the first, Wales is a nation of small communities, usually Welsh-speaking and highly tolerant. In the second, Wales is the modern nation, not exempt from the "sins" of modernism, and largely having lost its national language as a natural means of communication. The study points to several valuable lines of inquiry for researchers of national and other kinds of identity. These include the need to explore: history and its artifacts and how people react to them; the existence of core-periphery type relationships within and between nations and the implications of their prevalence; conversations with people from the so-called "core" population living within the "periphery" for the insights they can give on national imaginings in the peripheral nation; people's own essentialist descriptions of identity and the reactions of their national fellows to those descriptions; and comparisons between how identity is imagined in relation to external and internal influences.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Buckser, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Cultural anthropology

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