A Modern Scottish View of Clans (and Gathering)

[O'Callaghan]

At highland games here in the US I have often thought how ironic it is to see Americans leap to their feet when clan chiefs are introduced as honored guests, in ignorance, sometimes willful, that it was more often than not the ancestors of these very chiefs whose mistreatment of their own ancestors cause them to leave their homes in Scotland to start from nothing, making a new life in a strange country.

I suspect in the imaginings of most of those in the US, their ancestors WERE the chiefs, rather than their serfs, so they happily spend outrageous sums on highland dress, in the belief they are continuing the traditions of their chiefly ancestors, rather than clothing themselves in something closer to the chiefs' lackeys.

Of course times have changed, perhaps more quickly here in the US than in Britain. Every time I go to the UK, it is a bit of a shock to encounter how deeply held class prejudice is, and how pervasive, compared to the US, and on both sides of the salt. (I do not say there are not all sorts of prejudices in the US. There are. It's just that the kind of class prejudice one sees in the UK, one doesn't see here. It's qualitatively different.) It's more akin to racism in the US, I guess, an unpleasant legacy from the benighted past that most people avoid discussing openly, and find more comfortable to ignore.

One could continue this analogy of the Gathering in Edinburgh as if middle and upper income African-Americans from the northern US were to travel to the rural American South, dress in rags, pick cotton and pretend to be happy, content and compliant darkies who rever their kindly masters---to the point that they took their owners' surnames, just as clansmen took their chiefs'--- and enjoy nothing more than waiting on them hand and foot. But this misses the point. And that point is using myth to promote tourism and thus the local economy, benefitting largely the descendants of the oppressed. A past that never existed is foisted upon the unwary.

In England, at least, I would say that the class divide is at least partly racial, i.e. Norman invaders lording it over Saxon serfs, putting it bluntly. Of course, that's an over-simplification to the nth degree, but to those who can't understand why it persists, I'd say that's the origin of it, even if its seldom overtly discussed in this way. This makes it a lot easier to understand than when you try to look at it in economic terms. I don't think that considering class prejudice in the UK in purely economic terms leads to any enlightenment about what's really going on.

Just because descendants of both are white, doesn't stop us from classifying someone when they open their mouth to speak, even today, even if it isn't as bad as it once was. The more you use latin based words (which all entered the language from Norman French) the higher your assumed social class. More Saxon based words marks you out as blue collar. In reality, the speaker's racial origin may have little to do with their vocabulary, because people worked out long ago that we don't look much different and so they 'cheated', but perceived social class is linked to how much you use words from two different racial groups, probably not only in England, but to a lesser extent in all English speaking countries, even where, as in the US, you might have very little of either in your family tree.

For a long time after the conquest, the ruling classes didn't even speak English. Of course, that wasn't English as we know it, but it was the admixture of Norman French with it that created English as we now know it today. Believe it or not, the original reason why French became the most common foreign language taught in English schools, as it still is, had nothing whatsoever to do with wanting to converse with French people from France.

We can call it class prejudice, but it does come from race originally, and even those of the upper classes who weren't of Norman origin were held guilty by association, gradually came to speak like them, and in time intermarried with them anyway.

In the rest of the UK it may be even worse, as there's a tendency to mistakenly identify a Southern English accent as 'posh', even when it's not.

[O'Callaghan]

Some interesting points have been raised. A chief of the name is considered to be Irish nobility in Ireland, and the same goes for a hereditary Scots clan chief, i.e. that they are a Scottish noble, except that the English and later British governments never recognised any of this. Some of them got English titles as well, others not. The victors certainly got to redistribute the spoils.

Most of the above is moot anyway, as most of them have no real power anymore. Even those with English titles don't all get to sit in the House of Lords anymore. The UK Labour Party controlled government reduced the number of peers who sit in the House of Lords to a smaller number of 'representative peers', so the rest have only the title, although of course there are quite a few who still have a lot of the land they were given when their ancestors were 'ennobled'.

The House of Lords is a bit like the US Senate, except that instead of a reconcilliation process, the bills go through the House of Commons (made up of the elected MPs, who are a bit like Representatives), then to the Lords, and then back to the Commons for a Second Reading, where the MPs can undo all the changes the Lords made if they want to, except for 'money bills' which I think don't go to the Lords. Some of the peers in the Lords are hereditary, and some appointed for life by governments as they leave office.

[JSFMACLJR]

The House of Lords is a bit like the US Senate, except that instead of a reconcilliation process, the bills go through the House of Commons (made up of the elected MPs, who are a bit like Representatives), then to the Lords, and then back to the Commons for a Second Reading, where the MPs can undo all the changes the Lords made if they want to, except for 'money bills' which I think don't go to the Lords. Some of the peers in the Lords are hereditary, and some appointed for life by governments as they leave office.

This may be splitting hairs, but in all truth, the US Senate is a bit like the House of Lords, and the US House of Representatives is a bit like the House of Commons. The Parliament of Westminster is the Mother of Parliaments