Peat and turf spades
“Nowadays, the beauty about being an antiquary is that it does not label us in a narrow way as, for instance, an academic or curator, or as an historian or archaeologist. We should not need to remind ourselves that the Society has always been a broad church and many of the enduring achievements of our Fellows have depended on an interaction between different disciplines. An important strand present in the interests of our Fellows since 1780 is what is now generally known as ethnology. It was good to see the Society, in association with the European Ethnological Research Centre in Edinburgh University, mount a conference on the Ethnological Crossroads in Edinburgh on 5-6 December. This event marked the 25th anniversary of the EERC and the recent completion of its 14 volume Compendium of Scottish Ethnology – a truly remarkable achievement. It was also, as the conference title indicates, an opportunity to review the place of Scottish ethnology within the wider European context and assess the new directions which the subject might take in the future.
‘Ethnology Crossroads’ not only points to different ways ahead but implies a route already traversed, one that extends much further back in time than the founding of the Society in 1780. We can certainly see in the writings of Scotland’s medieval chroniclers and historians material which we would now regard as indicative of an ethnological interest, a curiosity about the habits and customs of their countrymen, their racial origins, and how others saw them. Book 1 of John Major’s A History of Greater Britain of 1521 is a good example, available in an English translation published by the Scottish History Society in 1892.
The Society’s collections, formed in the 19th century into the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland and now incorporated in the National Museums Scotland, were not just about documenting life in Scotland but in seeking out comparable material from elsewhere in the world as a means of understanding the development of civilisation and the place of Scotland and the Scots in that story. The 1892 printed catalogue of the museum encompasses all the collections in an elegant classification system which recognises there were successive ages of stone, bronze and iron, and for historic material creates categories of ecclesiastical relics, arms and armour, domestic utensils, etc. Each section of Scottish material is followed by the corresponding non-Scottish artefacts.
As a new, young curator in the museum in the early 1970s the writer was urged to read Fellow Sir Arthur Mitchell’s The Past in the Present: What is Civilisation? The contents of this book, published in 1881, were first delivered as the Rhind Lectures in 1876 and 1878. It was good to hear Hugh Cheape remind us at the conference of its enduring value, for its many examples of ‘neo-archaic’ (Mitchell’s term) objects and customs still existing in late 19th-century Scotland, a country which had to be considered as civilised. Included are accounts of the use of spindles and whorls for spinning, ‘Norse mills’ and the manufacture of hand-made pottery at Barvas in Lewis. We may not now see much of value in Mitchell’s approach to an understanding of the nature of civilisation but we should recognise his determination to create a scientifically rigorous methodology.
Nobody at the conference was in any doubt that the main figure in the story of ethnology in Scotland was our late Honorary Fellow, Professor Alexander – ‘Sandy’ – Fenton, the man whose vision, hard work and persistence created the Compendium of Scottish Ethnology. Sandy was a man of many talents, a lexicographer, linguist, curator, academic and teacher, but it is as an ethnologist that he will chiefly be remembered. In the latter part of the 20th century he was largely responsible for putting Scotland on the map, ethnologically speaking, and it was good to see distinguished guests at the conference from elsewhere in Europe to honour his memory. Sandy not only produced work of a high academic standing but his book on Scottish Country Life, first published in 1976, rightly remains a classic that can be read and enjoyed by a wide range of people.
So whether ethnology in Scotland? It is too early to say, but it is clear that it is alive and well and the conference provided a lot to think about. As antiquaries we should take pleasure in that, and whether or not ethnologists ourselves, hope to learn from the work of Sandy Fenton’s successors.”
Dr David Caldwell
President
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