Castles, lochs, seascapes. Coastal Scotland is one of the world's most romanticized tourist destinations, yet it is in the midst of severe economic decline. The North Atlantic fisheries crisis has hit Scottish communities hard and local fisherfolk are faced with chronic insecurity, anxiety over the decline of fishing and doubts about their cultural survival. The decline of this traditional industry has been accompanied by growing tourism along Scottish shores. Fishing villages are marketed for tourist consumption and culture has become a commodity.
Drawing upon fieldwork, novels, folk music and travel literature, Nadel-Klein explores how these influences have affected locals' sense of identity and presence within a modern European nation. How is identity linked to power? What role do memory and authenticity play in the creation of Scottish heritage? How do locals feel about the onslaught of tourists? The topical nature of these issues and their relevance to other regions facing similar tensions make this book an important contribution to contemporary anthropology.

Castles, lochs, seascapes. Coastal Scotland is one of the world's most romanticized tourist destinations, yet it is in the midst of severe economic decline. The North Atlantic fisheries crisis has hit Scottish communities hard and local fisherfolk are faced with chronic insecurity, anxiety over the decline of fishing and doubts about their cultural survival. The decline of this traditional industry has been accompanied by growing tourism along Scottish shores. Fishing villages are marketed for tourist consumption and culture has become a commodity.
Drawing upon fieldwork, novels, folk music and travel literature, Nadel-Klein explores how these influences have affected locals' sense of identity and presence within a modern European nation. How is identity linked to power? What role do memory and authenticity play in the creation of Scottish heritage? How do locals feel about the onslaught of tourists? The topical nature of these issues and their relevance to other regions facing similar tensions make this book an important contribution to contemporary anthropology.

Focusing on issues of empathy and mutuality, and self and other, as experienced in the everyday challenges of doing participant-observation fieldwork, this volume makes a significant contribution to rethinking the experiential and conceptual construction of the field. The contributors adopt a critical and self reflexive approach that goes beyond issues of voice and representation raised by early postmodern anthropology, to grapple with issues concerning the nature of knowledge transmission that lie at the very heart of the ethnographic effort. They explore how multiple modes of attending, awareness and sense making can shape the ethnographic process. Of note are those unanticipated, less palpable forms of communication that are peripheral to or transcend more formalized and structured research methods and agendas. Among these are empathy, intuition, somatic modes of attention and/or embodied knowledge and identification, as well as, shared sensory experiences and aesthetics. By the elaboration of such concepts the volume as a whole offers a substantial elaboration of a phenomenological approach.