Chapter 2. Methodology
Chapter Two
Methodology
Well, these are not the old days when science and mathematics were all the rage. That sort of thing seems to have died down, somehow, perhaps because all the discoveries have been made, don’t you think? Interesting things can still happen apparently. At least I was told it was interesting [my emphasis] (Asimov, 1988:16).
The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur (A. N. Whitehead cited in McLuhan and Fiore, 1967).
One of my utmost concerns in the pursuit of this research was the continuing dilemma within the social sciences over the various knowledge claims and the debate concerning epistemology. It is an overarching concern that:
...whatever passes for 'knowledge' in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such knowledge...and that all human knowledge is developed, transmitted and maintained in social situations...then we are concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966:15).
If we are concerned with the social construction of reality we must then consider which are the best sociological tools with which we can study how this knowledge is developed, transmitted and maintained. Our major concern becomes what is the correct approach for such an enquiry. One of the first requests of my supervisor was to ‘go away and come back with a methodological model’ which I was to use for my fieldwork. This created a major problem for me. However, it was a useful task for I was able to clarify my thinking and report back that my research was not of the type that required the construction of a model.
While positivism has a long history within the social sciences, I felt that for the type of research I was doing on identity that these methods where not wholly appropriate. Much more appropriate was the approach known as ‘Naturalism’. This is one where the social world is studied in its natural state, using methods which do not come with pre-formed ideas or models which distort, as I see it, our understanding of social phenomena, for as Barnes et al. (1996) tells us, knowledge is ‘a natural phenomenon’. Such an approach then could allow the researcher to use a set of methods which would involve the researcher:
...participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives...watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions - in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of research (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983)
Using this set of guiding principles, I felt that I could access the Cornish and work as what might be termed an ‘indigenous ethnographer' (See Fahim, 1982 and Ohnuki-Tierney, 1984). For as Clifford (1986) writes, ‘Insiders studying their own cultures offer new angles of vision and depths of understanding' (Clifford, 1986:9). I am not Cornish, but feel that by studying a group of people within the British Isles I am in effect studying the indigenous cultures of the British Isles. And while not an anthropologist I recognise here the anthropological turn that this research takes.
The fact that I am not Cornish gives me two clear benefits in this type of research. The first is that in working ‘at home’ there is the possibility of having better human relationships with the respondents because of my ‘indigenous’ sensitivity to people’s expectations and my already taken for granted understanding of common customs and rituals and other forms of shared knowledge. The second benefit of being the indigenous anthropologist is that I can also be the ‘rude foreigner’ who can crash through cultural barriers and ask inappropriate questions to which people are willing to respond, ‘since they realise that the [researcher is], a sort of ‘innocent child, [who] does not know.' (Colson, 1976:13). As Jones (1970) claims ‘there is a difference between the vantage point of an insider who carries out research among his own people, and that of an outsider, although the former is not necessarily better' [my emphasis] (Jones, 1970:251-9). This is worth considering because this type of ethnographic research is often criticised for being biased and unscientific, indeed Popper goes as far as stating that:
The triumph of social anthropology is the triumph of a pseudo-observational, pseudo-descriptive, and pseudo-inductive generalising methodology and above all marks the triumph of a pretended objectivity and hence an imitation of the methods of natural science (cited in Banton, 1964).
Despite Popper's reservations about the methodological approach of ethnography or, as I have called it, indigenous anthropology, this type of research does have a long and respectable history within the field of Sociology/Anthropology. This history stretches from the early work of the Webb’s and Charles Booth, who (for many dark eugenic reasons) were interested in the class structure of Britain and used observational methods (Burgess, 1982:4-6), to the Chicago School of Sociologists. It is in Robert Parks work that Burgess suggests that we find the ‘interchange between social anthropology and sociology both in terms of the methods used and the perspectives employed' (Burgess 1984:112). Here we find such ‘classic’ works of sociology as Lynd and Lynd’s (1937) studies of Middletown; Whyte’s (1955) Street Corner Society; Becker's, (1963) Outsiders and Humphreys, (1970) Tea Room Trade.
In Britain this ethnographic approach pioneered by the Chicago School was taken up by sociologists and has produced such classic pieces of sociology as Cohen’s, (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics; Willis, (1977) Learning to Labour; Willmot and Young, (1960) Family and Class in a London Suburb; Young and Willmot, (1961) Family and Kinship in East London. It is this type of research that Burgess tells us was ‘the study of “natives”; individuals with whom sociologists were not familiar in their own society’ (Burgess, 1984:15).
This type of research, however, is not without its dangers. It is of particular relevance here that the dangers are considered given that I am researching an identity that seems to be emerging, or is imagined (Anderson, 1983), or is being invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), or at least is an epistemological problem for some of those people who live in Cornwall and call themselves Cornish. Michael Cernea (1982) warns us that the concept of indigenous anthropology is:
...fraught with the epistemological dangers of legitimising a particular nationalistic approach to science and to social facts. This concept implies the possibility of having several anthropologies about each object of anthropological study. My contention is that this concept would tend to legitimize a situation which I feel should be avoided, not validated (Cernea, 1982:67)
It is a fact that this thesis will become part of the ontological and epistemological building blocks that Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ will use to legitimise their claims that a Cornish identity is a social fact. However, as Cernea suggests, a distinction needs to be made about the nature of this work. It is proposed that rather than considering my research to be indigenous anthropology it is better to consider myself to be working as an indigenous anthropologist to resist any claims of bias. It therefore is important to note that we can make the charge of cultural bias against many of the writers who publish academic work within the covers of such journals as Cornish Studies. We can show that much of the academic writing that makes up the corpus of work concerning Cornish History, Cornish Culture, Cornish Identity and the general Cornish situation is the work of Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ such as Phillip Payton, Bernard Deacon, Ken George, Malcolm Williams and Alan Kent to name but a few.
Other secondary sources such as magazines like ‘Kernow’ frame their editorial policy in more political terms. This is a magazine which:
...puts Cornwall and Cornish people first [it] provides a forum for...the plight of the Cornish people. We see the struggle of the Cornish people as part of the worldwide fight for the rights of small nations and peoples.
While the magazine published by the Cornish Bureau for European Relations (CoBER), ‘CoBER Covath’, has an editorial policy that is at one with the ‘European Movement’ and believes that Cornwall as part of the European Community should have its own clear identity and thus tells in its pages of the Cornish ‘...history, customs and way of life’. Its prime aim is to be the mouthpiece of an organisation which:
...has as its task the recognition of Cornwall as one of Europe’s historic cultural regions. (Letter to Covath from its CoBER’s Chairman, Spring 1991).
All these writers attempt to make different and often competing claims of what the Cornish ‘situation’ is. For example, in a magazine called Cornish World-wide, Alan Kent (1994) explores the ‘mythical’ or fantastical elements of a Cornish identity, while in an earlier issue, Philip Payton (1992) explores the Cornish as ‘A Global Identity’ and in the same issue Vi West (1992) tells us of Cornwall’s Intellectual Identity. Importantly all of these writers are Cornish and as such have a vested interest in creating a discourse wherein the various claims for a ‘different’ Cornwall is taken as a serious project. I, by default, am also part of this discourse which attempts to categorise and corroborate the existence of a Cornish identity.
My aim then within this thesis is to provide, by using the tools of ethnography, what Geertz calls ‘thick description’ an uncovering of the ‘structures of signification' (Geertz, 1973:9), a pursuit of the multiplicity of complex conceptual structures that the Cornish display, structures which are ‘...at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit' (Geertz, 1973:10), and which must be grasped and then rendered.
An Indigenous Ethnographer in Cornwall: Assessing the claim for a Cornish Identity.
Cornish Nyns Yu [not is] English (Graffiti on a roadbridge Liskeard 1998)[i]
The English are good at puddings. Perhaps it is the only thing they are good at. (Richard Stein, Cornish Chef. The Guardian 12-03-91 p.23)
How then do we start to ‘grasp’ and ‘render’ this thing called Cornish identity? My research interest was sparked by the seemingly never-ending debate concerning the nature of the Cornish identity, not least in the local press in papers such as the Western Morning News, West Briton and Cornish Times and the journals mentioned above, where there is a continual assertion of ‘Cornish difference’.
This raised a number of sociological questions. First we could ask, what is the nature of this ‘Cornishness’ which attracts such eloquent articulation? And secondly, why is it that ‘Cornishness’ is an issue at all? After all, in the condition of what many academics call ‘late-modernity’, we live in a world of compressed global communications and transactions with an apparently relentless drive towards cultural homogeneity in which the assertion of separate identity appears both eccentric and perverse. And yet as I walked the streets of Cornwall it became increasingly harder to deny on a common-sense level that there is a ‘group of people who define themselves as Cornish’. (Deacon, B and Payton, P, 1993).
However, this notion of the Cornish being different or having a separate identity is not new. Not only do the Cornish define themselves as different, but the dominant group, the English, also defines them as 'others'. Two examples from the medium of television may suffice here. The first is the ‘Kilroy’ daytime talkshow (BBC 1. 20-03-96). One of his guests was talking about being beaten by ‘bouncers’. He says, ‘I was thrown down the stairs’ Kilroy asks ‘Was this in a club?’, ‘Yes’, ‘Where’? ‘In Cornwall’ Kilroy makes a joke ‘Oh well, they’re rough down there aren’t they?' The second example is another TV programme which once again defined the Cornish as different. On Room 101, (03-03-98) a popular BBC 2 comedy programme, where guests consign their pet hates to Room 101, a clip of film from the 1970’s was shown of a young girl with a thick, obviously South Western regional accent (Bristolian in fact). The presenter Nick Hancock made the quip, after the clip was shown, that it had actually been filmed in Truro earlier that day. These jokes point to the existence of a common stock of knowledge wherein any reference to Cornwall, however slight, reinforces notions of opposition and difference. For people to ‘get’ the joke the notion that the Cornish are ‘different’ because they speak in broad yokel accents and are consequently stupid (which was the whole point of showing the clip), they, the (English) TV viewing population, have to have a reservoir of cultural stereotypes through which they can utilise to both reinforce their own cultural ‘sameness’ and unity against the (often unfounded) threat of the ‘other’.
I will show in Chapter Four the distinctive and different history the Cornish claim for themselves. But it is in other cultural artefacts that we can also start to find evidence of a Cornish identity asserting itself. For example, a very early example of difference is found in William Shakespeare’s play King Henry V (iv. I). There is a scene where Henry, in disguise, is wandering around his assembled troops. Upon encountering one of his soldiers, ‘Pistol’, the disguised King is asked, ‘What is thy name’. The King replies; ‘Harry le Roy’. Pistol then remarks; ‘Le Roy! A Cornish Name: art thou of Cornish Crew?’ Here, we may argue, is Shakespeare demarcating the Cornish as different, a ‘demarcation of “otherness”’ (Kent, 1996).
The Director of the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves also uses a similar device. When Robin Hood calls at the castle of Peter Dubois, a Muslim Azeem accompanies him. Duncan, a blind old retainer fails to realise that Azeem is a Black Muslim. He asks Azeem; ‘What manner of name is Azeem? Irish? Cornish?’. Alan Kent analyses this by suggesting that:
Duncan, like Pistol, finds the name strange. It has an ‘otherness’ and he can only relate that to names of a Celtic origin. Irish is offered initially, but he feels the need to be more outlandish; thus, Cornish is the second nationality offered. (Kent, 1996:25)
In Kenneth Brannagh’s 1989 film version of Henry V even the Cornish flag of St. Piran can be seen. If we then start to add these literary references to the more contemporary ‘everyday’ references to Cornishness and Cornish identity we start to build a large body of prim’a facie evidence. These include the flying of St. Piran flags. The images of ‘Trelawny’s Army’ advancing upon Twickenham for a rugby final against an English county team, an event which was symbolically constructed by the media as Cornwall against England. Those Cornish people who in 1997 commemorated the 1497 rebellions by marching into England and planting their colours in an act of achievement and defiance on the battlefield at Blackheath. Redruth Brewery even introduced a line of Cornish Rebellion Beer with supporting T-shirts to match. Even the use of a headline by the Western Morning News (June 20 1998), ‘Cornish ‘army’ to block border’ symbolises difference and maintains a defensive attitude towards the English.
Cornwall also has an ‘otherness’, a ‘difference’ thrust upon it by those ‘devotional texts’ known as tourist guidebooks (See Horne 1984). Horne tells us that these texts present ‘the object as relic and provides the ‘magical glow’ which can illuminate meanings that justify power or claim prestige’ (Horne, 1984: 34). So we find in the Cornish tourist guides advertising that promises us a different experience in the Cornish Riviera. Cornwall - a place of mystery and romance, the haunt of smugglers and piskies, the Cornwall of the Poldarks populated by short dark Celtic men and dark eyed maidens. (See Thornton, 1993; Payton and Thornton, 1995).
Using the Internet as another source of prim’a facie evidence, a web search of the term ‘Cornish’, shows us 40 Cornish Associations world-wide plus 18 across the UK. This includes associations[ii] all around the world from Australia, to the Central and South Americas, North America, South Africa, and so on, all run by first and second generation citizens, all of whom would claim Cornish descent and Cornish identity. An identity that is seemingly powerful and salient enough to fragment the national identities of those who also claim Cornishness around the globe. Take for example this woman, a Canadian of Cornish descent who has never been to Cornwall, writes after listening to a Cornish men’s choir on tape:
Help!! I must be crazy!!! I’m Canadian!!! Really I am!! I love my country! But....this [Cornish] feeling is weird!! I daren’t tell my kids!....But I suspect that there is something ‘buried’ in our genes that ‘bind’ us together. I hope so, ‘cause if not, I am crazy!! (Cornish World. Issue 7. Dec-Jan 1995-6)
This ‘ordinary’ and everyday 'flagging' (Billig, 1995) of Cornish identity is of crucial importance. For Billig this ‘Flagging of the Homeland Daily’ (ibid. p.93) suggests that identity (he uses the word ‘nationhood’) is near to the surface of daily life. It is through the constant, but barely conscious, reminders of the homeland. For example, the use of Kernow bumper stickers on cars which subtly impinge upon the group idea of Cornwall and Cornish Identity. There is the constant flagging of Cornish identity in literature, the news and entertainment media. The continued use of ‘banal’ regional symbols such as the Cornish pasty, piskeys, Cornish silver bands and the folk festivals of Cornwall such as the Padstow ‘obby oss’ and the Furry Dance (in Helston) work to ‘ensure that, whatever else is forgotten (or not known about) in a world of information overload, we do not forget our homelands’ (Billig, 1995: 127) and our identity.
Padstow 'Obby Oss' Blue ribbon oss. There are two oss's 'clubs', Old Oss to which only true Padstonians can join (red ribbons) and blue ribbon oss to which incomers can join (after a suitable period). Padstow obby oss is thought to be the oldest folk celebration in Europe.
Clearly, just in this brief overview of some of the myriad examples of secondary data, Cornish identity seems to be a social phenomena, if not for others but for the Cornish. The interesting sociological questions are, of course, just who are these Cornish people and does this flagging of the homeland constitute evidence that a Cornish identity does, in reality, exist?
Accessing the Cornish
One of the major problems for the sociological or anthropological fieldworker is gaining access to the chosen group. Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) suggest that its:
…achievement depend[s] upon theoretical understanding, often disguised as ‘native wit’, but the discovery of obstacles to access, and perhaps of effective means of overcoming them, [which in] itself provides insights into the social organisation of the setting’. (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983:54)
My first research question seemed to me to be a major one. Just who are the Cornish and where were they? It was clear to me from reading the local press (I was then living in Plymouth, on the Cornish - Devon border) that there did seem to be an on-going identity theme in local stories. This hunch was developed as I began to live in Cornwall as a participant observer. I spent 16 months living and working in Cornwall, between June 1995 and January 1997. I immersed myself in the day to day lives of the people I was living with and met Cornish people, both socially and professionally. I also attended Cornish meetings and events. This is where I would attempt to gain ‘inside’ knowledge that would give me access to the group.
Indeed, Giddens insists that this is the right approach. For Giddens (cited in Blaikie 1993) tells us that 'all social research is necessarily anthropological; it requires immersion...' (in Blaikie, 1993:90). We immerse ourselves in the social context to uncover the ways in which social reality is produced and reproduced by the activities of the people who are skilled actors. But as Gramsci tells us repeatedly those forms of social reality being produced and reproduced are often in conditions not of their own choosing. Therefore, in order to understand the context of these worlds of production it is necessary to explore what these social actors know and do in their daily activities. Blaikie (1993) tells us that:
Without immersion there is no adequate understanding of what lies behind and structures overt behaviour. Social research has to deal with a social world that is already constituted as meaningful by its participants. (Blaikie 1993:189)
The available literature on Cornish identity at this time was of very little help. Work that had been undertaken prior to and up to the 1990’s had generally been undertaken by those academics working within the disciplines of politics and economics. These writers (Pelling, 1962; Rallings and Lee undated) generally concluded that while a Cornish identity may have some passing interest, the fact that it had not formed into a politically salient nationalist identity was evidence enough not to study it. Payton (1993) notes that work on the Cornish was ‘brief and confused...flawed by the assumption that Cornwall was merely...[a]...part of a wider, homogeneous Southwest’. Even writers on Nationalism such as A.D. Smith (1981) and A. Birch (1989) failed to turn their attention in any meaningful way to the Cornish case. However work such as Hechter’s (1975) on Internal Colonialism within the Celtic fringe helped to develop some early theoretical directions.
As there was little or no relevant literature, I had to work as an ethnographer/anthropologist in the field. However, I was loath to follow the advice of Colson in an article entitled ‘The Intensive Study of Sample Small Communities’. Elizabeth Colson (1954) entreats us to
...organise fieldwork [with mathematics] in mind. We must obtain more quantification of every kind wherever it is possible to do so.... If one of the goals of ethnology is to arrive at patterns, configurations, or structures of cultures, these must be determined inductively from adequate numbers of actual facts if they are to satisfy the standards of science.
Rather, I wanted to remain true to the position I outlined above, that of ‘Naturalism’. To do this I followed the advice given to the anthropologist in the field. Upon entering a ‘native’ community, Williams (1967) tells us that contact with ‘native chiefs’ is useful. Fetterman (1989) also suggests that ‘introduction by a member is the ethnographer’s best ticket into the community’. A good example here is ‘Doc’ in Whyte’s Street Corner Society. This may be a ‘chief, principle, director teacher, tramp or gang member, and should have some credibility with the group' (Fetterman, 1989:42). To that end I started visiting Cornish activities. This is what Fetterman calls ‘the Big Net approach' (Fetterman, 1989:42). It allows the researcher to get a wide-angle view of the situation before a more exact study is made. To that end I attended The Annual Cornish Conference, Cornish events such as the Padstow Obby Oss and the Helston Furry Dance. I met with and talked to ‘native chiefs’, if I may call the Cornish Bards that. I was as Goffman (1989:126-129) puts it ‘getting into place’.
As these visits progressed it seemed to me that while I may have been attending Cornish cultural events there seemed to be one group of people missing, and that was the Cornish themselves. Most of the meetings I attended seemed to be populated by a group of people we might want to call ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. They generally seemed to be well educated and generally of the ‘middle classes’. So one of my first research problems was who where the Cornish? And secondly where were the Cornish?
Gramsci, Cultural Hegemony and Cornwall — A theoretical signpost.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci depicts the Italian proletariat as a subordinate group that can simultaneously hold two conceptions of the world. By employing Gramsci’s argument it is possible to utilise his analysis to show how the Cornish, as another subordinate group, can also hold two conceptions of the world. One is the ‘official’ conception, or dominant English viewpoint. The other is the ‘popular’ conception of the world, i.e. a Cornish conception, which, despite the dominance of the English viewpoint, has its own vigour and its own spontaneous life. The work of Gramsci on cultural hegemony[iii] allows us, according to Jackson-Lears (1985:568), to 'analyse the systemic features of a society characterised by inequalities of power without reducing that society to a system.' Thus:
By clarifying the political functions of cultural symbols, the concept of cultural hegemony can aid [in] ...trying to understand how ideas reinforce or undermine existing social structures...and seek ...to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the power wielded by dominant groups and the relative cultural autonomy of subordinate groups whom they victimise (Jackson-Lears (1985:568).
In this way, it is possible for us to recognise and acknowledge the existence of a Cornish version of the Gramscian ‘popular consciousness’ in which the consciousness of exploited populations is seen as turbulent, fluctuating, incoherent and (most notably) contradictory. In the following chapter I show how this Cornish popular consciousness is actively being created by the cultural entrepreneurs who point to examples of continuing historical and contemporary social, economic and political exploitation. However, in order to achieve a fuller analysis of Cornish culture and Cornish Identity, we need to probe more deeply into what Gramsci called the 'popular consciousness' and to follow his suggestion that the 'spontaneous philosophies' of folklores expressed in the thought of the common people needed to be understood. In undertaking such an analysis we should note that the philosophies of the subordinated Cornish population draw upon fragments of many ideologies: Celticism, Catholicism, Capitalism, Methodism, Old Customs, Folklore and so on which they are directed to through the efforts of the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. Each of these discourses vies for domination. And it is these re-interpreted, re-invented conceptions that find themselves at odds with the dominant or hegemonic culture — that of the 'English State'. Myriad fragments of ideologies may be absorbed by a Cornish individual to create a 'mosaic of meaning' which in many ways is unsystematic, lacks coherence and is subject to influence, particularly by the hegemonic culture (Cirese, 1982). Often everyday experience will contradict or challenge this mosaic of meaning producing a frustrating and contradictory consciousness which may facilitate the domination of more powerful ideologies and cultures (e.g. Englishness) and yet may also construct an internal (albeit inconsistent) ideology of resistance or popular rebellion (Gramsci, 1971:321ff). Gramsci is, above all, concerned with the concept of cultural hegemony:
the 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group,[i.e. the English] this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production (Gramsci, 1971:12)
Although Gramsci acknowledged that the power of the State was vested ultimately in its monopoly on the means of violence and its role as the final arbiter of all disputes, he argued that in practice the ruling elites in modern parliamentary democracies win their authority (hegemony), not through the explicit domination of their peoples through violence (or even through legitimising symbols) but through the consent of the subordinate groups. Thus:
In the bourgeois state, which is the first to use an extensive hegemonic apparatus, the autonomous castes of the pre-modern state become transformed into the voluntary associations - parties, unions, cultural institutions, etc., -which serve as hegemonic instruments (Adamson, 1980:173-174).
While working in the field as a participant observer it seemed very clear that there was indeed a definite group of people who were defining themselves as different. When I attended Cornish cultural gatherings they where very evident because of the badges and symbols of Cornishness they where displaying.
Because a modern Cornish identity is a re-interpretation of what went before and is a re-creation, it has to make do with traditions that may be invented or imagined and may or may not have some historical relevance to Cornwall’s past. For example, as we shall see below, it may be that Cornwall’s Celtic past is nothing more than an invention in response to social and political changes but we see this past symbolically displayed through various Cornish/Celtic symbols and badges that Cornish people use to declare their Cornishness. These badges and symbols include the wearing of items such as the Cornish tartan made into ties, waistcoats, and kilts. It may be the wearing of badges of the flag of St. Piran, the Cornish ‘national saint’ which is the flag of Cornwall (a white cross on a black background), or even bumper stickers of the same or with the word Kernow (Cornwall). The yellow and black rugby shirt of the county team has also become a popular symbol in Cornwall.
The 'banal signs' of Cornish identity St Piran's flags and the Cornish rugby shirt at Twickenham
These symbols, St. Piran's flag and the yellow and black rugby shirts, were much in evidence for example on Sunday 1st March, 1999 during a protest march in London by country people and in the protests which followed the closing (6 March 1998) of the last tin mine at South Crofty and the closing of the routes into Cornwall by Cornish protesters (See Western Morning News 27 July 1998, The Guardian 14 March 1998:14, The Observer 22 February 1998:16)
Such devices are for Billig (1995) ‘flagged signs of nationhood' (p. 69) and help what we might want to call, after Billig’s concept of Banal Nationalism, signs of ‘Banal Regionalism’. [my emphasis] Billig tells us that Banal Nationalism covers the:
…ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced. It is argued that these habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily, the nation is indicated, or flagged, in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition. (p.6)
However, there are other people for whom Cornishness is still a relevant part of their lives but are much more difficult to categorise as they do not flag their Cornishness on a daily basis. Gramsci however gives us further clues. He suggests that the sub-ordinate groups hold two consciousnesses, one that is not its own and 'borrowed' from another group - in this case the English. The other is 'its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception which manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes' (Jackson Lears, 1985:569).
What this means is that Cornish identity is for some one which is ‘submerged’ beneath the day to day rituals of everyday English cultural life. But given the right circumstance the Cornish identity will manifest itself. This manifestation may only be caught in Gramscian flashes, but when asserted can replace the English identity, for example the twenty thousand Cornishmen and women who pulled on their Cornish identity in the form of the yellow and black jerseys of the Cornish rugby team when they visited the ‘enemy’ in Twickenham in April 1992. Also the recent protests around the closing of the tin mines, and the protests at the Tamar Bridge have seen the Cornish ‘banal’ symbols being used as signs of identity. For example, although the Cornish language has ceased to be a spoken tongue, protesters have been chanting ‘Kernow bys vykken!’ (Cornwall forever) as did their ancestors in 1497 and 1643 when the Cornish marched on England. (See the Observer 22 February 1998:16).
If I were to understand how such minority identities were achieved I would need to immerse myself in the culture of the Cornish and locate informants to inform my work. Anecdotal evidence had suggested that the ‘real’ Cornish were ‘down in the west’, that if I wanted to do my research I had to go down to West Penwith. But it also seemed that this was a generalised belief that if I wanted the ‘real’ Cornish then I always had to go West and when I reached West Penwith, the next landing West is the USA where, of course, the American Cornish are more Cornish than the Cornish!
Also, many years of inward migration by the English has populated both urban and rural areas to such a great extent that the Cornish are a hidden minority, especially given that there are no distinguishing marks apart from the wearing of cultural ‘badges’ that mark the ‘ordinary’ Cornish person out. Further the adoption of a Cornish identity by incomers who have spent some years in Cornwall is an interesting phenomenon but produces an added problem.
There is evidence that there are distinctive Cornish names. Work carried out by Richard Blewett (1968) during the 1950s and 1960s suggests there are particular surnames in Cornwall which have Celtic origins. For example, he notes that (at the time of his writing) using an atlas (See Blewett, 1953) of surname distribution, there were about 750 Celtic surnames still in use in Cornwall, some of which, like the surname Curnow, are ‘practically confined westward of a line drawn from Truro to Newquay, about a quarter of the area of the country' (Blewett, 1968:7).
Another marker of Cornishness is biological or genetic criteria. An article in the Daily Mail entitled The hidden tribes of Britain (August 28 1992) suggests that the Cornish are genetically distinct from the rest of England. In the article, Professor Derek Roberts commenting on work presented to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science suggests that ‘History appears to have left such communities genetically undiluted in many ways from tribal ancestors' (Daily Mail, August 28 1992). He goes on to say that ‘People tend to marry locally and move locally with their choices governed by local factors. In many cases, where a family has moved away you will find subsequent generations move back. This ‘natural selection’ was, for Professor Robert Sokal of New York State University, a ‘crucial factor' (ibid.).
Harvey et. al. (1986) carried out more specific genetic work. Harvey and his team sampled 254 Cornish men and women, 90% of which volunteered in response to appeals in the media. The remaining 9% were students and teachers from the Cornwall College for Further and Higher Education. 143 Cornish adult males sampled by Professor F.S. Hulse in 1952 supplemented this. Various variables were sampled, anthropometric measurements, (bones, face structure etc.) dermatoglyphics (fingerprints), hair colour, eye colour, colour vision and of course blood sampling.
The results of this research are somewhat mixed, Harvey et. al. suggest that characteristics such as body size, head size, hair and eye colour seem to point to an affinity with the ‘Celtic language-speaking peoples of Wales, Ireland and Scotland than with the neighbours of the Cornish to the East' [the English]( Harvey et. al.,1986:198). The blood group analysis suggests that the Cornish sample ‘occupies a somewhat intermediate position between “Celtic” and “Anglo-Saxon” populations, but with a definite tendency to be aligned with the latter’ (ibid.) [my emphasis].
It seems therefore that the Cornish do not appear to have retained much of the Celtic blood line (if indeed there ever was one) and the biologists have to concede that the continuing ‘Celticness’ of the Cornish may have more to do with:
...the power of successive Celtic revivals, including the present Cornish language revival, and to the selective retention of cultural traits and manipulation of kinship links in promoting the Celtic identity [which tend to be] genealogical rather than genetic' (Harvey et. al. 1986:199)
This position is somewhat reinforced by Dr Simon James an archaeologist at Durham University who argues that ‘Archaeologists have searched in vain for evidence of...waves of migrating Celts’ and that ‘more and more archaeologists are concluding that the Ancient Celts, as usually conceived, never really existed’ (quoted in The Guardian 13 March 1998:6). They were simply the romantic invention of a defensive identity at the time of the 1707 Act of Union as a defiant rallying cry by the beleaguered Scottish and Welsh against the powerful advances of the English.
This ‘failure’ to link the Cornish biologically to their Celtic neighbours is perhaps summed up best by this Cornish correspondent, who echoes Harvey’s and James’ point of a social/cultural identity rather than any genetic contributing factors, to the Western Morning News (09-09-1991) in a letter entitled ‘I’m Cornish and that’s that’ she writes:
There was no way I would contribute one drop of my good Cornish blood to some study on Cornish genetic roots. I don’t need anyone to tell me that I am Cornish and different. Bisecting my heart is probably the only test that would prove this, and no study will ever have the expertise to get inside a Cornish heart.
She then makes the defensive claim that these types of study are the ‘usual English effort[s] to prove that we Cornish are not what we know we are' [my emphasis].
The positivist debate about the rationales used for the selection of informants within the positivist school is not a new one. Margaret Mead (1953) for example, was concerned by what is termed ‘nonprobability sampling’. She particularly emphasised that informants should be selected by their salient characteristics. Spindler (1955) also chose informants on the basis of their cultural participation. Mead (1953) underlines this approach telling us that the way to maintain validity and to offset bias in the research was that:
The validity of the sample depends not so much upon the number of cases as upon proper specification of the informant, so that he or she can be accurately place in terms of a very large number of variables - age, sex, order of birth, family background, life experience, temperamental tendencies, political and religious position, exact situational relationship to the investigator, configurational relationship to every other informant, and so forth. Within this extensive degree of specification each informant is studied as a perfect example, an organic representation of his complete cultural experience [my emphasis](p.646).
As a consequence of this debate I felt that the best way to access the Cornish was to immerse myself in the culture of the Cornish and to use my informed judgements as to how I was to access the Cornish. Honigmann (1970:268) puts it this way:
The ethnographer uses his prior knowledge of the universe to draw representatives from it who possess distinctive qualifications.
For me that distinctive qualification was that the informant was Cornish or at least professed to be Cornish. Notwithstanding that while one does attempt to maintain some control over the type of informant one requires, as Bernard (1988) intimates selecting key informants is often simply down to ‘luck, intuition and hardwork' (pp. 177-178). While Spradley and McCurdy (1972) suggest that a good informant is one who is willing to talk, this is also an important factor for Werner and Schoepfle (1987). It is important that the informant is non-analytical about themselves and their world, but is also as Werner and Schoepfle (1987) suggest, thoughtful.
I was mainly dependent upon the informal networks that I made when I attended meetings, went down the pub, spoke to people at cultural gatherings such as the 'Obby Oss' and Cornish music/literary events known as 'Troyls' but also upon other opportunities offered to me during the phase of the research when I was immersed as a participant observer living in Cornwall. The use of such informal networks is important as Kimball and Partridge (1979) found in their study of cannabis use. They show how, in following the networks of social relationships ‘information was gained about the nature of the community [and] the social organisation of community life’. For my research this information was all the more useful in that it started to highlight the geographical/ spatial character of the Cornish identity. Therefore the decisions on choosing the informants for interview was dependent upon my deep knowledge of the Cornish and Cornish culture. Nevertheless I was aware of some of the pitfalls and noted Dick Hobbs's experience:
For the most part I spoke, acted, drank and generally behaved as though I was not doing research. Indeed, I often had to remind myself that I was not in a pub to enjoy myself, but to conduct an academic inquiry and repeatedly woke up the following morning with an incredible hangover facing the dilemma of whether to bring it up or write it up. (Hobbs, 1998:6)
Thus, this approach allows us to focus upon the various ways people re-present their collective experience of life-in-common. It becomes an ethnography of all of us. It is a methodology (for want of a better term) that is concerned with symbols and the signs and signifiers through which we now use to interpret and deconstruct our world. This approach is a writing of culture rather than the construction of cultural models. It allows for a world of plural constructions and diverse realities and a multiplicity of readings and meanings.
Because this thesis addresses the notion of cultural supremacy by one group over another and considers the struggle of an identity ‘in the making’, this post-modern approach allows for the undercutting of privileged texts and is concerned with ‘listening to’ and ‘talking with’ the other. For the post-modern researcher it is an attempt to construct knowledge with reference to the local: it is a recognition of what Maffesoli (1996) calls ‘ordinary knowledge’ or a concern with the epistemology of everyday life. For as Maffesoli (1996:134-135) argues:
Sociology must therefore recognise that it has a duty to put down roots in a daily experience which is not so much a content as a way of establishing a perspective.
[i] This graffiti is made even more ironic in that it perfectly shows the duality of being Cornish. Correctly spray painted it should read Kernewek Nyns Yu Sowsnek. And this in an area which has quite a ‘hard-core’ of Cornish language speakers.
[ii] See http://www.zynet.co.uk/Cornwall/associate.htm
[iii] Hegemony is probably Gramsci's key concept. It is used in the sense of influence, leadership, and consent rather than the alternative and opposite meaning of domination. It has to do with the way one social group influences other groups, making certain compromises with them in order to gain their consent for its leadership in society as a whole. Hegemony has cultural, political and economic aspects.
Methodology
Well, these are not the old days when science and mathematics were all the rage. That sort of thing seems to have died down, somehow, perhaps because all the discoveries have been made, don’t you think? Interesting things can still happen apparently. At least I was told it was interesting [my emphasis] (Asimov, 1988:16).
The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur (A. N. Whitehead cited in McLuhan and Fiore, 1967).
One of my utmost concerns in the pursuit of this research was the continuing dilemma within the social sciences over the various knowledge claims and the debate concerning epistemology. It is an overarching concern that:
...whatever passes for 'knowledge' in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such knowledge...and that all human knowledge is developed, transmitted and maintained in social situations...then we are concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966:15).
If we are concerned with the social construction of reality we must then consider which are the best sociological tools with which we can study how this knowledge is developed, transmitted and maintained. Our major concern becomes what is the correct approach for such an enquiry. One of the first requests of my supervisor was to ‘go away and come back with a methodological model’ which I was to use for my fieldwork. This created a major problem for me. However, it was a useful task for I was able to clarify my thinking and report back that my research was not of the type that required the construction of a model.
While positivism has a long history within the social sciences, I felt that for the type of research I was doing on identity that these methods where not wholly appropriate. Much more appropriate was the approach known as ‘Naturalism’. This is one where the social world is studied in its natural state, using methods which do not come with pre-formed ideas or models which distort, as I see it, our understanding of social phenomena, for as Barnes et al. (1996) tells us, knowledge is ‘a natural phenomenon’. Such an approach then could allow the researcher to use a set of methods which would involve the researcher:
...participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives...watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions - in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of research (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983)
Using this set of guiding principles, I felt that I could access the Cornish and work as what might be termed an ‘indigenous ethnographer' (See Fahim, 1982 and Ohnuki-Tierney, 1984). For as Clifford (1986) writes, ‘Insiders studying their own cultures offer new angles of vision and depths of understanding' (Clifford, 1986:9). I am not Cornish, but feel that by studying a group of people within the British Isles I am in effect studying the indigenous cultures of the British Isles. And while not an anthropologist I recognise here the anthropological turn that this research takes.
The fact that I am not Cornish gives me two clear benefits in this type of research. The first is that in working ‘at home’ there is the possibility of having better human relationships with the respondents because of my ‘indigenous’ sensitivity to people’s expectations and my already taken for granted understanding of common customs and rituals and other forms of shared knowledge. The second benefit of being the indigenous anthropologist is that I can also be the ‘rude foreigner’ who can crash through cultural barriers and ask inappropriate questions to which people are willing to respond, ‘since they realise that the [researcher is], a sort of ‘innocent child, [who] does not know.' (Colson, 1976:13). As Jones (1970) claims ‘there is a difference between the vantage point of an insider who carries out research among his own people, and that of an outsider, although the former is not necessarily better' [my emphasis] (Jones, 1970:251-9). This is worth considering because this type of ethnographic research is often criticised for being biased and unscientific, indeed Popper goes as far as stating that:
The triumph of social anthropology is the triumph of a pseudo-observational, pseudo-descriptive, and pseudo-inductive generalising methodology and above all marks the triumph of a pretended objectivity and hence an imitation of the methods of natural science (cited in Banton, 1964).
Despite Popper's reservations about the methodological approach of ethnography or, as I have called it, indigenous anthropology, this type of research does have a long and respectable history within the field of Sociology/Anthropology. This history stretches from the early work of the Webb’s and Charles Booth, who (for many dark eugenic reasons) were interested in the class structure of Britain and used observational methods (Burgess, 1982:4-6), to the Chicago School of Sociologists. It is in Robert Parks work that Burgess suggests that we find the ‘interchange between social anthropology and sociology both in terms of the methods used and the perspectives employed' (Burgess 1984:112). Here we find such ‘classic’ works of sociology as Lynd and Lynd’s (1937) studies of Middletown; Whyte’s (1955) Street Corner Society; Becker's, (1963) Outsiders and Humphreys, (1970) Tea Room Trade.
In Britain this ethnographic approach pioneered by the Chicago School was taken up by sociologists and has produced such classic pieces of sociology as Cohen’s, (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics; Willis, (1977) Learning to Labour; Willmot and Young, (1960) Family and Class in a London Suburb; Young and Willmot, (1961) Family and Kinship in East London. It is this type of research that Burgess tells us was ‘the study of “natives”; individuals with whom sociologists were not familiar in their own society’ (Burgess, 1984:15).
This type of research, however, is not without its dangers. It is of particular relevance here that the dangers are considered given that I am researching an identity that seems to be emerging, or is imagined (Anderson, 1983), or is being invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), or at least is an epistemological problem for some of those people who live in Cornwall and call themselves Cornish. Michael Cernea (1982) warns us that the concept of indigenous anthropology is:
...fraught with the epistemological dangers of legitimising a particular nationalistic approach to science and to social facts. This concept implies the possibility of having several anthropologies about each object of anthropological study. My contention is that this concept would tend to legitimize a situation which I feel should be avoided, not validated (Cernea, 1982:67)
It is a fact that this thesis will become part of the ontological and epistemological building blocks that Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ will use to legitimise their claims that a Cornish identity is a social fact. However, as Cernea suggests, a distinction needs to be made about the nature of this work. It is proposed that rather than considering my research to be indigenous anthropology it is better to consider myself to be working as an indigenous anthropologist to resist any claims of bias. It therefore is important to note that we can make the charge of cultural bias against many of the writers who publish academic work within the covers of such journals as Cornish Studies. We can show that much of the academic writing that makes up the corpus of work concerning Cornish History, Cornish Culture, Cornish Identity and the general Cornish situation is the work of Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ such as Phillip Payton, Bernard Deacon, Ken George, Malcolm Williams and Alan Kent to name but a few.
Other secondary sources such as magazines like ‘Kernow’ frame their editorial policy in more political terms. This is a magazine which:
...puts Cornwall and Cornish people first [it] provides a forum for...the plight of the Cornish people. We see the struggle of the Cornish people as part of the worldwide fight for the rights of small nations and peoples.
While the magazine published by the Cornish Bureau for European Relations (CoBER), ‘CoBER Covath’, has an editorial policy that is at one with the ‘European Movement’ and believes that Cornwall as part of the European Community should have its own clear identity and thus tells in its pages of the Cornish ‘...history, customs and way of life’. Its prime aim is to be the mouthpiece of an organisation which:
...has as its task the recognition of Cornwall as one of Europe’s historic cultural regions. (Letter to Covath from its CoBER’s Chairman, Spring 1991).
All these writers attempt to make different and often competing claims of what the Cornish ‘situation’ is. For example, in a magazine called Cornish World-wide, Alan Kent (1994) explores the ‘mythical’ or fantastical elements of a Cornish identity, while in an earlier issue, Philip Payton (1992) explores the Cornish as ‘A Global Identity’ and in the same issue Vi West (1992) tells us of Cornwall’s Intellectual Identity. Importantly all of these writers are Cornish and as such have a vested interest in creating a discourse wherein the various claims for a ‘different’ Cornwall is taken as a serious project. I, by default, am also part of this discourse which attempts to categorise and corroborate the existence of a Cornish identity.
My aim then within this thesis is to provide, by using the tools of ethnography, what Geertz calls ‘thick description’ an uncovering of the ‘structures of signification' (Geertz, 1973:9), a pursuit of the multiplicity of complex conceptual structures that the Cornish display, structures which are ‘...at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit' (Geertz, 1973:10), and which must be grasped and then rendered.
An Indigenous Ethnographer in Cornwall: Assessing the claim for a Cornish Identity.
Cornish Nyns Yu [not is] English (Graffiti on a roadbridge Liskeard 1998)[i]
The English are good at puddings. Perhaps it is the only thing they are good at. (Richard Stein, Cornish Chef. The Guardian 12-03-91 p.23)
How then do we start to ‘grasp’ and ‘render’ this thing called Cornish identity? My research interest was sparked by the seemingly never-ending debate concerning the nature of the Cornish identity, not least in the local press in papers such as the Western Morning News, West Briton and Cornish Times and the journals mentioned above, where there is a continual assertion of ‘Cornish difference’.
This raised a number of sociological questions. First we could ask, what is the nature of this ‘Cornishness’ which attracts such eloquent articulation? And secondly, why is it that ‘Cornishness’ is an issue at all? After all, in the condition of what many academics call ‘late-modernity’, we live in a world of compressed global communications and transactions with an apparently relentless drive towards cultural homogeneity in which the assertion of separate identity appears both eccentric and perverse. And yet as I walked the streets of Cornwall it became increasingly harder to deny on a common-sense level that there is a ‘group of people who define themselves as Cornish’. (Deacon, B and Payton, P, 1993).
However, this notion of the Cornish being different or having a separate identity is not new. Not only do the Cornish define themselves as different, but the dominant group, the English, also defines them as 'others'. Two examples from the medium of television may suffice here. The first is the ‘Kilroy’ daytime talkshow (BBC 1. 20-03-96). One of his guests was talking about being beaten by ‘bouncers’. He says, ‘I was thrown down the stairs’ Kilroy asks ‘Was this in a club?’, ‘Yes’, ‘Where’? ‘In Cornwall’ Kilroy makes a joke ‘Oh well, they’re rough down there aren’t they?' The second example is another TV programme which once again defined the Cornish as different. On Room 101, (03-03-98) a popular BBC 2 comedy programme, where guests consign their pet hates to Room 101, a clip of film from the 1970’s was shown of a young girl with a thick, obviously South Western regional accent (Bristolian in fact). The presenter Nick Hancock made the quip, after the clip was shown, that it had actually been filmed in Truro earlier that day. These jokes point to the existence of a common stock of knowledge wherein any reference to Cornwall, however slight, reinforces notions of opposition and difference. For people to ‘get’ the joke the notion that the Cornish are ‘different’ because they speak in broad yokel accents and are consequently stupid (which was the whole point of showing the clip), they, the (English) TV viewing population, have to have a reservoir of cultural stereotypes through which they can utilise to both reinforce their own cultural ‘sameness’ and unity against the (often unfounded) threat of the ‘other’.
I will show in Chapter Four the distinctive and different history the Cornish claim for themselves. But it is in other cultural artefacts that we can also start to find evidence of a Cornish identity asserting itself. For example, a very early example of difference is found in William Shakespeare’s play King Henry V (iv. I). There is a scene where Henry, in disguise, is wandering around his assembled troops. Upon encountering one of his soldiers, ‘Pistol’, the disguised King is asked, ‘What is thy name’. The King replies; ‘Harry le Roy’. Pistol then remarks; ‘Le Roy! A Cornish Name: art thou of Cornish Crew?’ Here, we may argue, is Shakespeare demarcating the Cornish as different, a ‘demarcation of “otherness”’ (Kent, 1996).
The Director of the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves also uses a similar device. When Robin Hood calls at the castle of Peter Dubois, a Muslim Azeem accompanies him. Duncan, a blind old retainer fails to realise that Azeem is a Black Muslim. He asks Azeem; ‘What manner of name is Azeem? Irish? Cornish?’. Alan Kent analyses this by suggesting that:
Duncan, like Pistol, finds the name strange. It has an ‘otherness’ and he can only relate that to names of a Celtic origin. Irish is offered initially, but he feels the need to be more outlandish; thus, Cornish is the second nationality offered. (Kent, 1996:25)
In Kenneth Brannagh’s 1989 film version of Henry V even the Cornish flag of St. Piran can be seen. If we then start to add these literary references to the more contemporary ‘everyday’ references to Cornishness and Cornish identity we start to build a large body of prim’a facie evidence. These include the flying of St. Piran flags. The images of ‘Trelawny’s Army’ advancing upon Twickenham for a rugby final against an English county team, an event which was symbolically constructed by the media as Cornwall against England. Those Cornish people who in 1997 commemorated the 1497 rebellions by marching into England and planting their colours in an act of achievement and defiance on the battlefield at Blackheath. Redruth Brewery even introduced a line of Cornish Rebellion Beer with supporting T-shirts to match. Even the use of a headline by the Western Morning News (June 20 1998), ‘Cornish ‘army’ to block border’ symbolises difference and maintains a defensive attitude towards the English.
Cornwall also has an ‘otherness’, a ‘difference’ thrust upon it by those ‘devotional texts’ known as tourist guidebooks (See Horne 1984). Horne tells us that these texts present ‘the object as relic and provides the ‘magical glow’ which can illuminate meanings that justify power or claim prestige’ (Horne, 1984: 34). So we find in the Cornish tourist guides advertising that promises us a different experience in the Cornish Riviera. Cornwall - a place of mystery and romance, the haunt of smugglers and piskies, the Cornwall of the Poldarks populated by short dark Celtic men and dark eyed maidens. (See Thornton, 1993; Payton and Thornton, 1995).
Using the Internet as another source of prim’a facie evidence, a web search of the term ‘Cornish’, shows us 40 Cornish Associations world-wide plus 18 across the UK. This includes associations[ii] all around the world from Australia, to the Central and South Americas, North America, South Africa, and so on, all run by first and second generation citizens, all of whom would claim Cornish descent and Cornish identity. An identity that is seemingly powerful and salient enough to fragment the national identities of those who also claim Cornishness around the globe. Take for example this woman, a Canadian of Cornish descent who has never been to Cornwall, writes after listening to a Cornish men’s choir on tape:
Help!! I must be crazy!!! I’m Canadian!!! Really I am!! I love my country! But....this [Cornish] feeling is weird!! I daren’t tell my kids!....But I suspect that there is something ‘buried’ in our genes that ‘bind’ us together. I hope so, ‘cause if not, I am crazy!! (Cornish World. Issue 7. Dec-Jan 1995-6)
This ‘ordinary’ and everyday 'flagging' (Billig, 1995) of Cornish identity is of crucial importance. For Billig this ‘Flagging of the Homeland Daily’ (ibid. p.93) suggests that identity (he uses the word ‘nationhood’) is near to the surface of daily life. It is through the constant, but barely conscious, reminders of the homeland. For example, the use of Kernow bumper stickers on cars which subtly impinge upon the group idea of Cornwall and Cornish Identity. There is the constant flagging of Cornish identity in literature, the news and entertainment media. The continued use of ‘banal’ regional symbols such as the Cornish pasty, piskeys, Cornish silver bands and the folk festivals of Cornwall such as the Padstow ‘obby oss’ and the Furry Dance (in Helston) work to ‘ensure that, whatever else is forgotten (or not known about) in a world of information overload, we do not forget our homelands’ (Billig, 1995: 127) and our identity.
Padstow 'Obby Oss' Blue ribbon oss. There are two oss's 'clubs', Old Oss to which only true Padstonians can join (red ribbons) and blue ribbon oss to which incomers can join (after a suitable period). Padstow obby oss is thought to be the oldest folk celebration in Europe.
Clearly, just in this brief overview of some of the myriad examples of secondary data, Cornish identity seems to be a social phenomena, if not for others but for the Cornish. The interesting sociological questions are, of course, just who are these Cornish people and does this flagging of the homeland constitute evidence that a Cornish identity does, in reality, exist?
Accessing the Cornish
One of the major problems for the sociological or anthropological fieldworker is gaining access to the chosen group. Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) suggest that its:
…achievement depend[s] upon theoretical understanding, often disguised as ‘native wit’, but the discovery of obstacles to access, and perhaps of effective means of overcoming them, [which in] itself provides insights into the social organisation of the setting’. (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983:54)
My first research question seemed to me to be a major one. Just who are the Cornish and where were they? It was clear to me from reading the local press (I was then living in Plymouth, on the Cornish - Devon border) that there did seem to be an on-going identity theme in local stories. This hunch was developed as I began to live in Cornwall as a participant observer. I spent 16 months living and working in Cornwall, between June 1995 and January 1997. I immersed myself in the day to day lives of the people I was living with and met Cornish people, both socially and professionally. I also attended Cornish meetings and events. This is where I would attempt to gain ‘inside’ knowledge that would give me access to the group.
Indeed, Giddens insists that this is the right approach. For Giddens (cited in Blaikie 1993) tells us that 'all social research is necessarily anthropological; it requires immersion...' (in Blaikie, 1993:90). We immerse ourselves in the social context to uncover the ways in which social reality is produced and reproduced by the activities of the people who are skilled actors. But as Gramsci tells us repeatedly those forms of social reality being produced and reproduced are often in conditions not of their own choosing. Therefore, in order to understand the context of these worlds of production it is necessary to explore what these social actors know and do in their daily activities. Blaikie (1993) tells us that:
Without immersion there is no adequate understanding of what lies behind and structures overt behaviour. Social research has to deal with a social world that is already constituted as meaningful by its participants. (Blaikie 1993:189)
The available literature on Cornish identity at this time was of very little help. Work that had been undertaken prior to and up to the 1990’s had generally been undertaken by those academics working within the disciplines of politics and economics. These writers (Pelling, 1962; Rallings and Lee undated) generally concluded that while a Cornish identity may have some passing interest, the fact that it had not formed into a politically salient nationalist identity was evidence enough not to study it. Payton (1993) notes that work on the Cornish was ‘brief and confused...flawed by the assumption that Cornwall was merely...[a]...part of a wider, homogeneous Southwest’. Even writers on Nationalism such as A.D. Smith (1981) and A. Birch (1989) failed to turn their attention in any meaningful way to the Cornish case. However work such as Hechter’s (1975) on Internal Colonialism within the Celtic fringe helped to develop some early theoretical directions.
As there was little or no relevant literature, I had to work as an ethnographer/anthropologist in the field. However, I was loath to follow the advice of Colson in an article entitled ‘The Intensive Study of Sample Small Communities’. Elizabeth Colson (1954) entreats us to
...organise fieldwork [with mathematics] in mind. We must obtain more quantification of every kind wherever it is possible to do so.... If one of the goals of ethnology is to arrive at patterns, configurations, or structures of cultures, these must be determined inductively from adequate numbers of actual facts if they are to satisfy the standards of science.
Rather, I wanted to remain true to the position I outlined above, that of ‘Naturalism’. To do this I followed the advice given to the anthropologist in the field. Upon entering a ‘native’ community, Williams (1967) tells us that contact with ‘native chiefs’ is useful. Fetterman (1989) also suggests that ‘introduction by a member is the ethnographer’s best ticket into the community’. A good example here is ‘Doc’ in Whyte’s Street Corner Society. This may be a ‘chief, principle, director teacher, tramp or gang member, and should have some credibility with the group' (Fetterman, 1989:42). To that end I started visiting Cornish activities. This is what Fetterman calls ‘the Big Net approach' (Fetterman, 1989:42). It allows the researcher to get a wide-angle view of the situation before a more exact study is made. To that end I attended The Annual Cornish Conference, Cornish events such as the Padstow Obby Oss and the Helston Furry Dance. I met with and talked to ‘native chiefs’, if I may call the Cornish Bards that. I was as Goffman (1989:126-129) puts it ‘getting into place’.
As these visits progressed it seemed to me that while I may have been attending Cornish cultural events there seemed to be one group of people missing, and that was the Cornish themselves. Most of the meetings I attended seemed to be populated by a group of people we might want to call ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. They generally seemed to be well educated and generally of the ‘middle classes’. So one of my first research problems was who where the Cornish? And secondly where were the Cornish?
Gramsci, Cultural Hegemony and Cornwall — A theoretical signpost.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci depicts the Italian proletariat as a subordinate group that can simultaneously hold two conceptions of the world. By employing Gramsci’s argument it is possible to utilise his analysis to show how the Cornish, as another subordinate group, can also hold two conceptions of the world. One is the ‘official’ conception, or dominant English viewpoint. The other is the ‘popular’ conception of the world, i.e. a Cornish conception, which, despite the dominance of the English viewpoint, has its own vigour and its own spontaneous life. The work of Gramsci on cultural hegemony[iii] allows us, according to Jackson-Lears (1985:568), to 'analyse the systemic features of a society characterised by inequalities of power without reducing that society to a system.' Thus:
By clarifying the political functions of cultural symbols, the concept of cultural hegemony can aid [in] ...trying to understand how ideas reinforce or undermine existing social structures...and seek ...to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the power wielded by dominant groups and the relative cultural autonomy of subordinate groups whom they victimise (Jackson-Lears (1985:568).
In this way, it is possible for us to recognise and acknowledge the existence of a Cornish version of the Gramscian ‘popular consciousness’ in which the consciousness of exploited populations is seen as turbulent, fluctuating, incoherent and (most notably) contradictory. In the following chapter I show how this Cornish popular consciousness is actively being created by the cultural entrepreneurs who point to examples of continuing historical and contemporary social, economic and political exploitation. However, in order to achieve a fuller analysis of Cornish culture and Cornish Identity, we need to probe more deeply into what Gramsci called the 'popular consciousness' and to follow his suggestion that the 'spontaneous philosophies' of folklores expressed in the thought of the common people needed to be understood. In undertaking such an analysis we should note that the philosophies of the subordinated Cornish population draw upon fragments of many ideologies: Celticism, Catholicism, Capitalism, Methodism, Old Customs, Folklore and so on which they are directed to through the efforts of the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. Each of these discourses vies for domination. And it is these re-interpreted, re-invented conceptions that find themselves at odds with the dominant or hegemonic culture — that of the 'English State'. Myriad fragments of ideologies may be absorbed by a Cornish individual to create a 'mosaic of meaning' which in many ways is unsystematic, lacks coherence and is subject to influence, particularly by the hegemonic culture (Cirese, 1982). Often everyday experience will contradict or challenge this mosaic of meaning producing a frustrating and contradictory consciousness which may facilitate the domination of more powerful ideologies and cultures (e.g. Englishness) and yet may also construct an internal (albeit inconsistent) ideology of resistance or popular rebellion (Gramsci, 1971:321ff). Gramsci is, above all, concerned with the concept of cultural hegemony:
the 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group,[i.e. the English] this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production (Gramsci, 1971:12)
Although Gramsci acknowledged that the power of the State was vested ultimately in its monopoly on the means of violence and its role as the final arbiter of all disputes, he argued that in practice the ruling elites in modern parliamentary democracies win their authority (hegemony), not through the explicit domination of their peoples through violence (or even through legitimising symbols) but through the consent of the subordinate groups. Thus:
In the bourgeois state, which is the first to use an extensive hegemonic apparatus, the autonomous castes of the pre-modern state become transformed into the voluntary associations - parties, unions, cultural institutions, etc., -which serve as hegemonic instruments (Adamson, 1980:173-174).
While working in the field as a participant observer it seemed very clear that there was indeed a definite group of people who were defining themselves as different. When I attended Cornish cultural gatherings they where very evident because of the badges and symbols of Cornishness they where displaying.
Because a modern Cornish identity is a re-interpretation of what went before and is a re-creation, it has to make do with traditions that may be invented or imagined and may or may not have some historical relevance to Cornwall’s past. For example, as we shall see below, it may be that Cornwall’s Celtic past is nothing more than an invention in response to social and political changes but we see this past symbolically displayed through various Cornish/Celtic symbols and badges that Cornish people use to declare their Cornishness. These badges and symbols include the wearing of items such as the Cornish tartan made into ties, waistcoats, and kilts. It may be the wearing of badges of the flag of St. Piran, the Cornish ‘national saint’ which is the flag of Cornwall (a white cross on a black background), or even bumper stickers of the same or with the word Kernow (Cornwall). The yellow and black rugby shirt of the county team has also become a popular symbol in Cornwall.
The 'banal signs' of Cornish identity St Piran's flags and the Cornish rugby shirt at Twickenham
These symbols, St. Piran's flag and the yellow and black rugby shirts, were much in evidence for example on Sunday 1st March, 1999 during a protest march in London by country people and in the protests which followed the closing (6 March 1998) of the last tin mine at South Crofty and the closing of the routes into Cornwall by Cornish protesters (See Western Morning News 27 July 1998, The Guardian 14 March 1998:14, The Observer 22 February 1998:16)
Such devices are for Billig (1995) ‘flagged signs of nationhood' (p. 69) and help what we might want to call, after Billig’s concept of Banal Nationalism, signs of ‘Banal Regionalism’. [my emphasis] Billig tells us that Banal Nationalism covers the:
…ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced. It is argued that these habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily, the nation is indicated, or flagged, in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition. (p.6)
However, there are other people for whom Cornishness is still a relevant part of their lives but are much more difficult to categorise as they do not flag their Cornishness on a daily basis. Gramsci however gives us further clues. He suggests that the sub-ordinate groups hold two consciousnesses, one that is not its own and 'borrowed' from another group - in this case the English. The other is 'its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception which manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes' (Jackson Lears, 1985:569).
What this means is that Cornish identity is for some one which is ‘submerged’ beneath the day to day rituals of everyday English cultural life. But given the right circumstance the Cornish identity will manifest itself. This manifestation may only be caught in Gramscian flashes, but when asserted can replace the English identity, for example the twenty thousand Cornishmen and women who pulled on their Cornish identity in the form of the yellow and black jerseys of the Cornish rugby team when they visited the ‘enemy’ in Twickenham in April 1992. Also the recent protests around the closing of the tin mines, and the protests at the Tamar Bridge have seen the Cornish ‘banal’ symbols being used as signs of identity. For example, although the Cornish language has ceased to be a spoken tongue, protesters have been chanting ‘Kernow bys vykken!’ (Cornwall forever) as did their ancestors in 1497 and 1643 when the Cornish marched on England. (See the Observer 22 February 1998:16).
If I were to understand how such minority identities were achieved I would need to immerse myself in the culture of the Cornish and locate informants to inform my work. Anecdotal evidence had suggested that the ‘real’ Cornish were ‘down in the west’, that if I wanted to do my research I had to go down to West Penwith. But it also seemed that this was a generalised belief that if I wanted the ‘real’ Cornish then I always had to go West and when I reached West Penwith, the next landing West is the USA where, of course, the American Cornish are more Cornish than the Cornish!
Also, many years of inward migration by the English has populated both urban and rural areas to such a great extent that the Cornish are a hidden minority, especially given that there are no distinguishing marks apart from the wearing of cultural ‘badges’ that mark the ‘ordinary’ Cornish person out. Further the adoption of a Cornish identity by incomers who have spent some years in Cornwall is an interesting phenomenon but produces an added problem.
There is evidence that there are distinctive Cornish names. Work carried out by Richard Blewett (1968) during the 1950s and 1960s suggests there are particular surnames in Cornwall which have Celtic origins. For example, he notes that (at the time of his writing) using an atlas (See Blewett, 1953) of surname distribution, there were about 750 Celtic surnames still in use in Cornwall, some of which, like the surname Curnow, are ‘practically confined westward of a line drawn from Truro to Newquay, about a quarter of the area of the country' (Blewett, 1968:7).
Another marker of Cornishness is biological or genetic criteria. An article in the Daily Mail entitled The hidden tribes of Britain (August 28 1992) suggests that the Cornish are genetically distinct from the rest of England. In the article, Professor Derek Roberts commenting on work presented to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science suggests that ‘History appears to have left such communities genetically undiluted in many ways from tribal ancestors' (Daily Mail, August 28 1992). He goes on to say that ‘People tend to marry locally and move locally with their choices governed by local factors. In many cases, where a family has moved away you will find subsequent generations move back. This ‘natural selection’ was, for Professor Robert Sokal of New York State University, a ‘crucial factor' (ibid.).
Harvey et. al. (1986) carried out more specific genetic work. Harvey and his team sampled 254 Cornish men and women, 90% of which volunteered in response to appeals in the media. The remaining 9% were students and teachers from the Cornwall College for Further and Higher Education. 143 Cornish adult males sampled by Professor F.S. Hulse in 1952 supplemented this. Various variables were sampled, anthropometric measurements, (bones, face structure etc.) dermatoglyphics (fingerprints), hair colour, eye colour, colour vision and of course blood sampling.
The results of this research are somewhat mixed, Harvey et. al. suggest that characteristics such as body size, head size, hair and eye colour seem to point to an affinity with the ‘Celtic language-speaking peoples of Wales, Ireland and Scotland than with the neighbours of the Cornish to the East' [the English]( Harvey et. al.,1986:198). The blood group analysis suggests that the Cornish sample ‘occupies a somewhat intermediate position between “Celtic” and “Anglo-Saxon” populations, but with a definite tendency to be aligned with the latter’ (ibid.) [my emphasis].
It seems therefore that the Cornish do not appear to have retained much of the Celtic blood line (if indeed there ever was one) and the biologists have to concede that the continuing ‘Celticness’ of the Cornish may have more to do with:
...the power of successive Celtic revivals, including the present Cornish language revival, and to the selective retention of cultural traits and manipulation of kinship links in promoting the Celtic identity [which tend to be] genealogical rather than genetic' (Harvey et. al. 1986:199)
This position is somewhat reinforced by Dr Simon James an archaeologist at Durham University who argues that ‘Archaeologists have searched in vain for evidence of...waves of migrating Celts’ and that ‘more and more archaeologists are concluding that the Ancient Celts, as usually conceived, never really existed’ (quoted in The Guardian 13 March 1998:6). They were simply the romantic invention of a defensive identity at the time of the 1707 Act of Union as a defiant rallying cry by the beleaguered Scottish and Welsh against the powerful advances of the English.
This ‘failure’ to link the Cornish biologically to their Celtic neighbours is perhaps summed up best by this Cornish correspondent, who echoes Harvey’s and James’ point of a social/cultural identity rather than any genetic contributing factors, to the Western Morning News (09-09-1991) in a letter entitled ‘I’m Cornish and that’s that’ she writes:
There was no way I would contribute one drop of my good Cornish blood to some study on Cornish genetic roots. I don’t need anyone to tell me that I am Cornish and different. Bisecting my heart is probably the only test that would prove this, and no study will ever have the expertise to get inside a Cornish heart.
She then makes the defensive claim that these types of study are the ‘usual English effort[s] to prove that we Cornish are not what we know we are' [my emphasis].
The positivist debate about the rationales used for the selection of informants within the positivist school is not a new one. Margaret Mead (1953) for example, was concerned by what is termed ‘nonprobability sampling’. She particularly emphasised that informants should be selected by their salient characteristics. Spindler (1955) also chose informants on the basis of their cultural participation. Mead (1953) underlines this approach telling us that the way to maintain validity and to offset bias in the research was that:
The validity of the sample depends not so much upon the number of cases as upon proper specification of the informant, so that he or she can be accurately place in terms of a very large number of variables - age, sex, order of birth, family background, life experience, temperamental tendencies, political and religious position, exact situational relationship to the investigator, configurational relationship to every other informant, and so forth. Within this extensive degree of specification each informant is studied as a perfect example, an organic representation of his complete cultural experience [my emphasis](p.646).
As a consequence of this debate I felt that the best way to access the Cornish was to immerse myself in the culture of the Cornish and to use my informed judgements as to how I was to access the Cornish. Honigmann (1970:268) puts it this way:
The ethnographer uses his prior knowledge of the universe to draw representatives from it who possess distinctive qualifications.
For me that distinctive qualification was that the informant was Cornish or at least professed to be Cornish. Notwithstanding that while one does attempt to maintain some control over the type of informant one requires, as Bernard (1988) intimates selecting key informants is often simply down to ‘luck, intuition and hardwork' (pp. 177-178). While Spradley and McCurdy (1972) suggest that a good informant is one who is willing to talk, this is also an important factor for Werner and Schoepfle (1987). It is important that the informant is non-analytical about themselves and their world, but is also as Werner and Schoepfle (1987) suggest, thoughtful.
I was mainly dependent upon the informal networks that I made when I attended meetings, went down the pub, spoke to people at cultural gatherings such as the 'Obby Oss' and Cornish music/literary events known as 'Troyls' but also upon other opportunities offered to me during the phase of the research when I was immersed as a participant observer living in Cornwall. The use of such informal networks is important as Kimball and Partridge (1979) found in their study of cannabis use. They show how, in following the networks of social relationships ‘information was gained about the nature of the community [and] the social organisation of community life’. For my research this information was all the more useful in that it started to highlight the geographical/ spatial character of the Cornish identity. Therefore the decisions on choosing the informants for interview was dependent upon my deep knowledge of the Cornish and Cornish culture. Nevertheless I was aware of some of the pitfalls and noted Dick Hobbs's experience:
For the most part I spoke, acted, drank and generally behaved as though I was not doing research. Indeed, I often had to remind myself that I was not in a pub to enjoy myself, but to conduct an academic inquiry and repeatedly woke up the following morning with an incredible hangover facing the dilemma of whether to bring it up or write it up. (Hobbs, 1998:6)
Thus, this approach allows us to focus upon the various ways people re-present their collective experience of life-in-common. It becomes an ethnography of all of us. It is a methodology (for want of a better term) that is concerned with symbols and the signs and signifiers through which we now use to interpret and deconstruct our world. This approach is a writing of culture rather than the construction of cultural models. It allows for a world of plural constructions and diverse realities and a multiplicity of readings and meanings.
Because this thesis addresses the notion of cultural supremacy by one group over another and considers the struggle of an identity ‘in the making’, this post-modern approach allows for the undercutting of privileged texts and is concerned with ‘listening to’ and ‘talking with’ the other. For the post-modern researcher it is an attempt to construct knowledge with reference to the local: it is a recognition of what Maffesoli (1996) calls ‘ordinary knowledge’ or a concern with the epistemology of everyday life. For as Maffesoli (1996:134-135) argues:
Sociology must therefore recognise that it has a duty to put down roots in a daily experience which is not so much a content as a way of establishing a perspective.
[i] This graffiti is made even more ironic in that it perfectly shows the duality of being Cornish. Correctly spray painted it should read Kernewek Nyns Yu Sowsnek. And this in an area which has quite a ‘hard-core’ of Cornish language speakers.
[ii] See http://www.zynet.co.uk/Cornwall/associate.htm
[iii] Hegemony is probably Gramsci's key concept. It is used in the sense of influence, leadership, and consent rather than the alternative and opposite meaning of domination. It has to do with the way one social group influences other groups, making certain compromises with them in order to gain their consent for its leadership in society as a whole. Hegemony has cultural, political and economic aspects.
posted by Rob Burton at 9:00 AM
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