Dr Robs PhD Thesis online

A Passion to Exist: Cultural Entrepreneurship and the search for authenticity in Cornwall

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A Passion to Exist:
Cultural Entrepreneurship and the search for authenticity in Cornwall

By

Robert Edward Burton

Any comments or questions please contact me at icology@hotmail.co.uk

Submitted by Robert Edward Burton to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Faculty of Postgraduate Studies. July 2000.

This thesis is available for use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement

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Contents
A Passion to Exist
Abstract
Acknowledgements:
Contents
Accompanying Material
Appendix
Burton, R. 1997. A Passion to Exist: Cultural Hegemony
and the Roots of Cornish Identity. Cornish Studies 5. 1997 7

Introduction

Chapter One
The Identity project: Owning Identity?
Introduction:
Preparing the Ground: The foundations of identity
Social Identity
National Identity
The re-creation of Englishness
The New Nationalism
Belonging and Marginality
Leadership
Neo Tribalism
Postmodernism and Identity
Politics of Difference
Cornish Identity

Chapter Two
Methodology
An Indigenous Ethnographer in Cornwall:
Assessing the claim for a Cornish Identity
Accessing the Cornish
Gramsci, Cultural Hegemony and Cornwall — A theoretical signpost

Chapter Three
Intellectuals, interpreters and cultural entrepreneurs
Intellectuals and Interpreters
Intellectuals as Legislators
The Cultural Entrepreneur
The Organic Intellectual
Moral Entrepreneurs
Cultural Entrepreneurs
Flagging Identity
An Irish Example
The Cultural Entrepreneurs in Cornwall

Chapter Four
The Management and Manipulation of the Cornish Identity
Social and Cultural Memory
Cultural Memory
Cornish Memory
The Cornish Language – an identity marker
The Cornish Language - the search for authenticity
The re-interpretation of history
Social Amnesia
The Cornish Experience

Chapter Five
The Cornish Contextualized
The Search for an Identity, a search for authenticity
- a very Cornish History
Early Cornish History
Early Accommodation
The Tudor Period (15th and 16th centuries)
The Age of Elizabeth
The Civil War
Capitalism and Colonialism
A struggle for existence: The impact of capitalism
The Impact of Industrialisation
Religion in Cornwall

Chapter Six
New Culture - New Traditions
The impact of Industrialisation
Folklore and Rituals
The Cornish Diaspora
Cornish Identity in the Twentieth Century
ys Need Barbarians
Considering the Historical Narrative

Chapter Seven
A Passion to Exist
The Cornish and the Identity Project
Marching backwards into the future: The dynamics of difference
The phenomenological claim to identity
Gramsci and cultural hegemony

Chapter Eight
Re-Traditionalising the Traditional
Passing as Cornish

Chapter Nine
Irrational identity in a rational world
The Construction of Identity
Irrational choices and identity
Cornish Primordialism
Cornish Atavism
Cornish Inconsistency
Resisting Modernity

Conclusion

References
Pamphlets

APPENDIX 1

Abstract

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Abstract
Identities in Britain are in flux, and such identities have been to the political and social fore. Identities now traverse time and space, no individual on this planet is now immune from the impact of identity change. This thesis has, as its focus, the ‘Cultural Entrepreneurs’ who manage, manipulate and re-interpret Cornish identity. The Cornish identity is one that has not yet been widely subjected to the sociological gaze as it is, I argue, in its genesis. The active re-creation of the modern Cornish identity has taken place in the last twenty to thirty years as interested academics and writers have focused their attention onto the Cornish experience. That the majority of academics and writers are Cornish themselves is no accident. This thesis argues that Cornish identity is an identity searching for substance and directing this search is a group of ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ who manage, manipulate, interpret and construct the markers of Cornishness. For these Cornish entrepreneurs the search for a Cornish identity is a search for authenticity. Clues and facts are gleaned from historical references, signs and signifiers are ‘borrowed’ from other cultures to provide the substance from which, like the Irish, a contemporary and viable identity can be formed.
Unlike the Irish, however, the Cornish identity project is faced with the problem that there are very few, if any ‘authentic’ identity markers with which the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ could use in the same way as the Irish cultural entrepreneurs did. The Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ however have created two identity arenas wherein the narratives of Cornish identity played out. These are the arenas of language and history. The Cornish language is a case study of the search for ‘authenticity’. In Cornwall the language movement has split into three opposing camps with each claiming that their version of the language is more authentic than the other. The second arena of history shows us how important social and cultural memory is for the creation of an identity. That the history may have been re-written, re-interpreted, changed and even invented is of little consequence, for the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ is able, by dint of their cultural awareness, to provide authentic and compelling readings of history which once accepted by the group or community influence the groups narratives about themselves and thus their identity.
The epistemological consequence for this debate is that the ways in which a Cornish identity is created makes the Cornish identity an authentic knowledge tool. This tool allows us to look at the actors, - the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ - involved in the creation or re-creation of identities, such as the contemporary creation of an English identity and the focus upon Cornish identity allows us to think about how identity is managed and manipulated in new and different ways.

Acknowledgements

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Acknowledgements:

Thanks to all those people who have given me advice, talked to me and listened. Thanks to all my respondents in Cornwall for allowing me into their lives and homes. Thanks to those people who proof read and transcribed tapes and thanks to Dr. Paul Keating and Dr. John Vincent at the University of Exeter for their support over the years. Special thanks to Dr. Greg Martin for his support and help over the years.

This thesis is dedicated to my daughter Matilda.

Introduction

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Introduction
...England faces an identity crisis. With the empire gone, the commonwealth neither here nor there, Ireland mostly gone and Scotland and Wales on the way, we are back where we were in 1603 when Queen Elizabeth I died. (Sir Roy Strong in a letter to the editor The Sunday Times 6 October 1998)
In the quotation above, Sir Roy Strong sums up not only the post-modern angst over the fragmentation of identity that seems to be a phenomenon across the globe, but he also shows the ethno-centric imperialism of the English. He tells us, in the quote above, ‘England is facing an identity crisis’ ignoring the fact that even despite post-modern fragmentation, the Irish, Welsh and Scottish peoples have never seen themselves as being English - British maybe, but not English.

Identities in Britain are in flux, and such identities have been to the political and social fore because of constitutional, political and economic change and the development of the European Union. Demonstrating this is contemporary political material focusing on community boundary identification to enforce power relationships. The very title of one paper: ‘Wales in Europe’ (Gray and Osmond, 1997) demonstrates refocusing of identity gained through a new consideration of the idea of the State. In this paper and in John Osmond’s (1996) book, Welsh Europeans, social identity and political and economic power are considered as intrinsically linked. As is demonstrated by these papers and by papers produced in the other peripheral nations[i] of Europe identities are fought over, controlled and shaped.

Identity in England, that is, within the geographical boundaries constituting England as a political entity, seemed to be, in the fin de siecle, a new area of social dispute. For example, as part of the recent debates surrounding the devolution of Wales and Scotland, the BBC have focused, in some of their reports, upon the devolutionary moves in the North East of England and Yorkshire. However, it is not just recent developments in the European Union, or changes in the non-codified Constitution, or a post-modern ‘particular in the universal’ that have influenced identity flux. In Britain the move away from modern forms of production and the Chicago economic policy introduced by the consecutive Conservative governments’ engendered individualism and attempted to disengage the individual from the social. Indeed the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once famously declared ‘There's no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families’ (Woman's Own, 1987:8-10). This social philosophy attacked the traditional ways of thinking about oneself and the traditional institutions of social integration.

The Church, Trade Unions, Work and the Family have all in one way or another suffered. This diminished structural influence in the day-to-day lives of individuals has affected the ways a person located himself or herself in society. People have started to think about their identity in a different way than they did when the Church, the Family, Work and so on had more of an influence in their lives. The Conservative’s introduction of an economic policy developed by laissez-faire economists at the Chicago School of Economics, promoted an individualistic ideology which moved people from thinking about who they were from a collectivist point of view to the cult of the individual.

However, the cult of the individual, and by this we mean the ‘economically successful individual’, seemed only to be successful in the context of the economic boom of the 1980’s. The rise of ‘identity’ groups that have risen out of economic collapse has created a shift in how we think about ourselves. No longer are our identities an essential part of ourselves, somehow given, in the sense that we are for example, a Protestant, working class, a miner or a father. Our identities can be considered to be more of a phenomenological response to the way we now live our lives. So to be ‘Gay’ or a ‘Traveller’ or Welsh, Scottish or Irish seems to be more to do with the way we live our lives. More to do with the ways we consume and the way culture itself has become a commodity. Culture is now ‘off the shelf’. We can buy into it, use it and then discard it at will.

Identities become commodified as social psychologists become marketing analysts, spin-doctors and members of elite intellectual groups. The commodified identities work to reinforce political claims and aspiration as Bowie (1993: pp. 167-193) demonstrates. There are conflicting interpretations of Welsh identity from inside, as indeed, there are conflicting interpretations of Cornish identity from inside, and not just in respect of District Boundaries. What is interesting in the case of Wales, is the political project which has been undertaken by somewhat patriarchal elite figures such as John Osmond, Sir John Gray and many more from cross party and partisanship divides to form a united front of Welsh nationhood (Bowie, 1993:)[ii].

Given the use of social psychology as a political tool, it is still evident that identity has become commodified in other respects and can therefore be considered a Baudrilladian signifier (Baudrillard, 1988) that allows the individual to become once again a part of something. The ‘something’ in question is malleable by political or economic agents, as is noted above. It allows the fragmented mass to metaphysically solidify once again into a mass - a community. The shape and form of a community which a commodified identity aspires to is decided in part by agency, but of course, such agency is limited and informed, whether by political elites or marketing strategists who are trained social psychologists. Communities real or engendered are all real if believed to be so - even though the fact of being a part of this virtual mass may mean that you will never meet another member of the identity group.

The new global villages, the dissolving of the barriers of time and space by electronic media such as the Internet, have made the necessity for personal immediate interaction a historical misnomer. There is no longer any need to be geographically located in a particular area to have a particular identity. Identities now traverse time and space allowing people to investigate, sample, design, create, accept and disregard identities as they wish.

No individual on this planet is now immune from the impact of identity change. Western consumer culture (and more specifically American culture) influences most readily upon cultures and identities with such ferocity that some national governments (e.g the Toubon Law of 1994, in France, which guards the French language against Americanisms, Arabisms, and the word play that makes up the slang of the banlieues) have to legislate to stop some of the more encroaching facets of Western life diluting the national indigenous identity. So while others defend themselves against ‘attacks’ upon their identities, others are creating theirs, forming a collective consciousness on the World Wide Web. So, if you want to be a North American Indian, get yourself a name, log onto the Web, join an affinity group and be a member of whatever tribe takes your fancy. For Maffesoli (1996) this is the ‘Time of the Tribes’, it is a time where the ‘new’ masses are simply heterogeneous fragments, groups that are distinguished by ‘their members’ shared lifestyles and tastes.
Tribus are thus not ‘tribes’ in the traditional anthropological sense, for they do not have the fixity and longevity of tribes. Nor are they neo-tribes; they are better understood as ‘post-modern tribes’ or even pseudo-tribes. (Maffesoli 1996:x)
However, what are the processes by which this identity change comes about? How are these new post-modern identities created? How and why have Scottish and Welsh identities, for example, become more salient? What is it that turned Yugoslavians into warring tribes calling themselves Serbs, Bosnians or Croats? What is the process of this fragmentation and how can we, as sociologists, understand what the meaning of this identity shift means?

In order to move us forward and clarify what I mean when I talk about identity, I will offer some brief thoughts about identity and Cornish identity to direct the reader through the following thesis. I will be showing, as Hetherington (1998) suggests, that identities are not smooth, consistent and standardised but are ‘folded, crumpled and uncertain’ (Hetherington, 1998:16). This thesis will show how a Cornish identity is in many ways uncertain, irrational and is insubstantial. This is not to say that for some people however, a Cornish identity does not exist. That it does exist at all is a testament to the ‘recovery’ work done by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ within Cornwall, for as I will show, one of the reasons that a Cornish identity is insubstantial is that the crucial ‘markers’ of identity, which are so important in the recovery/re-creation of an identity, were or are lacking in Cornwall. However, the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ have been able to revitalise two significant arenas of Cornish identity to act as markers, these are the Cornish language and a re-written and re-interpreted Cornish history.

What this thesis is about therefore is how groups of people are dealing with the complexities and anxieties (Hetherington, 1998:16) of the identity project that such uncertainty brings. I will be showing that for a group of people I call ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ ‘identity involves combination and the mixing of things at hand, and an ordering associated with that process of mixing’ (Hetherington, 1998:26). I will show how, unlike the Irish, whose revivalist genesis happened in the late 1800s (the same time period as the earlier Cornish revival), the Cornish markers of identity were missing, thus, somewhat retarding the development of the modern identity. Whereas the Irish were able to look to their Catholicism, their still living language, their rurality, their rituals and customs and their on-going and real contempt and dislike for the English bourgeoisie that ruled them, the Cornish had none of these. Because these crucial markers had been wiped out by the waves of cultural imperialism suffered by the Cornish they had to turn to inventions, re-inventions, re-interpretations of history and in some cases mysticism and fantasy to create the ‘new’ markers of Cornish identity to give them something to belong to. Thus, a Cornish identity becomes as a mixing of things (Hetherington 1998:26) or any symbol in a storm (Deacon 1993:76-77).

Many writers have focused upon the phenomenon of how identities are linked to the markers of identity such as traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) the media (Anderson, 1983) the banal signs of identity (Billig, 1995) and heritage (Mc Crone et al, 1995). What all of these writiers are attempting to tell us is that if one was to look at some of our rituals, traditions, signs and markers of identity and our ‘heritage’ we would find that they are more recent innovations with a more commercialised history than one might imagine. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) for example, tell us that many of the things we consider to be traditional and with histories of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years, are inventions, mostly of the late Victorian period. Many of them are commercialised; Christmas, for example, arose as a commercial endeavour. They show that many of the rituals surrounding the monarchy - royal processions like the trooping of the colour - are late nineteenth century inventions. Such things are products of the industrial age rather than pre-modern traditions. Their argument is that because these are invented traditions they are in some sense false because they are creations of a conscious fashion and so are not genuine traditions.

The question pursued by this thesis, however, is while we accept that many aspects of the identity markers and traditions may well be invented and commercialised who is it that does the actual inventing? Many writers seem to simply pre-suppose that the markers of identity are given and fail to provide any real definitive account of who it is that actually engineers the aspects of identity they talk about. Hobsawm and Ranger (1983) tell us in many cases it was the Victorians who invented the various traditions, McCrone et al (1995) lays the ‘blame’ for the Scottish heritage industry at the feet of Sir Walter Scott and his ‘highly romantic and fictitious picture of the Scottish past’ (p.4). While for Anderson national identity in the form of nationalism was the ‘response’ by ‘power groups’ to being threatened by exclusion from popular imagined communities (1983:102).

This thesis attempts to go beyond some of these vague explications and to drill down into a specific culture to try to understand the individuals involved in the epistemology of identity creation and maintenance. I will argue that emerging or re-invented identities will always have those who define the boundaries of that identity. These are the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’: they become the guardians of the identity and guardians are different from experts. The ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ will claim to have access to the ritual truth of tradition, history and culture and are like priests or shamans. To get at the truth of the identity you would need an interpretation by one of the tradition's guardians. It is the priests in any society who are able to explain the will of God or the meaning of ceremonies to those who are required to take part in them. The key role of the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ is that they are the repositories of the knowledge that the ordinary lay individual in the group does not have. It is they, and they alone who are able to recover the identity through the interpretation of the role of history, the on-going culture and the identity markers which make up for a particular group their identity.

For a Cornish identity to be successful for example, a Cornish person would have to be:
a recipient of its proudly distinctive and consciously preserved culture - a repository of its traditions and values, a performer of its hallowed skills, an expert in its idioms and idiosyncrasies (Cohen, 1984:21).
But of course Cohen is talking here about a well formed and well-established identity such as one would find in the Hebrides. The test of such categorisation in Cornwall, for example, would be whether such a shared distinctive culture, traditions, values and skills mobilise people to protect them as the Irish have done and as the Serbs and Croats have done in the former Yugoslavia. This is clearly difficult to prejudge in Cornwall, but some people clearly do feel motivated enough to take to the streets to mobilise around what they may see as ‘ethnic’ or at least group issues. This could be as varied as the closing of the last tin mine, the recent commemoration of the Cornish Rebellions, Cornish rugby or the attacks upon English Heritage signs at what are perceived as Celtic/Cornish sites.

The repository of Cornwall’s traditions and values are, I argue, its ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ who have taken it upon themselves to recover, re-interpret, re-create and commodify Cornishness. They become in effect the guardians of Cornishness. At its base they have been effective in the re-invention of a Cornish language (albeit the movement is bogged down by schisms and argument) and a Cornish history that has been widely re-interpreted and disseminated in Cornwall as the ‘authentic’ history of Cornwall. This project has been successful to the extent that these historical events have been concretised and commodified as ‘saleable goods’, for example Redruth Breweries’ Cornish Rebellion Beer, Trelawney Day, St. Piran’s Day March, the black and gold rugby shirt or the Gorsedd. It is at the Gorsedd where we find the ‘performers of its hallowed skills’, the Bards of the Gorsedd. It is they who are in themselves the ‘experts in its idioms and idiosyncrasies’ and who are indeed complicit in the creation of the Cornish idiosyncrasies, for example, the Gorsedd and the Cornish language. This thesis sets out to define the role and the activities of such ‘cultural entrepreneurs’.

I show that the Irish also had, at the time of their cultural recovery, a group of ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ who were able to successfully re-create an Irish identity. They were able to do this because they had, already in place, the ‘sharp markers’ of their identity whereas the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneur’ has ‘blunt’ markers’. Cornish Catholicism for example, was lost during Tudor times, a victim to Protestantism imposed by the sword and economic pressure as the English state had to protect its western approaches. The Cornish had experienced industrialism and the effects of the economic marketplaces in much the same way as their English cousins. The Cornish language was lost and was only preserved in fragments of texts scattered through the libraries of Britain. The imposition of the English prayer and textbook in the churches maintained the hegemonic position of English as the dominant language. A Cornish history that is claimed to be distinct and different was obscured. The Cornish people were socialised through the social and education system that taught them English history, English values and customs. To all intents and purposes Cornish people of the modern era were little different from those over the Tamar, any residual Cornish identity blunted by the lack of the sharp markers of identity. And yet given that markers of identity did actually exist at one time there seems to have been enough for the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ to locate, to manipulate and manage, to re-interpret and to bring more into focus and sharpen. So together with the other imagined, re-created and invented identity markers such as the tartan and kilt, this was enough to enable Cornish people, or whomsoever wished to be Cornish, to identify with, and thus identify themselves as, part of the group

Chapter One starts from the premise that identity was once thought to be given and fixed. Prior to the Enlightenment religious understandings of who or what we were were the dominant ways of explaining what our identity was. The ‘who am I’ question was easily explicated with reference to God and faith, our identities and social roles were proscribed for us by the church and through the tenets of religion. It was not until the Enlightenment that the ‘who am I’ question was opened up to the reflexive gaze of the philosophes. However such tenets were couched in essentialist terms. One’s identity was fixed in blood and geography.

The chapter then considers how notions of social identity have been influenced by new thinking that has removed the fixicity of essentialism and has been replaced by ideas concerning social identity which provide for a more fluid and fragmented analysis of identity. This move from the essential to the phenomenological is also reflected in the sections concerning national identity and nationalism. I show how the ‘new nationalism’ is more about the political discourses that surround issues concerning the nation rather than being about blood and territory. I show how in recent times ‘Englishness’ has been subject to a Hobsbawnian re-invention that has seen the replacement of such banal signs as the Union Jack with the Cross of St. George as a popular sign of English nationalism.

Belonging and the impact of marginality are considered along with a discussion of leadership. This builds upon the earlier discussion and looks at how culture in marginal areas is used as defence against assimilation into the whole. If one needs to belong to something or somewhere then the cultural artefacts that allow us to imagine ourselves as being part of that thing need to be evident and authentic. I show how a dichotomy of difference works to allow for identity assertions to be made and sustained in the face of often hegemonic, assimilating cultures. The actions are what Hetherington (1998:18) calls ‘performative repertoires’. These ‘performative repertoires’ are the showing and use of flags, rituals and signs and all the cultural paraphernalia that demarcates the difference between one group and another.

I then involve myself here, albeit briefly, with some discussion concerning leadership, for this thesis is concerned with the leadership qualities of the group of people I call ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. Here I raise questions concerning the core values of such groups. How are these performative repertoires maintained? Who does the cultural work that provides people with their cues and knowledge about the group, especially the groups that are marginalised? It is clear that group belief, rules, totems and so on do not exist in a vacuum. They do not appear mystically to the people - they have to be constructed and presented in legible and explicable ways to those interested members. (See Durkheim, 1966)

The work on neo-tribes and the post modern writers provide us with further understanding of the fragmentation of identity and the so called ‘crisis of identity’ in the late twentieth century. Essentially we may argue that at the centre of such debates is the politics of difference. Identity politics posit fuzzy theories which allow individuals to sample identities as if they were sampling music tracks. And as with music tracks, each sampled identity is packaged as new and authentic despite the use of often essentialist claims and older cultural references.

Consequently, in this chapter, we find that identity, far from being the essentialist problem posited by the early philosophers and positivist social scientists, is more of a precarious activity. Identities are, I argue, constructed by a wide variety of discourses. For it is the knowledge that we hold that informs and shapes our identities and as that knowledge changes so does the shape of our identities. Identity is reflexively created and can either be stable and solid or be in a state of flux. Identity production becomes a dialectic process through which social praxis is the achievement of a particular identity. I offer as a counterpoint to the Cornish identity, an overview of the revival of the Irish identity, pointing out that the Irish cultural entrepreneurs had for their identity project sharp markers of identity such as their Catholicism.

I then present the body of work that exists on Cornish identity. For the most part this work is the produce of self-interested actors. By this I mean that each of the writers I cite have a vested interest in the success of the Cornish identity project. Later in this thesis I identify these self-same writers as cultural entrepreneurs, for it is they who actively create and commodify what we understand to be a Cornish identity. However, in this section I show that for the most part these authors succumb to the same basic essentialist generalisations and explanations in their creations which underpin much of the literature cited earlier in the chapter.

In Chapter Two I discuss my methodology and continue the debate concerned with epistemology, i.e. identity is about knowledge and as such we need to understand how this knowledge is developed, transmitted and maintained. For us to understand the post-modern condition it behoves the researcher to apply post-modern methods as best as she/he can. This approach involves the complete immersion into the culture. The researcher allows his/her knowledge of the milieu to develop by artfully using the multiple examples of identity that are available. This approach allows the researcher to participate in the daily life of the subjects, watching what happens and collecting whatever data was available (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983).

Using this set of guiding principles I continued my fieldwork by living in Cornwall and becoming what I have termed as an ‘indigenous anthropologist’. This type of ethnographic work has a long and respected history within the social sciences from the early work of the Webbs through the Chicago school and to work by British sociologists such as Cohen, Willis and Willmot and Young. In this chapter I also discuss previous research that has been carried out, such as work attempting to find a genetic basis for Cornishness, plus other research based on old Cornish names. I also introduce the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci whose work on the Italian proletariat and working class culture allows us to understand in a better way how a group of people may hold multiple consciousnesses. It allows a Cornish identity consciousness to exist at the same time as other identities.

In Chapter Three I will be developing the concept of the ‘Cultural Entrepreneur’. Since the 18th century, prominent thinkers have directed the social, economic and political life of modern society. However, Bauman tells us that the influence of such intellectuals has changed from legislators to interpreters (Bauman, 1987). Thus, I will be showing how the intellectuals, in the form of ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ have influenced social life. By investigating work by Gramsci (1971) on ‘organic intellectuals’ and Becker (1963) on ‘moral entrepreneurs’, I show how intellectuals have been influential in the contemporary debate around identity; how it is they inform the ‘discourse community’, creating narratives about such communities and thus influence the norms, values and identity of the community. I then provide a discussion concerning the development of the theoretical concept that is central to this thesis, the ‘cultural entrepreneur’. First I argue that it is the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ role to present alternative narratives and to create new discourses which influence the identity of a particular group. I show how it is the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ role to work with both ideas and objects that help to flag identity on a day to day basis. These ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ imbibe these markers of identity with an authenticity because they have claimed the cultural and intellectual right to know better than any other. I then demonstrate the work of such ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ first in the re-creation of an Irish identity and then in the context of the Cornish case.
This concept of the ‘cultural entreprenuer’ is central to this thesis. It allows me to show how these cultural actors are crucial players for the identity project, not only in Cornwall, but also in other areas of the world where identity is contested. These ‘cultural entrepreneurs’, I show, play a key role in the maintenance of everyday life and in the maintenance of a contested identity. It is they who set the ‘identity agendas’ in such marginal areas as Cornwall, often as a response to a defined ‘other’ which is often an hegemonic identity. It is the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ who refocuses the gaze away from the dominant identity towards the more specific local identity. It is they who invent, recreate and manage the banal signs and symbols that are used to signify the authenticity of such claims and it is they who create narratives and discourses that are continually reworked to enable the Cornish people to make sense of their memories and lives.

Chapter Four outlines the role of the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ in Cornwall in the production of culture and in particular of identity. I show how they manage and manipulate identity through the use of the main identity markers. The first is a reconstructed language and the second a partisan reading of history. I suggest that Cornish identity becomes hegemonically managed and manipulated by these ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ rather than being implicitly remembered or being sui generis to the individual or community. I argue that the reconstructions of memory, both individual and social, are subject to the process of reconstruction and re-interpretion through narrative structures. But memory becomes plastic, it is pliable and subject to change and it is because of this tendency to change that we have social cues to remind us of particular times and events. In Cornwall the dominant cues are the Cornish language and history. In this Chapter I focus on how the Cornish language and Cornish history have been created, developed and re-interpreted by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ as sites of resistance and as the main cues of identity. For example members of the Stannary Parliament taking direct action against English Heritage signage on what they perceive as Cornish/Celtic sites or the Cornish language being used in both formal and informal situations in Cornwall and being used to shout slogans in political demonstrations. By using the examples of the language and Cornish history I show how re-written/re-interpreted histories are crucial tools in the hands of the cultural entrepreneurs. By creating a Cornish narrative around these issues the matter of Cornish identity is disseminated around the county and is given an authenticity which underpins their claim for distinctiveness.

Chapter Five introduces us to the Cornish through a partisan reading and re-interpretation of their history. It is a history that the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ would argue is hidden – written out of ‘English’ history by the forces of assimilation and hegemony. This is a history that I suggest contextualises the Cornish identity project. It is to this history that the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ turn to prove the authenticity of their case for a separate Cornish identity. Thus, from the setting of the Cornish borders along the river Tamar by the Saxon King Athelstan through to the impact of Capitalism and Industrialisation, the claim for a distinct identity is justified by the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneur’. I suggest that by directing the attention of the ‘ordinary’ Cornish person to a particular historical and contemporary situation presented as ‘authentic’ knowledge’ a passion to exist is engendered within the population.

The Pasty and the Kilt, two banal symbols of Cornish identity, notice also the Cornish sporrans.

Chapter Six continues with the historical theme but considers the contemporary history of Cornwall. This chapter focuses upon new cultures and new traditions. The contemporary history of Cornwall is one where we can find the genesis of romantic myths about the nature of the Cornish. It is also a time where the myth of the Celt is invented, there was a new focus on Cornishness as a specific identity and middle-class anglicised Cornish academics attempted to revive the Cornish language. Cornwall was in the process of being re-invented. It is during this period of history where we find the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ becoming active in cultural and identity politics.

I am providing evidence that history creates a necessary circumstance whereby a particular view of history can be the arena where identities are contested. This is a discourse that continues throughout this thesis and is expanded upon in later chapters. Chapters Four and Five show that history is not dead and inert. It is not just the learning by rote of previous kings and queens and their victories but that history is a real and living discourse. It is a narrative, a story from which we can choose our favourite bits and use them to inform our personal identity space. History is no longer a confining and restraining tool with which elites use to maintain their elite positions, but a discourse which is rich in signs and signifiers. It is these signs which are used as creative resources within the identity project.

The ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ search out these signs, like archaeologists, sifting through the fine soil of history. Once found, the signs are dusted off, renovated and remade if need be, re-interpreted and then presented to the people as a historical artefact available for purchase as an identity sign, for example, the kilt and tartan. The ‘customer’ can then pick and chose their particular historical markers. I argue that people such as the Cornish look to these signs of history and manipulate them for their own use. So, for example, some of the Cornish will 'buy' the Celtic artefacts as a particular identity sign that is salient for them, while for others Cornish folklore and myths are a much more preferential 'purchase'. These 'goods' are then used in a creative and defensive way to maintain a sense of control over their own morality especially when the perception is that they are being faced by the unwelcome encroachment of an unpopular culture as the Irish example shows. In this way history can be used to mythologise the past, maintain the present and symbolise the future.

Chapters Seven, Eight and Nine turn to the problem of Cornish identity, which I argue, is in its modern genesis. I argue that what we are witnessing in Cornwall is the birththroes of a post-modern identity which does have a ‘passion to exist’. I argue in this section that traditional approaches to understanding the Cornish identity, such as Rational Choice Theory, are not suitable vehicles of analysis simply because their analysis of ethnic identity has always focused upon the fully-formed identity and not identities exhibiting the irrationalities of their own genesis.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1978) noted that:
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before ones eyes). The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. (My emphasis) (p.50e:129)(sic)
For the purposes of this thesis I want us to consider a people with an identity that is, according to the common discourses within Cornwall (and elsewhere), different to that of the English. However, these people live in an area that is generally considered to be ‘English’ and part of the United Kingdom. They have always been before our eyes and yet we have not noticed them. As the Cornish writers (Thornton 1993, Payton and Thornton 1995) suggest, many of us may have been to Cornwall, perhaps attracted by the advertising that promises us a different experience in the Cornish Riviera. Cornwall is a place of mystery and romance, it is the haunt of smugglers and pixies - it’s populated by short dark Celtic men and dark eyed maidens, it is the Cornwall of the Poldarks or Daphne Du Maurier or perhaps, simply, the romantic notions of the advertising copywriter.

These chapters nevertheless, have as their focus a Cornish identity that if one walks the streets of Cornwall is clearly exhibited. However, it is an identity that has not yet been widely subjected to the sociological gaze. This identity, I argue, is very different from the kind of ‘heritagised’ identity that advertisers have created and academics such as Urry (1990) and McCrone et al. (1995) have started to focus upon. Cornish identity is a phenomenon that exists in its own right. But it is, in its post-modern form, purely the artful and idealised creation of the other by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’.

This thesis argues that beyond the purity of the idealised creation of heritage Cornish there exist other Cornwalls. Many owe their existence to a reaction against English labelling and Englishness. Others exist as an otherness embedded in a difference in social formation which in itself lies in the difference of significant cultural markers. Whether it is because of language, custom, or an affiliation for the land rare amongst other social groups, Cornish identity is a real sociological phenomenon. It is an identity that has its roots in the social construction of geographical, social and political marginalisation that the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ claim Cornwall has suffered over the last two thousand years.

While we cannot deny that the Cornish did have a different historical experience than the rest of the country, and while it did have a different language, the Cornish identity we find ourselves gazing at today is intrinsically different from a Cornish identity of, say, the mid 1500s. It is from this period, for example, fragments of the old language have been discovered which allows one faction of the language movement to make particular claims about pronunciation in the search for authenticity. So the claims for the uniqueness, distinctiveness and difference of the Cornish identity made on the back of 'authentic' evidence underpin an identity which is actively being re-created (McCrone 1995) and re-invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and imagined (Anderson, 1983) ‘right before our eyes’. (See Burton 1997)

Cornish identity is, I argue, a post-modern identity. It looks to the past to recreate and redefine the new as in architecture. There is a proliferation of multiple and conflicting discourses. For the Cornish, the local is a site of continuing political, economic and social conflict. They are resistant to unification and are not unified by the common culture or institutional core. Indeed, one aspect of a Cornish identity is the complete rejection of the English State and Englishness. Nevertheless a Cornish identity can also be playful and tongue-in-cheek; the existence of a Cornish identity within the boundaries of the 'United Kingdom' together with recent developments in Wales and Scotland is evidence of the fragmenting of identity. These identities exhibit innovation that disrupts the unifying conceptual schemes of the centre and emphasise difference, ambiguity, uncertainty and conflict. Post-modern identities are complex mosaics of meaning that exhibit many qualities.

The whole notion of identity per se is being questioned across the world and the crisis of self has been a reaction to the radical changes in social structures which has created an anxiety about who we are. In a post-modern society this is a difficult question to answer. Hall and du Gay (eds.) (1996:89) suggest that identities are always relational and incomplete. Identity per se depends upon its 'difference from, its negation of, some other term, even as the identity of the latter term depends upon its difference from, its negation of the former'. (Hall and du Gay (eds.) 1996:89). It becomes harder to depend upon explanations which depend upon notions of identity that suggest a common origin or common structure of experience. These essentialist modernist explanations often claim that these identities are somehow more authentic and unique than other contesting identities. From an anti-essentialist position it becomes no longer tenable to accept the premise which underwrites the ideas which form our understanding of the essentialist identities.

Chapter Seven focuses upon ‘the passion to exist’ that the Cornish seem to exhibit. For the Cornish part of the contractual ensemble created by the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ which makes up their identity, is the creation and maintenance of ‘otherness’. If one visits Cornwall simply as a visitor, one is often struck by the ‘different’ nature of Cornwall and the Cornish. The geographical difference is apparent in the stark granite horizon at once at odds with the rolling green Devonshire hills and countryside one has had to travel through to physically get into Cornwall. But more significantly is the sense of difference portrayed by the Cornish people themselves. Their sense of Cornishness often overwhelms any sense of Englishness to the extent that at times they simply do not feel that they are English or have any attachment to England, politically, socially or even geographically.

This sense of otherness can only be understood within its historical context and the clearest way to understand how the historical context impacts upon Cornish Identity is through the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's (1971) work allows for an understanding of how a people might develop a consciousness or, in the words of Gramsci, a ‘popular morality’ which is their own. He shows how, in a given situation, where there is a perceived power relationship which is unequal it is possible for the minority group to resist the ‘official morality’. Gramsci can lead us to understand how this clash of ideas can be implicated in the creation of the popular morality, or in other words the collection of ideas a people have about themselves which inform the self identity of the group and the identity of the individual.

In this chapter I also show how the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ have solidly cemented the Cornish identity into the psyche of the Cornish people. I show how all of these experiences work together, pollinating imagination to create an identity that becomes one of the multiple choices of identities available. The availability of multiple identities then allows for a phenomenological claim to be made for any particular identity. It is then an identity for which a particular stock of knowledge has been created, manipulated and is ready for use. People can accept that this stock of knowledge we may want to call Cornish identity is an authentic knowledge tool. Once accepted, people are then able to access that knowledge and use it in a tangible way. As the phenomenological idea of a Cornish identity becomes more and apparent, through, for example the setting up of the Gorsedd, or the creation of Bards, or the resurrection of the Language or the idea that Cornwall has a history of opposition to the ‘other’, then such an identity is available to be used.

Chapter Seven, further, looks at how such phenomenological tools can be used in everyday settings. The success of such an identity is congruent upon the every day flagging of identity signs. The contemporary everyday references to Cornishness are what make a Cornish identity live. As those references change so too does the phenomenological shape of the identity ‘hat’ one is wearing. So one can go to a wide variety of Cornish events and find a wide range of ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ signs on display. Celtic insignia and symbols pervade such meetings but so to do other tokens that have been borrowed, reclaimed or re-cycled from other cultures and ethnic groups. That these borrowed ideas, badges and tokens can be used with no apparent contradictions is a clear example of how such multiple identities are fluid and organic in their construction. What is crucial, however, is that these signs and symbols are somehow ‘authentic’ and bestow upon the user a sense that their identity is, in every sense, real.

The search for ‘authenticity’ is best exemplified within the Cornish language movement, as I show in Chapter Four. From its beginnings in the early 20th Century, well after the spoken language had been lost and most of the written language also lost - bar a few fragments, to the present day the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ have been at the forefront of its re-creation. This search for authenticity, a symptom of post-modern fragmentation, allows for what Deacon (1996) calls a plurality of authenticities to be created within the movement. This cultural fragmentation underlines the diffusionist and often fluid shape of Cornish identity.

Chapter Eight investigates this fluidity i.e. the apparent ability to accept and use different ideas at will and suggests that this presents us with a sociological problem. For when we are talking about groups of people such as this conventional sociological theory finds itself with a problem. Thus, the Cornish become a sociological paradox. In a society which, according to the theorists, is modernising to the extent that communities are dispersing and the economic, rational individual has become the model of modern development (Beck, 1992), Cornwall provides the paradox for the Cornish seem to be in the process of re-traditionalising.

Chapter Nine explores this paradox and suggests that in a rational world Cornishness could be in many ways irrational. In this chapter I propose Rational Choice theory is incomplete and fails to fully understand the irrationality of identities because when they apply rational choice theory to their models of ethnic identity, the model is always a fully formed and complete model. My argument is that Rational Choice theory cannot be used in any study of the Cornish simply because the Cornish identity is not fully formed. In the Cornish we are witnessing the genesis of a post-modern identity. In this chapter, as it has been throughout the thesis, the import of history and how that history is presented and importantly received is central to our understanding of one aspect of this irrationality.

For a dominant group cultural hegemony is about how to get people to forget who they once were and then attempt to get the people to ‘remember’ the new constructed identities. Throughout the thesis I argue that the process of memory stripping or social amnesia was not totally successful in Cornwall because of the activities of the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. The early ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ were able to successfully resist the encroaching ideas and culture of the English and maintain the folk memories of the Cornish people. The success of this activity is that their history (whether it is mythical, imagined, created or re-created) is part of their folk memory. But it is a folk memory that has been created and managed. This is unlike those of us who call ourselves English and have little option but to accept that history which is presented to us as our own, for we have been successfully memory stripped unlike the Cornish. However, as I do note, there has been a renewed focus upon Englishness by a new set of English cultural entrepreneurs such as Paxman (1999) and Marr (2000).

I conclude by arguing that for the Cornish, the use of history and language and the way images, narratives and explanations of the past are managed and manipulated and re-interpreted by ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ and mediated by the Cornish cultural and political institutions are crucially important for the continued vigour of the Cornish identity. This focus upon the way memory is managed and manipulated gives us access to knowledge about the detail of how identities are re-interpreted and re-invented by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. In a world where identity is in flux the use of banal signs, the creation of narratives and ‘authentic’ explanations of the past, are crucial to the creation of a post-modern identity. The Cornish identity is in its genesis and is at times irrational and inconsistent. This is not and cannot be recognised by the Rational Choice theorists simply because their 'gaze' is fixed firmly upon the fully formed ethnic identity. It is these processes of irrationality, of hybridisation and the search for authenticity which can inform us about the phenomenological and epistemological roots of identity formation in a world where identities are in flux and are fought over, controlled and shaped - a totally different conception of identity than that proposed by St Augustine.
Endnotes

[i] See: Une tele bretonne pour le siecle a venir p.8 Bretagne Breizh Info no.71 13th March 1998 (Directeur de publication Martial Menard. Imprimerie “Carhaix Impim” ZA, Karaez

[ii] Wales in Europe p.2 list of cross party and Welsh first language, Welsh second language divide.

Chapter 1. The Identity Project: Owning Identity?

2005-11-04T09:02:00.000-08:00

Chapter One
The Identity project: Owning Identity?

Introduction:
The following chapter is concerned with some of the wide-ranging literature concerning identity and identity formation. Towards the end of the last century the focus of sociological attention had turned away from the study of mass mobilizations such as class towards the ‘analysis of symbolic challenges, collective identity and cultural politics’. (Martin, G. forthcoming). We will see in the later chapters how a Cornish identity exemplifies these three factors – symbolic changes, collective identity and cultural politics. To enable us to understand a Cornish identity and to further understand the dynamics of other marginal identities, such as Serbian, Croat or even the English, we need to be clear in regard to the type of identity one may wish to study. This chapter will concern itself with a discussion of issues surrounding (i) social identity, national identity, and nationalism (ii) identity, neo-tribalism, marginality and difference (iii) identity and postmodernism (iv) identity and Cornishness.

The received understanding of the root of the term ‘identity’ is that etymologically it refers to an ‘absolute sameness’ or an ‘individuality’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 1996). For sociological use this is clearly not satisfactory. It will be made clear below in the forthcoming sections that this concept of ‘identity’ cannot be easily confined to tight and exact definitions. One of the ways of understanding identity that could be helpful would be to consider how the changes in social relations, brought about through the impact of new technologies, have made identities more diffused and fragmented – fuzzier. Ladd tells us:
Inexact, fuzzy concepts are different from scientific concepts or other kinds of concepts that are susceptible of exact definition. Wittgenstein compares the attempt to define such concepts with the attempt to "draw a sharp picture corresponding to a blurred one...Anything - and nothing - is right” (Ladd, 1975:417).
Royce further argues that 'we must be content with elastic definitions that approximate what we wish to define' (Royce, 1982:17). This identity fuzziness is, it is argued, a reaction against what Feyarabend suggests is the ‘monotony and dullness’ (Feyarabend 1987:3) of the modern condition, which ‘Like an advancing fog sameness is engulfing the country’ (Feyarabend 1987:3). Thus it is right for us, as sociologists, to be both aware of such fuzziness and of the ‘false certainties imposed by categorical approaches to identity (Somers 1994:605). Somers is concerned with what she calls the 'tendency to conflate identities with what can often slide into fixed "essentialist" singular categories such as those of race, sex, or gender' (Somers, 1994:605). For the purposes of this thesis such essentialism will need to be explored. However, we cannot escape from the proposition that in any discussion of identity we have to be aware of the contradictions of human life and social interaction therein. We are thus faced with a dilemma - how can we explicate and understand this thing we call 'identity'?
Preparing the Ground: The foundations of identity
Prior to the success of the Enlightenment Project the dominant (Western) way of describing the external world as part of the universe was with the benefit of faith. It was this total faith and the unflinching belief that all things were created by God which allowed people to understand the external world and themselves as part of it. Lovejoy talks of a 'great chain of being' (Lovejoy, 1936), a ranking system in which every living creature is placed in a hierarchy stretching from the lowest creature to God. Friedman argues that this structure dominated the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Friedman, 1994:45). The consequence of such a rigid (and unchanging) hierarchy was that the 'civilised human being' was seen to have a greater spiritual identity than the 'others' - that is the savage of the new worlds.

Consequently, many of the early philosophical ideas concerning identity were to do with personal identity that had religious overtones with little concern with the individual. Throughout the Middle Ages ‘the self’ was often defined in terms of its contractual relationships with the State. However, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the rise of Protestant ideas such as these exemplified by Martin Luther re-directed attention to the individual and the self. ‘... [T]here was a dramatic increase in privacy, in the potential for aloneness' (Levin, 1992:16).

The rise of the individual led to new opportunities for many people. It was Descartes who was to cement together the older ideas of Augustine and this new self-conscious being. In early modern societies, saturated in Enlightenment ideas, identity was often defined in essentialist terms. It becomes somewhat ironic that the arch-architect of the Enlightenment Project should be the author of the view of personal identity that allies itself so closely with religious tract. Greenwood notes that,
[T]he Cartesian view is itself often identified as the account that would be offered by most laypersons, at least by those of some form of religious persuasion. (Greenwood, 1994:103).
It was Rousseau however, who moved away from these initial essentialist ideas which suggest that individuals have one authentic identity towards a position where he can propose that identity is a ‘continuous process of self-examination’ (Goldstein and Rayner 1994:370). It is this process of ‘reflexivity’, as we shall see, which destabilises ideas of the ‘essentialist’ identity which have permeated ideas and discussions of identity since this early modern period.

It is during this process of self-examination that the individual asks what Guibernau (1996:72) considers to be the ‘key question with regard to identity’. The ‘Who am I’? question allows for, according to Guibernau, a definition to be made which allows for ‘an interpretation of the self that establishes what and where the person is in both social and psychological terms’. (Guibernau, 1996:72)

We shall see below how individuals have been disembedded from the social relations of modernity where class, for example, was one of the major identity indicators. Class located us in our social position and linked us to the material life through the economic system. As Hall (1991) tells us, class provided us ‘with a code through which we read one another’ (p.45). Our class identities were fixed, we ‘knew our place’, where we lived, who we socialised with, where we went on holiday, even, according to Urry (1996), how we stood, spoke and even ate, was influenced by one’s class identity.
Social Identity
Other social identities such as gender, race, age and so on were/are saturated with essentialist notions. Our gender and race for example are subjected to legal, medical/genetic, political and social categorisation and are underpinned by the ways in which the State wishes for those identities to be ‘allocated’ for their own bureaucratic needs. Such social identities also had functional roles within society. They limited and de-limited our behaviour as Urry (1996) notes and allowed for the identification of social groups within society.

Giddens (1991) notes that one’s social identity (be it class, age, race, gender and so on) influenced both our appearance and our demeanour.
Modes of facial adornment or dress, for example, have always been to some degree a means of individualisation; yet the extent to which this was either possible or desired was usually quite limited. (Giddens 1991:99)

Giddens (1991) quite firmly makes the link between dress and appearance and social identity. Thus dress and appearance become, what for Billig (1995) would be banal symbols of one’s social identity. As Giddens puts it ‘…dress remains a signalling device of gender, class position and occupational status’ (1991:99). The French writers such as Baudrillard and Barthes however, would want to move much further than Giddens and suggest that dress and demeanour are more of a sign or signifier that locates the wearer within a cultural milieu rather than within a closed category such as class or gender. Dress becomes a code or Baudrillardian sign which have four orders of signification. Thus dress, as a sign, can reflect basic reality, mask reality, mask the absence of reality or become simulacra, i.e. they have no relation to reality and are pure simulation.

So, for example, if we take a functional/utilitarian article of clothing such as a T-shirt, we may argue that this T-shirt may well be a ‘classless’ item of clothing unlike, say, a Barbour jacket. Nevertheless the T-shirt can still be used as a representational sign vehicle (as can the Barbour jacket). Thus the message carried in the emblem, words or pictures carried on the front of the T-shirt will stand for, mask, invent or simulate the social identity that the wearer wishes to be identified with. Thus T-shirts with trade union emblems, university slogans or advertising for a value commodity such as Jaguar cars, will represent as Eco (1979:135) suggests, an identity status claimed explicitly or implicitly by the wearer.

Post-modern influences have started to dismantle essentialist social structures and social identities such as class, race, gender and so on and allowed human beings to have more agency in how they define themselves. Bocock (1993:31) tells us that a ‘state of flux has replaced earlier forms of stable group membership’ such as class, religion, occupation, gender and so on. We have become more individualistic, more self-controlled and more reflective. Our identities now seem to be more influenced by intercultural references, fragments, instability and turmoil, global references and local intensifications rather than as a side effect to the basic social structures in which we live.

Thus, the older social identities, such as class, age, race and gender and so on are destabilised. This destabilisation is created by the way we as individuals locate ourselves within society rather than, as Gellner proposes, that society inculcated us with an identity such as class which was functional for that society. Thus, such essentialist identities, were in essence, sui generis to the individual involved. Identities, it is argued, have suffered fragmentation. As Bradley (1996:22) suggests, society has become more fluid, this involves not only the breaking up of all the social groupings, but ‘a loss of all sense of social belonging’ (Bradley 1996:22).
It is not so easy to talk of the individual or the self as an autonomous and coherent unity but instead we have come to understand that we are made up from and live our lives as a mass of contradictory fragments. (Moore, 1988, p.170)

National Identity
National identity provides us with a good example of an identity which is sui generis to the individual and is functional for society. Gellner (1983:54) proposed that the main emphasis upon a nationalist identity was that it was ‘rooted in a certain kind of division of labour’. Thus, for Gellner, a nationalist identity was a function of the society in which it was expressed. It was embedded within a particular culture and was/is transmitted to new members who emotionally identified with these solidarity bonds.

However, it may be argued, that as nationalism re-emerges across the globe, rather than being described in essentialist terms and seen simply as a function of the social structure, as Gellner proposes, a nationalist identity may now be seen to be more of a bricolage of ideas about the individual: a bricolage which is more about ‘society and politics’ (Kedourie, 1986), about ‘collective immortality and dignity’ (Smith, 1999 and Anderson, 1991), or the ‘community as a whole’ (Anderson, 1991) whether it be imagined or not. As we shall see below, each of these approaches are dependent upon the myths, symbols and rituals that underpin their social significance. Consequently it behoves us to further understand how such myths, symbols and rituals gain current acceptance amongst groups where dominant identities have been for many years the way people understood who they were. This will be explored in greater depth in later chapters and in particular when we consider the cultural ‘work’ done by groups of people I call ‘cultural entrepreneurs’.

However, in order for us to understand more about how identity is thought about in these post-modern or late modern times, it is of some import that we consider, in some detail, current work on identity. We do this in order to understand the melange of concepts, theories and functionality that influence identity choices. It will be proposed and shown in later chapters that the cultural entrepreneurs trawl this rich bricolage of ideas to help create, maintain and explicate their ideas on identity. Consequently in the next section I will consider national identity and nationalism in more detail.
National Identity and Nationalism
‘Symbols and rituals are decisive factors in the creation of national identity’ (Guibernau, 1996:80). In the photographs above I have shown how the symbols of English/British nationalism/patriotism can be used in different ways, hence highlighting the difficulty one has in dealing with such ‘fuzzy concepts’. Image one shows an English football supporter, image two shows British National Front supporters at a Remembrance Day parade in 1999 and image three shows a British marine yomping towards Port Stanley during the Falklands War in 1982. These signs of Britishness/Englishness clearly mean different things to different people and yet there is a sense that a community is formed in the use of these same symbols.
Nationalism is, according to Kedourie (1986),
...a doctrine that holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self government. (Kedourie 1986:12)

This notion is, however, dated, conceived during the Enlightenment by intellectuals who wanted to promote a new historicist vision of humanity where the new ideas of politics would overturn the role of religious dogma which had been used since St. Augustine as the key to individual and collective identity.

John Breuilly (1985) presents us in his book, Nationalism and the State, with a definition that avoids the danger of being too vague and all embracing and, among other things, draws attention to the modernity of nationalism. He argues that nationalist arguments are based upon three precepts:
a. There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character.
b. The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values.
c. The nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires at least the attainment of political sovereignty. (John Breuilly,1985:3).

Breuilly’s concern here is with nationalism as a form of politics. This political activity is primarily opposition politics. The understanding of nationalism and the nationalist movements should be based on the relationship between the nationalist movement and the existing state. He tells us that:
Very broadly, a nationalist opposition can stand in one of three relationships to the existing state. It can seek to break away from it, to take it over and reform it, or to unite it with other states. (Breuilly 1985:11-12)
Consequently, nationalist movements are concerned with separation, reform or unification. The consequence for identity is that cultural and political activity becomes of primary importance for the individual. In these two concepts we can find two quite different and often competing conceptions of the nation. Each group will form their own distinctive organisations and have diverging political and cultural strategies.
Gellner in his book Nations and Nationalism (1983:6-7) makes this point quite well.
1. Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
2. Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognise each other as belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations maketh man; nations are the artefacts of men's convictions and loyalties and solidarities. A mere category of persons (say, occupants of a given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example) becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly recognise certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation and not the other shared attributes, whatever they might be, which separate that category from non- members. (pp. 6-7)
.
Gellner (1983) also points out that, in fact, nations, like states, are a contingency and not a universal necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all circumstances. But nationalists tend to view the nation in Enlightenment terms – as existing as an organic entity, cemented in time as a continuously mobile community within a historical territorial homeland. These ideas conflict and create problems for the idea of a nationalist identity. Nationalist ideas rest on the notion of the homeland, ancient and unchanging, whereas, as Gellner (1983) points out, the idea, and indeed the fact of a nation or state change, as the recent events in the former Yugoslavia so potently underline.
As Gellner (1983) tells us the economic role of the state drives the political and cultural ideas that are transformed into nationalist identities.

So the economy needs both the new type of central culture and the central state: the culture needs the state; and the state probably needs the homogeneous branding of its flock (Gellner, 1983:140)
How that ‘branding’ is done is of significance for this thesis. Anderson (1983) points to the influence of communication and the rise of the media that allowed for the emergence of nations as imagined communities. For Anderson, nations are an illusion and it is only the face to face contact between individuals which sustains the community.

For Anderson then, the written language was the vehicle that invented nationalism (Anderson, 1983:122). Hall (1996) moves further and argues that Anderson’s (1983) imagined community could only be constructed and conveyed in discourse – and in particular in the narratives of the national culture. Thus nations become for Hall (1996:612) ‘systems of cultural representations’ – nations become symbolic communities. Indeed Smith (1999:15-16) tells us that the components of myth and symbol are particularly important in the creation of an identity and indeed are the ‘primary definers of the separate existence’ (Smith, 1999:15).

So nationalistic symbols and myths such as Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech of the Sixties, Margaret Thatcher's 'Our Culture will be Swamped' speech of the Seventies, and Winston Churchill's son's claim that ‘immigration has to be halted to defend the British way of life’, are what Stuart Hall refers to when he writes that ‘since 1979 lots of small Little England English people have been getting behind the barricades…when Europe begins to look like that hybrid, impure space of migrated peoples’ (Hall 1996: 134). These political narratives buy into the historical discourses about place and nation and influence the national identity. But crucially these narratives also underline the continuing hybridity and fragmentation of identity, for in the process of cultural re-trenchment the supporters of Thatcher and Powell et.al. look to a mythologised past. This mythologised past creates new notions of what it is to be English. The ‘new nationalism’ is found in the responses to a demonised ‘other’ and re-invents what England means and what constitutes Englishness.

Foucault (1974) tells us that his concept of discourse was one that was about how human beings understand themselves in our culture and how our shared meanings come to be produced in different periods. This position is important in allowing us to understand the current rise of an English national identity that in many ways is already subsuming the earlier British national identity. For example, the use of the English flag, the cross of St. George, has become a popular sight, especially at sports events where once the Union flag would have been flown.

Work by Marwick (1996:484) using the results of a 1994 ICM/Rowntree Trust poll, shows that among the three nations of Great Britain the sense of British identity was strongest among the English people surveyed. However, when these same people were asked about being English they demonstrated a weaker sense of being specifically English than did the Welsh respondents of being Welsh or the Scots of being Scottish. Oakland (1998:63) however, points out that there is resurgence in English nationalism particularly among teenagers that is not tied to traditional features. Work by Anne Leslie (1998) underlines this:

In my local inner-city market I asked a group of white teenagers loitering outside the ‘offie’ whether they felt English or British? “English, of course. I’m proud to be English!” replied one youth, his ears and nostrils pierced with large amounts of ironmongery. “I’m not British, I’m English!” Why? “Dunno, really. Just the way I am”. But one of his mates butted in with: “English, British, what’s the difference? I’m proud of being English, cos it’s the same thing, innit?” (Postscript, Summer 1998: 16-17)

The re-creation of Englishness
In the time that I have spent researching Cornish identity, Scotland and Wales have achieved a devolved government and with it a sense of increased national identity. English nationalism has reached the stage where the cross of St George (ironically a demoted Turkish saint who probably never set foot on English soil) has become a more salient sign of nationality and partisanship than the Union Jack.
Without doubt it is now commonly accepted in sports, athletic circles and events that the English Cross represents England. The incorrect waving of the Union Flag, or Jack, for England is fast disappearing. Painting of faces with the English cross at recent world cup events was an expression of national sentiment, English national sentiment, by ordinary and working class people. (Boyd, 1999)

The very nature of Englishness and English identity has become a continuing theme in the mass media. The Sunday Times (March 19, 2000) ran a story entitled ‘Young Britons lose sense of Nation’ the paper was reporting on a poll they had carried out with over 1000 British school children. The results of this poll showed that two-thirds or 66 per cent thought of themselves as English while only one quarter or 24 per cent thought of themselves as British. Within this continuing contemporary debate, which in some quarters may be verging on a moral panic, myths are being created of an ancient English identity and an English nation-state that has its roots in the mists of history. Populist commentators such as Matthew Parris can feel comfortable enough with these myths to write:
Englishness exists. England’s senses of itself go back more than a thousand years…and unless England is recognised…then all hopes for a liberal, open, democratic and tolerant future are in danger (The Guardian February 24. 2000)

Since the devolution of Wales and Scotland there has been a flurry of books both academic and populist, such as Jeremy Paxman’s (1999) The English, Peter Hitchen’s (1999) The Abolition of Britain, Andrew Marr’s (2000) The Day Britain Died, Simon Heffer’s (1999) Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Tom Nairn’s (2000) After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland and Adrian Hastings (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism to name a few. Each of these books, in its own way, reports upon the growth of English nationalism in Britain and the likely break up of the United Kingdom. These discussions are also impacted upon by continued articles in the press (for example see The Observer April 18, 1999 England expects a day to remember; The Guardian January 12, 2000 We can be English without falling into the racist trap) and by politicians such as the Right Honourable Jack Straw MP, the Home Secretary, who called for a celebration of the achievements of the English and the need to develop a ‘rounded sense of Englishness’.

Black (1998) argues that Englishness has a long history. And a number of periods can be selected as of particular formative importance, not least the transformation of Wessex into the Old English Monarchy in the tenth century. It is this sort of primordial historicism – a looking back to past glories - which may not strike a chord with the teenagers above, but which does in a very real way colour the narratives and discourse of English nationalism. Paradoxically a remote Turkish saint may become a provocative symbol of a land on which he never set foot. (Black 1998)

The flag of St. George becomes a very real symbol of Englishness for groups such as the teenagers above, who may well have come across it as a potent symbol of the England football club. Although these supporters in the photograph may not know it, they are artfully creating and reinforcing a discourse of nationality that has its roots in the mists of time. They are, for Foucault (1974), showing us how all social practices entail meaning and as Hall (1992:291) tells us, ‘meanings shape and influence what we do – our conduct - all practises have a discursive aspect’.

Thus the banal signs and symbols of nationalism become the lingua franca that underpins our conscious and unconscious identity. This is what Delanty (pace Billig, 1995) calls the ‘New Nationalism’ (Delanty 1996. SOC RES Online). Delanty’s thesis argues that:
Nationalism no longer appeals to ideology but to identity (Delanty, G. 1996:3)

The New Nationalism
Consequently, ‘cultural nationalism’ as opposed to ‘political nationalism’ becomes the predominant form of national identity. Cultural nationalism for Delanty becomes the vehicle through which differences are preserved as opposed to hegemonic and cultural superiority. Actors consequently have agency in their choice of nationalism. This form of national identity is formed from the bottom up rather than the older structural forms of nationalism and identity noted above and as Delanty (1996:4) notes, came from the ‘programmatic designs of elite’s’ (p.4) and which were based upon the essentialist notions of the Enlightenment.

This new nationalism, according to Delanty (1996:6):

Is the result of a shift from state to society and expresses a sense of widespread alienation and frustration deriving from social exclusion and deep social divisions
Consequently, the new nationalism becomes a set of tenets that shuts other people out rather than simply subjugating them. It becomes a way of defining ‘us’ and ‘them’. To call oneself English, Welsh, Cornish or Apache is to draw a psychological as well as a physical boundary. ‘They’, the ‘foreigner’ are outside it and can be perceived as a threat to all that is held to be ‘holy’ and ‘pure’ within those boundaries.

This approach answers Guibernau's (1996:72) key question with regard to identity – the ‘Who am I’ question. The ‘new nationalism’ provides an interpretation of the self that allows the person to understand themselves in both social and psychological terms. Thus the ‘new nationalism’ rather than couching identity in fixed essentialist terms which are sui generis of that person, argues that one’s identity now reflects the changing and fragmented political and social situations one finds themselves in. Thus, Lesley’s youths (above) can reflexively be both British and English and see them both as different and the same.

Once again we can see how the uses of these categories succumb to the notion of fuzziness. Once the certainty and the fixicity of the Enlightenment concepts are lost, it starts to become difficult to categorise these concepts with any confidence. Clearly it becomes a difficult project to know Nations simply through the projection of generalised or certain characteristics that can be ascertained. It also becomes difficult to support the claim that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government – ideas challenged currently in the ‘War’ against Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Islamic terrorists responsible for the 11th September action.
Belonging and Marginality
The ‘new’ nationalism reflects notions of ‘difference’ and ‘belonging’ that are being understood and used in social rather than political ways, albeit it in slightly fuzzy ways. Indeed, Anthony Cohen pointed us towards this more social understanding of ‘nationalism’, if we want to call it that, when he told us that:
Belonging implies very much more than merely having been born in the place. It suggests that one is an integral piece of the marvelously complicated fabric which constitutes the community; that one is a recipient of its proudly distinctive and consciously preserved culture – a repository of its traditions and values (Cohen, 1982: 21)
Local or marginal identities start to emerge as a compromise between those factors that may have a traditional and distinctive association with the individuals and the locality and those parts of the mélange which are imagined and/or constructed or re-constructed as symbolic identity devices. So, for example, as McCrone et al (1995) have shown, the Scots have recourse to a traditional past which has a distinctive association with places and geography, but the Scots identity is also influenced by Victorian constructions such as the tartan. These devices, however, may then be used as a bona-fide rationale to provide a form of cultural resistance to the threat of incorporation and assimilation into the larger order or may even, ironically, be used as symbols of accommodation into the larger order.

Local identity emerges as a compromise between a mix of elements of resistance to incorporation into a larger whole and of elements of accommodation to this larger order. For example, the Prince of Wales (who is also the Duke of Cornwall) may at one and the same time be seen as a symbol of assimilation or as a symbol or difference. It is these ambiguities of identity that we find in the margins such as Wales, Scotland and Cornwall

Indeed, Rob Shields (1991) tells us at the outset of his work on marginal locations that:
Marginal places, those towns and regions which have been ‘left behind’ in the modern race for progress, evoke both nostalgia and fascination (Rob Shields 1991:3)
Bernard Deacon, a Cornish academic, Cornish Bard and one of the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’, highlights this fascination and nostalgia for his community in a paper in which he reviews the ‘dominant discourse’ of a vanishing Cornwall, which include the three tropes of a ‘passionate Cornwall’, a ‘commodified Cornwall’ and a ‘domesticated Cornwall’ (Deacon 2000:2). This evocation of nostalgia and fascination is part of what Anderson (1983) calls the ‘imagined identity’, but in the margins it is underlined by a continual search for authenticity (an issue which is discussed at more length below).

But I would suggest that this search for authenticity in the margins is more to do with the resultant loss of authenticity through the imposition of ‘foreign’ culture as the hegemonic state replaced the older traditional cultures with the culture of the centre and of modernity. So the search for authenticity is more about ‘being true to the self’, of being a ‘real’ or ‘true’ person or, in the terms of this thesis, being a real or true Cornish person or Welsh person and so on (See Taylor, 1991 and Trilling 1972). As Shields tells us:
The social ‘Other’ of the marginal and of low culture is despised and reviled in the official discourse of dominant culture and central power while at the same time being constitutive of the imaginary and emotional repertoires of the dominant culture (Shields 1991:5)
This dichotomy, being at the same time despised and constitutive of the dominant culture, is highlighted by the fact that on the 2001 census Cornish people can now identify themselves as Cornish, rather than British. It is, according to Shields (1991:6), these ‘discourses on space’ which create a set of spatial metaphors and place images conveying notions of what that place ‘is’ or is ‘meant to be’. We saw above for example, Bernard Deacon construct various metaphors about the place that is Cornwall and in later chapters I will show in more detail how in the search for authenticity various metaphors are used to explain Cornwall. But it is these metaphors which Shields suggest become influential and work as directive images and ‘metaphors we live by’ (Shields 1991:47 and Lakoff and Johnson 1979 cited in Shields, 1991).

Furthermore, as Anderson (1983:15) tells us, ‘Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness but by the style in which they are imagined’. In the two extracts below we find Cornish people distinguishing their community.
Cornwall is not just another county – for historical and cultural reasons, Cornwall is different (Plymouth Evening Herald 11 April 2001 p.3)

Cornish people are different – they’re Celts and fiercely independent (Plymouth Evening Herald 11 April 2001 p.3)
The two Cornish people cited above in the newspaper reports, are presenting the references, the imaginations, of what for them it is to be Cornish. For one, it is for historical and cultural reasons and for the other a more essentialist position is taken in the call to Celticism. But crucially, both are presenting equal but competing notions of what it is to be Cornish, and as Hetherington tells us:
Identity is about both similarity and difference. It is about how subjects see themselves in representation and how they construct differences within that representation and between it and the representation of others. (Hetherington, 1998:15)
Elias examines this notion of difference in his classic sociology, The Established and the Outsiders (1965), where he shows in his study of ‘Winston Parva’ the divisions between an old-established group and a newer group of residents (the outsiders). This model can also be used to help us understand how differences are constructed in marginal places. Within the marginal space, the inhabitants (Elias would argue), would look upon themselves as ‘the ‘better’ people, as endowed with a kind of group charisma, with a specific virtue shared by all its members and lacked by the others’. (Elias, 1965:xvi). Thus, the Scots may cite ‘tartanry, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Mary Queen of Scots, Bannockburn and Burns [to] provide a source of ready-made distinguishing characteristics from England’ (McCrone et al, 1995:7). (Nagel, 1995:950) provides us also with the example of North American tribes ‘re-traditionalising through the reclaiming of land taken from them by the white settlers and an ‘increasing willingness to claim and assert Indian ethnicity’.

Hall (1991:33) tells us that this reaffirmation of difference and concentration upon the local is a consequence of the universalising tendencies of modern society. Thus, when faced by difference in the form of a hegemonic centre who are driving the process of assimilation, the marginal groups will enter into what Hetherington (1998:18) calls ‘performative repertoires’. These repertoires would involve what Elias (1965:158) might indicate as showing the flag, fighting for cultural superiority, status and power, highlighting their standards and beliefs and using stigmatised beliefs about the outside group. On a global scale we can see these ‘performative repertoires’ played out day by day by the Taliban in Afghanistan and those Islamists from other countries who would support the Taliban. These disparate individuals from many countries who are joined together as a ‘nation’ of Islam see themselves as fighting the ‘assimilationist’ cultural advances of the west and in particular the United States.

Another reaction to the process of assimilation may well be ‘glocalization’ (See Bauman, 1998). This is where local culture, responding to the homogenising effects of the globalisation process, defends itself by involving the aggressive external ideas into their own defensive strategies. So, for example, facets of the dominant or globalising culture are assimilated into the local culture where they become in themselves part of the local defence and resistance to the forces of hegemony and globalisation. For example, the McDonald's hamburger chain that occupies villages throughout modern-day France has commandeered Asterix, the Gaul to promote its food as part of a marketing campaign launched yesterday that pushes aside the venerable clown, Ronald McDonald. Further, whereas in its early years in the United States, McDonald's imposed strict codes about food preparation and decor to send a message to consumers about the comforts of standardisation, in France and some other countries, wine is served. In India, Maharaja Macs are made of lamb, not beef, in deference to Hindu sensibilities. In South Korea, McDonald's serves kimchi burgers as a paean to the aromatic, fermented cabbage that is a staple of the country's diet.

The new French menu features seven new sandwiches tied into Asterix's adventures against the Romans in pre-Christian times in a movie being released in February. It isn't the fare you would find in suburban America: The McLutce, for example, has emmenthal cheese; the McAlexandrie features grilled eggplant and olive sauce. As Robertson (1995) tells us these changes are done strategically, for example when global marketers create local traditions on the assumption that difference sells (1995: 29). More generally, glocalization captures the way in which homogenisation and heterogenisation intertwine (Robertson, 1995:40). Thus, whereas powerful companies might 'customise' their product to local markets, glocalization operates in the opposite direction. Local actors select and modify elements from an array of global possibilities, thereby initiating some democratic and creative engagement between the local and the global. (Cohen and Kennedy, 2000:377)
Thus, these customised goods become banal symbols of identity. A McLutce burger in France or a kimchi burger in South Korea provides the public display of the domestic identity as opposed to the impinging American identity represented by a McDonald’s burger. Thus notions of what construes the particular in terms of identity as opposed to the general are reinforced. The identity of the outside group becomes a deviant identity and the stigma attached to such identities becomes an attribute that is deeply discrediting i.e. for the French there is a strong resistance to a harmonised culture based on American norms in culture, music, books, Hollywood movies and other forms of art and entertainment which are seen to be influences that devalue and spoil the home culture. In other words, a stigma is a characteristic, behaviour, or experience that may cause the person with the stigma to be rebuked by others such as those who would use Americanisations in everyday language in France. In order to protect France's cultural identity, the French government recently stepped in and enacted some laws aiming at restricting the broadcast of English speaking movies or songs and the use of English vocabulary. In general, outlawing the use of English words that have been incorporated into French in advertising and on TV in an effort to stem the tide of the English influence on language and ‘Americanisation’ in French culture.

Thus, the dominant identity, for example, American, is seen, from the point of view of the marginal group, the French, as a spoilt identity; thus anything American, including the American identity becomes as Goffman (1963) suggests, stigmatised. Haseler (1996) underlines this notion of a ‘spoilt identity’ suggesting that in England there is an identity crisis and that the national identity of the British is waning (Haseler, 1996:97). It is an identity weakened and spoiled by Britain’s comparative economic decline (Haseler, 1996:105) and when the cracks in national identity started showing themselves, so too did ‘the realities (and thus the real identities) of Britain, and of England, and of their peoples…begin to reveal themselves’ (Haseler 1996:105).

‘Englishness’ in the era of late modernity, was a false identity according to Haseler (1996) and as he suggests ‘official Englishness distorted the very identity of the people themselves’ (Haseler 1996:107). Whereas, as I will show below, the re-constructed identity, or those identities which are deemed to be marginal, are able to claim for themselves an older and more established place within the identity politic. Also as the social distance between the established marginal group and the ‘outside’ hegemonic group grows the individuals become, as Giddens (1992) suggests, ‘disembedded’ from the traditional social contexts and ways of describing their identity i.e. in terms of class, race, religion and so on and experience an increasing need for pure relationships - relationships characterised by intimacy and a mutual process of self disclosure.
Leadership
The organisation of groups whereby the individual may fulfil the need for these pure relationships and intimacy may well be understood in terms of the ‘emotional community’ Hetherington (1994, 1998). Hetherington argues that Schmalenbach’s (1922) concept of the Bund allows for the ‘affectual identification with others that gives individuals the elective and expressive identity that they seek’ (Hetherington, 1998:83). In his work Hetherington evaluates:
…how expressive lifestyles might make use of a Bund as a charismatic form of sociation that provides a means of facilitating the development of expressive individual identities through a shared strongly emotional kind of identification with others. It is this type of organisation in which solidarity and a sense of moral election, something associated with the romantic structure of feeling and its subjectivised occasionalism, are expressed. (Hetherington, 1998:83-84)

One of the factors that Hetherington picks up on in his discussion of the Bund is the notion of Charisma. Charismatic leadership such as Weber understood it was the extraordinary quality of a person whereby he/she was thought to have supernatural or superhuman forces. This virtue could be found not only in magicians, sorcerers, and priests but also in political leaders. Weber also spoke of a type of ‘charismatic domination,’ which, like ‘rational’ and ‘traditional’ domination, based its legitimacy on particular arguments. ‘Charismatic’ leadership differed from the other two types in that its legitimacy originated in the people's recognition of the extraordinary virtues of their ruler. Weber defines charisma as an irrational type of domination that is not attached to any rules.

Hetherington (1998:93) however, suggests that this sort of understanding of the concept is less in keeping with the stance taken by those concerned with identity with the ‘so-called “new social movements”’. Hetherington (ibid.) suggests that the role of charismatic leadership is generalised throughout the group through a process of diffusion and that the Bund would not evidence any particular leaders. Nevertheless, Hetherington is aware that such a group ‘cannot exist without some form of centrality’ (ibid.). And he suggests that it is the organisational form itself to which the individuals submit themselves rather than the will of an individual leader (ibid. my italics).
One commits to the group one has joined and its core values rather than to a person. (Hetherington, 1998:93)
However, it is the issue of the ‘core values’ that must exercise us here. When we talk about the ‘core values’ of a group, we note as Hetherington (1998:115) does, that ‘every society, no matter how complex, has a centre of values and beliefs’ (Shils, 1975 cited in Hetherington ibid.). However, Hetherington does not pursue the epistemology of the values that would, for instance, direct the social organisation of his notion of the Bund. Althusser ‘s (1971) argument tells us that organisations generate systems of ideas and values, which we as individuals believe (or don't believe) and which parallels Hetherington's (1998) argument above. For Althusser these organisations are Ideological State Apparatuses, that is the schools, religions, the family, legal systems, politics, arts, sports, etc., from where the attitudes, values and beliefs of the hegemonic group are inculcated into a population as a dominant ideology. Consequently, we may ask, from whence do the values and ideas of the Bund come?

I would argue that, unlike Hetherington, who seems to be suggesting that within the Bund charisma (which I take to loosely mean ‘leadership’) is dispersed to all members, I would suggest that charisma may well be dispersed to all the members but some members may, in Orwellian terms, be ‘more equal than others’. While not being recognised in the Weberian sense as ‘leaders’ they are, however, employed in the creation and in the policing of the group’s values and beliefs. It is these people that I call ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ and it is this group of cultural leaders that this thesis focuses upon. The recognition of the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ as a group of people imbibed with slightly more charisma than the rest of the group, creating the rules, values and ideas, but not upsetting the stability of the group is, I would argue, the solution to Hetherington’s difficulty re the Bund. He tells us in his description of the Bund (points 4 and 5 p.98):

4. The cohesion of the group is maintained through forms of identification often organised around some mode of charismatic identification. This is often expressed through the performance of one’s commitment to the group’s goals and through identification with the ethics of aesthetics and tribal symbols.
5. Bunde are self-enclosed and produce a code of practices and totemic symbols which serve as the basis for identification (ibid. p.98)

Tribal symbols, totemic symbols, attitudes, values and beliefs – ideologies - do not exist in a vacuum and appear to people in mysterious and mystical ways, they are constructed and created by human beings within particular contexts and as a reaction to particular events or occasions. Hetherington (1998) does pick up on this when quoting Shils (1975 cited in Hetherington:115) who argued that the values and beliefs central to any society, no matter how complex, were ‘affirmed by elite’s that took on the sacred quality of authority’ (Shills 1975:4 cited in ibid.).

Nevertheless, Hetherington also emphasises the expressive and emotional aspect of the Bund. He underlines the notion that this organisational form ‘has more to do with a desire to share a sense of commitment and belonging with others who are seekers after some kind of expressive alternative to the conditions of modern life’ (Hetherington 1998:99).

These notions of ‘belonging’ and ‘marginality’ work to provide the individual with the impetus to search out others who share similar psychological, sociological and geographical aspects of their lived experience. In the next section we look at how the concept of the Bund has been developed to provide a more detailed understanding of the post-modern influence of group and individual identity. The debate concerning neo-tribes reflect the search for more real experiences - for a real, more authentic identity and more fully explores the notion of fragmentation. Neo-tribes are fuzzier, a place where the individual may inhabit a real physical space or, with no fear of dissociation, virtual and/or mental spaces but synergy with the group is still maintained.
Neo Tribalism
The French writer Michel Maffesoli also picks up on similar themes in his work The Time of the Tribes (1996). In this work Maffesoli, according to Shields in the foreword, ‘develops the concept of neo-tribalism beyond Schmalenbach’s ‘Bund’.’ The concept of `neo-tribalism' is central to Maffesoli's (1996) discussion of post-modern society. Maffesoli is intrigued by the paradox found in a modern society where there is a ‘constant interplay between the growing massification and the development of micro-groups’ which he calls ‘tribes’. (1996:6) He tells us that the ‘people’ are no longer the subject of historical movement as perhaps Marx would argue, but are now subject to the forces of ‘disindividuation’ and a new emphasis upon the roles that each person plays within the tribe.

The form of the ‘neo-tribe’ is one that is defined by its fragmentation, whereas the traditional ‘tribe’ is a form of association that is defined by its high levels of homogeneity. Maffesoli points out that such neo-tribes are fluid and organic in their make up, their masses are unstable and the people are free to move between tribes. It is this poly-dimensionality of the lived experience – ‘sociality’ – which has increasingly surpassed more formal, abstract and fixed positions – the ‘social’ - as the organisational basis of everyday life. Thus ‘sociality’ is defined as a ‘succession of ambiance’s, feelings and emotions’ (Maffesoli, 1996:11).

People are gathering together in their search for community and belonging. However, neo-tribalism is characterised by its fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal (Maffesoli, 1996:76). Nevertheless, the tribe is, according to Maffesoli, a community of ideas that goes beyond the individuals and the practices involved (ibid:79) but which is dependent upon shared feeling. It is the ‘undirected’ being together which is creating new lifestyles. Sociality is organic; it is inherent in the social interactions of the everyday. Maffesoli even goes as far as to say that we are born with knowledge of this sociality. Because sociality relies on intrinsic order rather than that imposed from above, the human being must perform social roles. To that end, personhood is required from each human and there is no room for individualism. The tension between the social and sociality is not new, but has existed always, with each one being more or less prominent depending on the character of the epoch. Indeed, sociality is the foundation of the social. The structures of the social become 'saturated' and collapse but sociality is always there. When the social collapses, as can be seen in Late Modernity, sociality re-emerges.

Maffesoli, however, is much clearer on how such tribes are organised. Looking to the religious models as exemplified by sociologists such as Durkheim and Weber he tries to show us the ‘logic of social attraction’ (ibid. p.82). In a discussion of small sects he tells us that these small groups are able to
…restore structurally the symbolic power. Step by step, one can see a mystical network being built, carefully yet solidly connected, leading one to speak of a cultural resurgence in social life (Maffesoli , 1996:83).
Still using the sect example, Maffesoli also indicates how such groups are led. While noting that in general the organisation of the group is everybody’s affair, he does deny that the group is a democratic system, rather leadership is more hierarchical and organic (Maffesoli, 1996:84) and ‘every single person is made indispensable to the group’ (ibid.). But he also argues that there are leaders, albeit that their position is fragile and in some cases short-lived.
There may well be charismatic leaders and various gurus on the scene; however, the fact that their powers are not based upon rational competence…renders them fragile and does not favour their longevity (Maffesoli, 1996:84)
The group itself then becomes experienced and organised through encounters with others, and with the situations and experiences within various groups to which each individual belongs (Maffesoli, 1996:88). This is, according to Maffesoli, based upon a ‘nostalgia for community’ (ibid.) which is simply a consequence of modernity draining the possibilities of social relationships of their ‘real’ content (Maffesoli, 1996:89). For Maffesoli, it is the re-creation of content and the creation of such groups and tribes, which is an act of creativity par excellence. For in that act of creation there arises a feeling of belonging to a symbolic territory; whether that may be an actual physical space or a mental space each carries the same weight, as does the creation of a communal ideology, which shapes the way the groups acts and feels.

Thus the post-modern or 'neo-tribes' are temporary, internally diverse, unstable, and organised to fulfil the desire to be together. For Maffesoli, neo-tribes reflect a populist movement tending toward rediscovering 'mutual aid, conviviality, commensality [and] professional support' (1996:69). They are 'less disposed to master the world, nature and society than collectively to achieve societies founded above all on quality of life' (ibid:62). Thus as Shields tells us
The tribus are more than a residual category of social life. They are the central feature and key social fact of our own experience of everyday living…. they have strong powers of integration and inclusion, of group solidarity. These powers are displayed and actualized in initiatory rituals and stages of membership…the members of the tribus are marked by it, wearing particular types of dress, exhibiting group-specific styles of adornment and espousing the shared values and ideals of the collectivity (Shields Foreword to Maffesoli 1996:ix-xii)
The sections above have moved us from a discussion which started with the notion that identity was somehow an essential part of us, we were part of God’s plan and we were formed in God’s image. Modern Enlightenment ideas separated man from God and just as effectively connected him/her to the new understanding of the economic system. The economic identity played a central part in how a person understood who or what they were. These modern ideas were fixed and immutable. One’s class, gender, race and so on established once and for all our life chances, our histories and our futures.
As the dominant grand narratives such as Marxism failed to provide useful tools for the understanding of cultural life, and were in many ways eclipsed by the critical analysis of feminism (Rojeck and Turner, 2000: 635), analysts turned their attention to questions of marginality, difference and identity. In the next section I discuss the influence of post-modern writers on the thinking concerning identity.
Postmodernism and Identity
It may not be easy to live through this time of loosening structures of belief, where the loyalty of the masses to the existing order can no longer be taken for granted, and where the deferential attitude of individuals to the social relations in which they take part can no longer be guaranteed (Moscovici, 1990:4).
Moscovici (1990) here indicates that at the fin de siecle there is dissatisfaction in regards to identity. Touraine (1984:4) notes further that ‘At the beginning of the 1980’s, there no longer existed a dominant representation of social life’. There has been a recognition by post-modernist thinkers and writers such as these that the Enlightenment rationalising project has created a ‘disenchantment of the world' (Gerth & C. Wright Mills. 1948:51). This disenchantment has, Maffesoli (1996) argues (as we have seen above), led to the development of micro-groups – tribes - as a reaction to the massification of modern society, a fragmenting of society into what Weber calls ‘elective affinity groups’ (Gerth & C. Wright Mills. 1948:62-63). The post-modernist writers are arguing that the dominant representations, the older essentialist, modernist ways of understanding ourselves in terms of the sociological categories of nationality, class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion and age are being challenged. It is a challenge to what Baudrillard calls a ‘profound monotony’, a ‘postulation uniforme’...‘the bliss of the consuming masses (Baudrillard, 1988:11). Lash and Urry (1994) note that this modern rejection of modernity will involve:
…a reflexive creation and invention of the sort of symbol-systems that will give collective solidarity to movements (Lash & Urry, 1994:50).
Dunn (1991) explains further that it is modernising capitalism itself that creates the conditions for such a challenge, that historically marginalised groups come to demand changes in the system, specifically in the form of disruptive claims to status and power (Dunn, 1991:114). Dunn (1994) goes on to explain that within this new epoch in the history of capitalism, that of commodification and consumerism, we will find ‘numerous social and cultural movements challenging modernist dichotomies (hierarchical oppositions) in the name of community, tradition and self-determination' (Dunn, 1991:115)

This theme is taken up by Mestrovic in his book The Balkanization of the West (1994). In warning us that the new century will see a time which is dominated by the break up of societies into ethnicities, religions and metaphorical ethnicity’s, he writes:
If Western Enlightenment narratives are no longer viable because they promote, oppression, ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism and other terrible things [such as boredom and monotony]; and if anti-Enlightenment phenomena such as nationalism and cultural identity as well as cultural relativism are going to grow stronger as these Enlightenment narratives wane; then present-day or future intellectuals will have to make a serious and sobering search for non-modernist bases for social order (Mestrovic, 1994:72).
Consequently, in this challenge to the modernist order and as a reaction to the monotony, domination, anomie and alienation the modern epoch maintains, attention is shifted towards a more reflexive understanding of oneself and one’s social affiliations. It is a move to the edges and the peripheralities, a re-thinking of the margins and the borders, (Hutcheon, 1988:58) a move away from the centralisation with its associated concerns on origin and oneness (Said, 1975; Rajchman, 1985). Postmodernism challenges essentialism and globalisation and turns itself towards an assertion of difference (Friedman, 1994), togetherness or solidarity (Maffesoli, 1996:72), creolization (Hannerz, 1987; 1992) and heterogeneity. The focus of attention becomes the local, the regional, the non-totalizing (Foucault, 1977). As Hutcheon (1988) remarks:
When the center starts to give way to the margins.... totalizing universalization begins to self-deconstruct [into a] flux of contextualized identities...this [is an] assertion of identity through difference and specificity...(p.51).
The unifying centre, the hegemonic source of unified identities, unified values, the modernist State are contested through the ‘valuing of the local and peripheral' (ibid. p.61):
...not New York or London or Toronto, but William Kennedy’s Albany, Graham Swift’s fens country, Robert Kroetsch’s Canadian West (Hutcheon 1988:61)
It is a valuing of the local (Vink, 1993.) and the peripheral (Payton, 1989), a recognition of difference (Harvey et. al, 1986), of the challenge to the hegemonic culture (Burton, 1997), a ‘stepping back into history’ in order to (re)-create an identity.

Modernity changes and destroys places, landscapes and communities (Deacon 1996:99). Inauthenticity swamps the authentic in the form of heritage, managed histories and illusion. Hegemonic culture invades museums and replaces the local with the general, and re-focuses attention away from the peripheries to the centre. Rural experiences and history are tied up into the concepts of 'quaintness' and are commodified into 'heritage'. Centres of industry, once hives of activity, are now romanticised and turned into tourist attractions. An example of this is Morwellham Quay in Cornwall where one can visit 'The Ship' which is 'an authentic inn with none of the false Victoriana' (advert in Okehampton Times April 13. 2000). Modernity is constantly adding to the inauthentic as the 'true origins', and 'roots' of things are overlain by the modern (Deacon 1996:99), but as the local contests the centre, as we recognise difference, challenge hegemony and step back into history, we also search out the authentic, the original and unique facets of our claim to provide for ourselves the roots for which we yearn - to locate ourselves outside the faceless masses and the Baudrillardian monotonous styles of living forced upon us by modernity.

However, Lash and Friedman (1992) question the dynamics of post-modern identity change and suggest that in fact:
postmodernism annuls movement and change…and posits a mediascape, an ‘astral empire of signs’ whose powers of social control over individuals and collectivities is so absolute that no change is possible (Lash and Friedman 1992:1)
Lash and Friedman (1992) see the ‘neo-tribal paradise’ – as a place where spaces of identity are constructed. A place where we can experiment with who we are, a place where how and what we do are unconstrained, and ultimately, as a place that suffocates the temporal dimension and provides us with no future.

Kellner (1992), however, argues rather than there being no change possible as Lash and Friedman suggest, the post-modern mediascape allows for identity to be ‘subject to new determinations and new forces while offering as well new possibilities, styles, models and forms [which] provide new openings to restructure one’s identity’ (Kellner 1992:174). So in a post-modern society it is popular culture which is the driving force of identity change. It is from the sometimes-overbearing wealth of images, scenes, stories and texts from which we can assume models and roles and change them at will, and, depending upon the context, introduce appropriate and inappropriate forms of behaviours into our repertoire, changes to our styles and play with different fashions. Media images, Kellner suggests, provides us with ‘subtle enticements to emulate and identify with certain subject positions while avoiding others’ (Kellner 1992:174).

For example at the end of World War II the media reinforced the value placed on traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity. George Mosse (1996:181) recalls how, for men in Western Europe, 'a consensus emerged that the torn fabric of society must be mended as soon as possible, and as part of this new traditionalism, prosaic, normative masculinity was reaffirmed… in advertisements, film, and literature: clean-cut and fit' (1996:181). Hence, 'typically men are portrayed as active, adventurous, powerful, sexually aggressive, and largely uninvolved in human relationships' (Wood, 1994:235).

At the same time, women were suffering their own identity crisis. Prior to the war, feminists had been articulating the idea of women having their own plans and careers; but soon after 1945, women were made to feel guilty by warnings of the 'dangerous consequences to the home' that had begun to circulate (Millum, 1975:73). Thus the messages circulating in the media would underline that ‘The highest good is keeping house and raising children' (Millum, 1975:74).

The motivation behind this mystique emerged (in part) because of a sense of social crisis, but it was exploited and reinforced (and possibly created) as a result of the 1950s' boom in the economy - particularly in the production of domestic goods, such as washing machines and convenience foods. It was presupposed that women would be purchasing such goods for the household, thus advertising 'was calculated to focus attention on their domestic role, reinforce home values and perpetuate the belief that success as a woman, wife and mother could be purchased for the price of a jar of cold cream, a bottle of cough syrup, or a packet of instant cake-mix' (Cynthia White, cited in Winship, 1980:7).

Post-modern media however, rather than emphasise the essentialist themes of masculinity and femininity focus on 'being different' - individuality is what is in fashion. Discussing the relationship between masculinity and popular culture, Mort notes that 'What's now cool is not the assertion of a fixed masculine identity, but a self-conscious assemblage of style… stressing the plurality of signification' (Mort, 1988:204-205). Thus, we can propose that when individuals borrow from gender-ambivalent fashion/advertising imagery, the emphasis (and degree of acceptance) is on signifying rather than being. Advertising, fashion and consumer culture all incorporate an ideology of commodity fetishism which has led individuals to believe that they can 'define themselves through the messages they transmit to others through the goods and practices that they possess and display' (Warde, 1994:878). As a result, 'appearance replaces essence' and 'artificiality substitutes for the genuine development of self'’ (Giddens, 1991:197). Consequently as Woodward argues:
Representation as a cultural process establishes individual and collective identities, and symbolic systems provide possible answers to the questions: who am I?; what could I be?; who do I want to be?’ (Woodward, 1998:14).
Politics of Difference
The post-modernist ideas about identity considered above tell us that appearance has replaced essence and that identities are based upon representations. Nevertheless the issues around post-modern identity remain fuzzy and this fuzziness simply works to re-enforce the post-modern notion of there being an ‘identity crisis’ in the West. Social change, globalisation, the emphasis on representation, the impact of the mass media, the aestheticization of everyday life (Featherstone, 1992), schizophrenia (Jameson 1983) and the decentering of the subject, are but a few of the concepts bandied about by various theorists and writers as the reason for such an identity crisis.

Social movement theory also adds to the fuzziness of the debate as both essentialist and non-essentialist arguments are used to further the debate on identity politics. Also adding to the fuzziness is the plethora of ideas about identity and groups. Are the new social movements similar to Schmalenbach’s Bund or to Mafessoli’s tribes? Or are they collective identity formations (Seidman 1993, Epstein 1994) where:
The shared oppression, the movements have forcefully claimed, is the denial of the freedoms and the opportunities to actualise the self. In this ethnic/essentialist politic, clear categories of collective identity are necessary for resistance and political gain. (Gamson 1995:391)

A deeper concern for one’s identity and how it is produced and contested is central to the development of the identity within the new social movements. It is a concern that places identity at the centre of political struggle. The post-war era has seen a plethora of ‘new’ social movements from the civil rights movements in the United States through the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 70s, anti-colonial nationalistic movements in the Third World, the gay movement and new age travellers, to name a few. The key factor in all of these movements is the declaration and the affirmation of what are deemed to be excluded identities.

This focus on ‘difference’ may well, we could argue, work now more or less as the classic notion of ‘identity’ did before. By this I mean that the notion of ‘difference’ contains within it claims for ‘authenticity’ and thus subsumes the argument in essentialist terms as did the ‘classic’ notions of identity such as class, race and so on. It is the notion that persons in similar social groups who have similar life experiences will act together on the basis of their common attributes, rather than on rational interest or learned values. Daly (1978) for example underlines the essentialism of the women’s movement where the claims made by women involved in the movement emphasise the ‘uniqueness’ of their biology which they claimed made them more caring and peaceful than men, where even appeals to history are defended by the claim that ‘herstory’ is of a different category to ‘history’. (Jeffreys 1985). Gay theory also challenges the notion that homosexuality is abnormal or immoral through the use of essentialist claims that a gay identity is a fact simply because it is biologically determined rather than a life style choice.

Notwithstanding such essentialist claims, new social movement theory is not immune from the challenge of fuzziness. For example, some of the new social movements, including the women’s movement, use non-essentialist categories to explain their position. Weeks (1994) writes about the ‘fluidity’ of identities composed of different components that react to and are constructed/reconstructed by the prevailing cultural conditions. Thornton (1995:167) notes that youth subcultures appropriate various aspects of popular political rhetoric. In the same way as they sample music it can be suggested that these youth subcultures sample the rhetoric of rights, freedom, equality and unity so far as it suits them to make their cultures and their identities more meaningful.

Thus, the possibilities for identity are endless as the struggle to articulate any particular identity is bound up in the complex dichotomy of biological categories and essentialism, the construction of opposites and difference and the sampling of cultures, lifestyles and political rhetoric. As Hetherington notes:
New social movements, in all their overlapping and networked diversity, have a multiplicity of concerns with issues associated with the politics of identity. These can take the form of challenging social identities and the ways that they are used as labels to denote something, for example, woman, Black, ethnic, disabled and so on: more the ways that what is positively connotated by those terms is often ignored by society; or they can challenge new and unwelcome connotations that are thought to exist. (Hetherington, 1998:38)

The construction of opposites and differences can only be organised through what Durkheim would have called the collective consciousness, i.e. ‘only universally shared, actively practised, vivid symbols could constrain individual passions and impose a social reality on individual consciousness’ (Swidler 1995: 32). Melucci (1995:44-45) considers how this collective consciousness is involved in the creation of a collective identity. He presents us with three points. The first is that a collective identity is created around rituals, practices, cultural artefacts and so on which encourage the individual to invest some of themselves in the group. Once the investment is made the individual then reaps a reward. This reward may simply be the emotional notion of ‘belonging’ or may well be the award of status within the group.

The second point that Melucci makes is that collective identity is a process. The collective identity is a network of relationships, communications, interactions and negotiations. These activities help to form the organisation within the group and provide models of leadership. Thirdly, Melucci suggests that there is a degree of emotional investment to the group which allows for the creation of a common purpose – a unity of action. Melucci (1995:45) tells us that ‘passions and feelings, love and hate, faith and fear are all part of a body acting collectively’

The collective identity of a new social movement creates the conditions that ensure the continuity of the group over time. However, this does raise the question, how ‘new’ are ‘new social movements’? We have already noted Schmalenbach's concept of the Bund and mentioned Durkheim’s notion of the collective consciousness. It is clear that identities were formed within early social movements such as the working class movement (see Calhoun 1995). Women were active in gender politics well before the 1960s, for example the Suffragette Movement, and we may well want to argue that movements such as the Levellers in the 17th century created an identity which was concerned with difference and opposites. It would seem, however, that the 'old’ social movements might be defined by their reference to the economic conditions of life and their allegiances to traditional political forces, whereas the ‘new’ social movement places the emphasis on cultural life and the symbolic nature of action.

What is clear is that the identity of the individual/group within any social movement, be it ‘old’ or ‘new’, is constructed from identity-based narratives, and that those narratives will vary within a common historical frame. This understanding is crucial to any theory of social movement formation. However, the debate about social movement theory is wide with many different strands. Some writers question the newness of new social movements (Tarrow, 1994; Koopmans, 1995), others as noted above are emphasising the role of identity in previous, older movements (Calhoun, 1993). Some writers stress the persistent role of material issues and concerns in the contemporary ‘new’ movements (Bartholomew and Mayer, 1992; Martin, 1998), while others are claiming the persistent relevance of class (Heath et al., 1991). Jordan and Maloney, (1997) are conversely even denying any relevance whatsoever to new politics and new social movements theories.

Hetherington (1998) also recognises that the term ‘new social movement’ is a problematic one (Hetherington, 1998:29) but he is more concerned with the ‘new configurations…around issues of identity and the politics of identity’ (Hetherington, 1998:30) than with the novelty of the concept. He goes on to suggest that commentators should focus on the ‘newness of the social conjuncture that makes these questions of identity significant’ (Hetherington, 1998:31). Thus the new theories of political identity found within new social movement theory stress ‘expressive goals of self-realization’ (Pizzorno 1978, 1985) while they attempt to positively restore previously devalued differences (Chodorow 1978, Elshtain 1981). The focus of attention has shifted from the universal to the particularistic – from the social agent to the concrete person (Somers and Gibson 1994).
Cornish Identity
As we have seen above there is an ever growing and wide academic debate about the nature of identity. The question of identity in Britain has recently, with the devolution of Wales and Scotland, the continuing problems in Northern Ireland and the loss of some sovereignty to the European Union, been to the fore. Popular commentators such as Paxman (1999) and Marr (2000) and others are raising questions of the nature of Englishness. Indeed the question of national identity seems to vex the nation so much that the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Tony Blair, felt the need to make a speech about Britishness (28 March 2000). For Mr. Blair, Britishness encapsulated a shared set of fundamental values: fair play, creativity, tolerance and an outward looking approach to the world. Cornish identity however, plays little part in these discussions.

There has been little academic work on the subject of Cornish identity per se and of the work that has been carried out the greater part is the work of Cornishmen and women. The early modern writers such as Coate, A.L. Rowse and A. Quiller-Couch were in the main antiquarians and historians. It was their aim to involve themselves with the revival of the Cornish language and to provide a distinctive history that would add credibility to their claims to be one of the Celtic Nations and maintain a sense of continuity and difference from their English neighbours.

However, the main crux of the romantic historian’s argument concerning the Cornish identity was that despite the ‘useful’ context of a distinct and separate history, the Cornish were indeed a race apart. And it was a race that had at its roots a direct connection with the Celtic peoples so rudely evicted from England by Athelstan. These strong claims linking the Cornish with the romantic notions of Celticism allowed these revivalists to ‘take refuge from the ugly realities of modern Cornwall by returning to a past when Cornwall was ‘purely Cornish’ (Payton and Deacon 1993).

Thus, a Cornish identity is explicated in terms of its essentialist nature. Coate, in her book on the Civil War in Cornwall, tells us about the 'passionate attachment of the Cornish to their own county and their own race' (Coate, 1963:351)(my emphasis). Rowse tells us that in Tudor Cornwall, ‘the Cornish have a common history…like Brittany, or Wales or Ireland, reaching back beyond the Normans and Saxons, beyond even Rome’ (Rowse 1943:20). These memories are, according to Rowse (1941) carried in the legends of the race. (my emphasis). This somewhat romanticised essentialist position is emphasised even more in a book written by A.L.Rowse in conjunction with John Betjamin (1974) who is, according to Rowse, a ‘Cornishman by adoption’. In this co-written book (Victorian and Edwardian Cornwall from Old Photographs) Rowse (1974) tells us how Cornwall is the ‘home of the silent vanished races’. The people are from ‘Dark Mediterranean Stock’ and the Cornish themselves are a Celtic Race who have a ‘temperament in which the factor of heredity is so much stronger than anything’.

This focus upon Cornish culture, Cornish language and Cornish history was at the forefront of a Cornish revival. This Cornish revival, in tandem with the Celtic revival (which had its genesis in Ireland earlier than the 1920s), saw the development of Cornish cultural nationalism in the 1920s. Deacon (1993) tells us this developing identity was also the impetus behind the small Cornish nationalist political movement which arose in the 1950s (for example Mebyon Kernow, the nationalist party, is staunchly Celtic). However when talking about this period, Deacon (1993) accepts the essentialist argument concerning Cornish Identity and questions academic work which denies the existence of an ethnic identity in Cornwall (See Havinden, Queniart and Stanyer 1991).

Phillip Payton’s (1992) definitive work on modern Cornwall, on which this thesis draws strongly, also succumbs to essentialist reductionism in his claims that a Cornish identity is tied up in a Celtic History. In a paper in which he attempts to locate Cornish identity in ‘notions of territory [which] have been fundamental to expressions of Cornishness’ (Payton, 1992:252), he talks about the perceptions of ‘Celtic descent’ as being one of the ‘notable elements of contemporary Cornish identity’ (ibid:224).

In his ‘coffee table’ treatise entitled ‘Cornwall’ (Payton 1996) there is an inherent Celtic narrative which is exhibited from the font used for its title to the photos, text and images within. In this glossy approach to Cornwall Payton asserts from the off that ‘Cornwall is a far-flung half-forgotten remnant of the Celtic World’, and that ‘the Cornish are the last of an ancient race’ (Payton 1996:2). Indeed in his search for authenticity he claims strongly that even ‘The stones of Cornwall are old’. [his emphasis]. Later in this constructivist history of Cornwall he re-emphasises the claim for authenticity telling us that:
The status of these ancient people as not only prehistoric but also pre-civilisation has been confirmed, or at least emphasised, by the Celtic revival in Cornwall (Payton 1996:26)
This quote does, however, seem to point to some uneasiness about the use of the category ‘Celtic’ and Payton is at pains to provide a detailed account of the discussions concerning the usefulness of the term ‘Celt’ for some historians and archaeologists. But despite this uneasiness he is happy to assert that ‘Cornwall, its people and their Civilisation are essentially Celtic’ (Payton 1996:26). Indeed in a later chapter entitled ‘Mystery of the Celts’ he accepts that the Celts existed and that ‘the first wave of Celtic cultural and economic importance happened in the 6th Century’ (Payton 1996:50) from central Europe. He goes on to say:
The Celtic influence in Cornwall has been of enduring significance, most notably in the Cornish language which developed eventually from the Cornish Dialect spoken in the peninsula and has given us the vast majority of Cornish placenames, many surnames and a vernacular which survived until modern times (Payton 1996:50)
Further, in a chapter entitled Paralysis and Revival: the reconstruction of Celtic-Catholic Cornwall 1890-1945, (in Westland 1997) he insists that where once a Cornish identity was based upon industrial prowess (again an essentialist assumption) it had been transformed by the Celtic-Catholic revival to be Celtic and it was an identity which represented 'the heritage of Ancient Britons' (Westland 1997:37). In a paper written with Thornton (Payton and Thornton, 1995) they argue:
The Cornish-Celtic revival…reach [ed] out across the debris of the industrial era to a time when Cornwall was more ‘purely Cornish’…its origins shrouded in the mysteries of Arthur and the Saints. (p.85)
Other writers have sought to authenticate the more romantic notions of Celticism with ‘hard science’ in the form of genetic studies. For example Harvey et al (1986) carried out genetic work amongst the Cornish but their results were inconclusive (I expand upon this study in the Methodology chapter). Other work by Smith (cited in Payton 1993) concluded that the Cornish genetic signatures were to be found between the ‘broad spread of other Celtic populations and the Anglo Saxons’ (Payton 1993:113).

An article by Dick Cole (1997) (Cornwall Archaeological Unit) refutes the efficacy of using such genetic investigations as a way of understanding identities in the present, let alone identities in the past. He argues that our modern identities are formed as ‘a result of more complex and complicated factors such as assimilation, acculturation and accommodation’ (Cole, 1997:28) and any genetic study must accept this reality. In this way Cole aligns himself with writers such as Chapman (1992) and James (1999) who both question the validity of the existence of the modern understanding and usage of the terms Celt and Celtic. Indeed, Chapman suggests that a modern identification as a ‘Celt’ is created through opposition to the ‘other’, and the ‘other’ may be the establishment, England, France, modernity, pollution or Christianity.

Others, however, are more convinced that the Cornish do have a link with a Celtic past that informs and shapes their identity. Amy Hale (1997) is concerned with the study of the Celtic revival in Cornwall. She is happy to accept that there is a ‘phenomenon of contemporary Celtic identities’ (Hale, 1997:85) in Cornwall. In her conclusion she wants us to be clear that ‘Cornwall and the Cornish have, historically, participated in these Celtic discourses…[and that] Celtic expressions in Cornwall are meaningful, multi-vocalic and constantly undergoing change. (Hale, 1997:97) She argues that these Celtic discourses will impact upon those individuals who self-identify with a Celtic ethnicity, or perhaps with other forms of perceived Celtic inheritance, such as spirituality. Thus, for all Hale’s talk of culture, tradition, re-invention, the impact of the mass media and the historical context, she, like the others before her, succumbs to the essentialist argument. She also attacks, in Cornish Studies 4 (1996), Chapman’s (1992) book The Celts: the Construction of a Myth. The very title of the book review 'Foot in the Mouth or Foot in the Door? Evaluating Chapman's the Celts' indicates her irritation with Chapman's thesis. While she does allow that Chapman's studies offers new challenges for those in the field of Celtic Studies she tells us that what Chapman calls a 'dispassionate view of the facts.... reads like a frighteningly Anglophilic revisionist fantasy' (Hale, 1996:167).

Alan Kent (1996), although attempting to locate a Cornish identity within literary texts, such as Shakespeare’s Henry V, the 1991 film Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, and an analysis of contemporary portrayals of Cornishness, such as in The Skipper and the detective series Wycliffe, still assumes that a Cornish identity is synonymous with a Celtic ident
ity and reduces Cornish identity to an essentialist identification of ‘traits’. His premise is that even Shakespeare was aware of the notion of ‘difference’ which the Cornish exhibited. He argues that the play Henry V ‘dramatised the might and mercy of the English Nation State’ (Kent, 1996:10) and it illuminates the ‘discord between England and her Celtic nations’ (Kent, 1996:11). Although it is left unsaid, it seems that Kent is alluding to a similar situation existing in contemporary Cornwall, his paper concluding with the almost revolutionary claim for the Cornish intellectuals to assume cultural leadership of the people.

Work by Seward (1997), entitled Cornish Rugby and Cultural Identity: A Socio-Historical Perspective, discusses to what extent sport in the form of Cornish rugby ‘influenced (or, indeed, became a defining construct of) the contemporary Cornish identity’? (Seward, 1997:164). He is arguing that as in the Welsh game there are particular nuances that can be recognised and that similar work needs to be carried out to identify similar Cornish nuances. He tells us that Cornwall compares to ‘the other Celtic nations’ (Seward, 1997:164). Nevertheless, he does allow that the Cornish rugby team fulfils an important symbolic role as a focus for Cornish sentiment. He is right to note that sport does reflect the reality of community life (Metcalfe 1996) and it is in Cornwall in particular where local rivalries have always been a boisterous and often violent part of life (see Hamilton Jenkins, 1972). Seward is also right, in my view, to suggest that sport and national identities have become intrinsically linked. We only have to note the increased use of the cross of St. George at many national sporting events in Britain or St Piran’s flag at Cornish events.

The very fact that there seem to be a number of different ways to understand a Cornish identity lends strength to the argument that a Cornish identity is a perfect example of fragmentation. This is at once supported by further evidence in magazines that are directed at the world-wide community of Cornish people. In a magazine called ‘Cornish Worldwide’ (1994), Kent is able to talk about the ‘mythical’ or ‘fantastical’ elements of a Cornish identity. In an earlier issue of the same magazine, 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. It would seem at a glance that a Cornish identity can be all things to all men and women.

Academic work on Cornwall and the claim for an ethnic identity is much stronger than the somewhat fragmented and over romanticised work of some of the writers above. McArthur for example, in her (1988) MSc dissertation at the University of Bristol, ‘The Cornish: a Case Study in Ethnicity’ makes the claim that the Cornish, by dint of their self-awareness and their location within a defined territory, are an ethnic group. McArthur however, does suggest that her respondents (18 in total) had strong notions of kinship and common origins and there was knowledge of a Celtic past, although this was not well articulated by all the respondents. Thus, McArthur’s Cornish identity has still not shed its essentialist thrust that this link to an actual or invented Celtic past gives to such explanations.

The question of what actually constitutes an ethnicity or ethnic groups is one that has vexed writers for the past 80 years. Max Weber gave us an early and subsequently influential definition of ethnicity (or as Weber calls them ‘anthropological types’) which, we will find is still as valid today as it was in 1922 when Weber published Economy and Society. If we accept Weber’s premise that such groups or types are based on the shared belief of common descent, then we are talking about an essentialist construction, that of race, as the writers above have done. As Weber tells us:
Race creates a ‘group’ only when it is subjectively perceived as a common trait: this happens only when a neighbourhood or the mere proximity of racially different persons is the basis of joint (mostly political) action, or conversely, when some common experiences of members of the same race are linked to some antagonism against members of an obviously different group. (Weber, 1978:385)
For Weber however, this belief in common ancestry is the consequence of collective action rather than the cause. Belonging is then the direct consequence of practical action on behalf of the group. It is the pursuit of collective interests that encourages a group to identify themselves as a distinct and separate ethnic group. This is clearly what the historical and antiquarian writers were alluding to in their use of the term ‘race’ and is clearly to be found in the subtext of McArthur’s position.

Ivey and Payton (1994) attempt to define the model of Cornish identity by presenting a ‘Cornish Identity Theory’. In this approach Ivey and Payton wish to consider ‘alternative perspectives on the Cornish identity’. While they broadly seem to accept culturally defined ethnic explanations, they wish to add to the broad definitions which emphasise shared values, language, history and so on, the notion that:
Ethnic identity is an acquired sense of oneself and/or one’s group as cultural beings, both emotionally and cognitively’ [my emphasis](Ivey and Payton, 1994:121)
They expand upon this saying that ethnic identity development:
…refers to the process of increasing individual and group understanding of previously unconscious forces (processes)[my emphasis] (Ivey and Payton, 1994:121)

The whole of the identity theory presented by Ivey and Payton (1994) is premised through with psychological reductionism. This is, in itself, in contrast to one of the writers they cite (Phinney, 1990 in Ivey and Payton, 1994:123) who tells them that ethnic identity is ‘a dynamic product that is achieved rather than simply given’: advice they chose to ignore. In their conclusion they baldly tell us that ‘…the attendant areas of counselling and psychotherapy should be used as an empowering or “liberating process”’ (Ivey and Payton, 1994:127). This is as if Cornishness is some sort of hidden memory that needs to be released by Freudian methods, or some sort of psychosis that needs to be treated. This is clearly essentialism at its most rife and offers nothing, I argue, to our understanding of Cornishness and the way in which Cornish identity is maintained.

For Deacon (1993), who is more open to the varied cultural explanations of ethnicity, one of the factors that interest him is the strong sense of association that the Cornish have to the geographical place of Cornwall. Using a model developed by a geographer (Paasi, 1986) to explain regional identities, Deacon (1993:202) highlights the importance of ‘ideas of community’ and ‘ideas of history’ to create a Cornish consciousness or ethnicity. Deacon, however, in this later work, is much more aware and careful when he makes his claims for a Cornish identity. He uses Anthony Smith’s (1981,1988) descriptions of an ethnic group as his starting point. Smith tells us than an ethnic community may be defined as a named human population, possessing a myth of common descent, common historical memories, elements of shared culture, an association with a particular territory, a sense of solidarity and one or more distinct characteristics and some sense of collective solidarity. Using these criteria Deacon comes to the conclusion that the Cornish ‘can be said to comprise a self-aware ethnic group with a sense of shared roots, common history and some notion of a distinct culture’ (Deacon, 1993:204). Deacon, while specifically shying away from the essentialist notions tied up in the claims for a Celtic heredity, simply reinforces them with his emphasis on roots, distinct culture and common history rather than looking to the more pragmatic signs of identity. However, Deacon is aware of the academic debates around identities and at times is able to note the nature of fragmentation and accommodation that post-modern identities exhibit. For example, writing with Payton (1993) Deacon is able to tell us (despite Payton's essentialist and Celtic leanings) that:
The sense of belonging to an imagined Cornish community now rests upon a wider set of symbols than before; a changing repertoire which includes co-opted elements from other cultures and newly re-invented 'traditions'. (Deacon and Payton 1993: 201)

However, when writing with others Deacon is not so certain of his ground. He allows himself to be party to statements that start to reflect the earlier essentialist explanations provided by the writers named above. For example, in a paper entitled ‘empowering Cornwall: the best government for the region and its communities’ (Deacon, Wills and Perry, 1994) the writers feel confident enough in an appendix entitled ‘Cornwall’s history and its identity’ to state ‘A separate non-English language…and a sense of non-Englishness’ underpinned the question of identity. It is this type of anti-English antagonism that Weber suggests allows a group to identify themselves as a different and distinct race.

Writing elsewhere about the Cornish language, Deacon (1996) removes himself from the essentialism of his collaborative writing. In his 1996 work he is able to consider how some aspects of the Cornish identity have moved beyond the certainties of classic modernity to uncertainty where ‘difference and disorder ‘ challenge the ways in which the world is understood. (Deacon 1996:101). For Deacon this aspect of the Cornish identity is part of the frantic and meaningless quest for ‘authenticity’. However, while Deacon attacks in this article the ‘grand narratives’ of the Cornish revival used by historians such as Nance to underpin their vision of a viable and living Cornish language, he is busy in other articles (1998) reinforcing ‘grand narratives’ of Cornish history wherein he makes the claim for a different and distinct historical and cultural experience.

One explanation for Deacon’s apparent inability to remove himself from the essentialisms which were used unquestioningly by other less aware writers is his role as a ‘cultural entrepreneur’. Deacon is at the centre of those who study and write about the Cornish situation. He is Cornish, a Bard of the Gorsedd and a Cornish speaker. Cornish is spoken at home and his daughter is being brought up as a Cornish speaker. He runs courses on Cornish history, such as an MA in Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter (See http://www.ex.ac.uk/admin/extrel/pgp/ics.htm) and is involved in Cornish/Celtic culture at various levels. Thus, it would be extremely difficult for Deacon to pursue a course of thinking which would lead, as he suggests when writing about the Cornish language, to a position where a Cornish identity is susceptible to an ‘anything goes’ approach. It turns out then that Deacon, despite his awareness of how an identity is often ‘any symbol in a storm’ (1993:76-77) is just as concerned about ‘authenticity’ as are those who are active in the language movement whom he seems to want to castigate.

I have attempted in this chapter both to show that identity construction, far from being the essentialist problem posited by the philosophers and positivist social scientists, is much more of a precarious activity. Individuals are inhabitants of a diversity of communities and social realities and that their identity will be constructed by a variety of discourses (Mouffe, 1988:35). This, of course, then becomes a problem of owning knowledge. For as Schutz tells us:
Knowledge is languaged and articulated according to socially and biographically variable schemata of relevance (Schutz, 1970).
The knowledge held by us that informs and shapes our identity, the identity consciousness, can either be stable and solid or it can be in a state of flux. Both Feyarabend (1988:161) and Gramsci (1971) seem to agree on this. We also seem to have 'squared the circle' in realising Augustine's principle that identity is reflexively created. However, what modern thought has added to Augustine's essentialist position is the importance of the social context. Somers and Gibson (1994) argued that the focus of attention had moved from the ‘particularistic’, where the social agent had an identity that was proscriptive and rule bound to the ‘universalistic’, where the social agent had now somehow transformed themselves into the concrete person. What this chapter has shown is how the social agent, made in the shape of God, whose identity is exemplified by Weber’s ethically bound Protestant has transformed into the so-called ‘real’ or concrete person. This post-modern individual, now, it seems, has the agency to throw off the old defining structures and is able to negotiate his/her way through the maze of identity narratives picking and choosing who he/she wants to be at will.

But as Baudrillard asks, how real is the real? In short, the image of free and infinitely increasing identity choices does nothing more than deter the realisation that the Enlightenment pursuit of ‘knowledge’ has imploded. Identity information describes movies on demand, electronic malls, and expanding numbers of television channels; the media is accelerating in a ‘void’ of the banal (Transparency 3). Increasing sophistication in technology produces more convincing simulations of identity and more convincing strategies of deterrence, difference and defence. The fascination of the depthless screen - ‘the superficial abyss’ - keeps us firmly rooted. With a wealth of information, we have no time to realise that we have nothing to learn.

We are barraged by a constant flow of images via mass media. Mass communication becomes part of everyday life and we are treated to an endless bombardment of signs that we accept, not as being real, but as Baudrillard would argue, as supplanting the real. The real loses its meaning, and so too does who we are; what we believe about ourselves is reduced to simulacra. Without any grounding in the real, and having no way to prove the real, our knowledge of the past is confined to whatever symbols we associate with it when we attempt to portray it. For example, ‘The 60s,’ as an historical entity, is not anything real, but merely the incorporation of symbols that define the way we think about that time, whether they be images of the Beatles, psychedelic images, Kennedy, the Pill, Isle of Wight Festivals, Pop Art, or Flower Power. There is no history, only a distorted nostalgia, distorted because it relies only on the symbols, icons, and indexes that we have access to at any given moment.

The question, however, is how do we make sense of this barrage of information and not lose our way within the maze of images and signs? My contention is that ‘leadership’ is provided by a group of culturally aware individuals that I call ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. These ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ are skilled practitioners of the cultural narratives and discourses that surround identity work. They work with entrepreneurial skill and zeal to provide the banal evidence that underpins the authenticity claims of a particular group. In Chapter 3 I will be showing how the identity work carried out by these cultural entrepreneurs represent a continuation of the tradition of social enlightenment first developed by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment.

Chapter 2. Methodology

2005-11-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Chapter 3: Intellectuals, interpreters and cultural entrepreneurs

2005-11-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

Chapter Three
Intellectuals, interpreters and cultural entrepreneurs
In this chapter I will be developing the concept of the ‘cultural entrepreneur’. I do this by looking at how, since the 18th century, prominent thinkers have directed the social, economic and political life of modern society. However, as Bauman shows us, there has been a critical change in the way these thinkers, the intellectuals, have influenced social life. I show below how the influence of the intellectual has changed from legislators to interpreters (Bauman, 1987). Further by investigating work by Gramsci on ‘organic intellectuals’ and Becker on ‘moral entrepreneurs’, I show how intellectuals have been influential in the contemporary debate around identity; how it is they inform the ‘discourse community’ and thus influence the norms, values and identity of such communities. I then provide a discussion concerning the development of the theoretical concept that is central to this thesis, the ‘cultural entrepreneur’. First I argue that it is the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ role to present alternative narratives and to create new discourses which influence the identity of a particular group. I show how it is the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ role to work with both ideas and objects that help to flag identity on a day to day basis. These ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ imbibe these markers of identity with an authenticity because they have claimed the cultural and intellectual right to know better than any other. I then demonstrate the work of such ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ in the context of both the Irish and Cornish case.

Intellectuals and Interpreters.
With the rise of modern societies, one might argue that the most celebrated and influential intellectuals (although the modern term was not popularly coined until the Dreyfus Affair in France circa. 1894), were those of the Enlightenment and the 18th century revolutions. Figures such as Thomas Payne, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, Descartes, Montesguieu, Hume, Locke and the rest of the philosophes who sought to implement the principles of social justice. Few philosophes however, advocated revolution and the reason is fairly clear. No philosophe advocated the violent overthrow of the existing order of things because violence was contrary to human reason. But because the philosophes of the Enlightenment attacked the established order together with authority of any kind, their ideas helped to produce what can only be called a revolutionary mentality.
18th century philosophy taught the Frenchman to find his condition wretched, unjust and illogical and made him disinclined to the patient resignation to his troubles that had long characterized his ancestors . . . The propaganda of the philosophes perhaps more than any other factor accounted for the fulfillment of the preliminary condition of the French Revolution, namely discontent with the existing state of things. (Peyre, 1943:73)
Burke, however, was more than critical of the precepts of the philosophes and of the revolutionaries who used these ideas to create what he saw as anarchy:
France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified the dark suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Margaret Thatcher was somewhat clearer than Burke when she argued that the French Revolution was ‘a Utopian attempt to overthrow a traditional order…in the name of abstract ideas, formulated by vain intellectuals’. (Thatcher 1993)

For Jennings and Kemp-Welch (1997:7), the Dreyfus affair saw intellectuals and writers such as Zola, Proust, Gide and Anatole France intervening in the public sphere of politics to protest at the injustices done to Captain Dreyfus. Jennings and Kemp-Welch underline that it is simply not the protest against social injustice which defines the definition of the intellectual, but the action of intervening in politics.

In Russia (pre-revolution) the term ‘intelligentsia’ had never, according to (Nahirny, 1983:5) been used as a term to describe creative scholars, scientists and artists but to ‘those educated and half-educated persons who carried the torch of ideological enlightenment’ (Nahirny, 1983:5). This notion of the intelligentsia concerns itself with persons or groups of people who were concerned with the definition of attitudes and ideological preconceptions, or in short, the creation of cultural values.

This notion of ‘cultural values’ encompasses a myriad of concepts such as ‘truth, world view, consciousness and spontaneity’ (Nahirny, 1983:6) but above all Nahirny suggests it is the intelligentsia’s relationship with narod or the populist debate which is the defining factor. Central to this debate then was the commitment by the intelligentsia to the ‘system of truth’. By this the intellectual could abide by a body of ideas that encompassed moral standards and action oriented ideals and beliefs which could provide:
1. a ‘guiding thread’ in the analysis of the surrounding world
2. a ‘guiding thread’ in practical activity and
3. a creed capable of eliciting ‘religious fervour’ (Nahirny, 1983:.9.)
Nahirny tells us that the whole of cultured society was infested with intellectuals to the degree that they were branded ‘spiders’ and ‘savages with high culture’ in popular literature and that they controlled the capital: ‘they form for the most part the public opinion; they preside over societal institutions and constituent assemblies; they control most of the press’ (Nahirny, 1983:8).

However, let’s be clear that the intellectual was not so altruistic in his/her actions that this was done for the good of society at large. As one author puts it:
It is not enough for him (the intelligent) to have a political program, a social theory; he must find in this program and this theory a place for himself, his personality, his sentiments, his conscience. He must understand how his personality is linked to things generally, to society, to the universe. (Tikhomirov, L.A. cited in Nahirny, 1983:9)

It was thus their job to challenge the established order, criticise convention and lay the ground for ‘enlightened action’ ( Nahirny, 1983:9) – they were the fighters of truth and justice! (Lavrov cited in Nahirny, 1983:10). Thus the intellectual’s role, as Gramsci underlines later, is to uncover and contest, to challenge and defeat the silence and normalised quiet of unseen power.
It was Sartre who placed the intellectual within the domain of the public, denouncing oppression and fighting for justice, human rights and other values. It was their job to bear witness, analyse, expose and criticise a wide range of social evils. It is within this sphere of activity that Bauman (1987) suggests that the intellectual has ceased to be a legislator and has become an interpreter. He notes:
There are many signs that the traditional role (performed or aspired to), portrayed by the metaphor of “legislators”, is being gradually replaced by the role best captured by the metaphor of “interpreters”. (Bauman 1987:125).

Bauman goes on to note however, that the intellectuals while being predominantly interpreters, also do still have the dual role of legislators, that is they are called upon to adjudicate or arbitrate in areas of controversy. He tells us:
Inside the community philosophers have the right and the duty, to spell out the rules which decide who are the rational discussants and who are not; their role is to assess the justification and objectivity of views and to supply the criteria for criticism which will be binding because of those criteria.’ (Bauman 1987:145)

What Bauman is suggesting is that there has been a shift from the modern intellectual as a legislator of universal values who legitimised the new modern social order to post-modern intellectuals as interpreters. What Bauman is suggesting intrinsically is that there has been a depolitisation of the role of the intellectual in social life.
Intellectuals as Legislators
Bauman tells us that the modern role of ‘legislator’ consisted of making authoritative statements which arbitrate in controversies of opinions and select those opinions which, having been selected, become correct and binding. So, for example, the legislator role of the ‘New’ ‘Modern’ intellectual of the Enlightenment gave us the tenets of class oppression, the doctrines of racism, and the forms of sexism. The intellectual assigned the individual a social role and a function that shaped the way they lived, worked and died.

Social order had to be maintained and from the ashes of the ancient regime a new modern society had to be formed. This was to be done through the centralised power of the state with the help of the intellectual - the ‘professional specialising in modifying human behaviour’ (Bauman 1987:75). However, it was not the role of the intellectual to pass on his powers of enlightenment to the people – to the masses, enlightenment was for ‘the monarch, the despot, the legislator’ (Bauman 1987:103).

Indeed, as Bauman underlines, les philosophes were no friends of the people, indeed Margaret Thatcher may have hit the nail on the head when she described them as ‘vain intellectuals’. The lower classes were, in their eyes, ignorant and stupid, lowly beasts, scatter-brained impetuous and troublemakers. (Bauman 1987:78). The role of the intellectual in this case was to enlighten the state and to disseminate the new rational ideas, not to champion the common people.

Through rational and adequate ideas, it was believed that the rational organisation of society could be achieved. Once this was successful everybody would know their place and would consequently be satisfied with their lot, whether they were at the top of the heap or at the bottom. Although social roles would be diversified, wealth and power would still be hierarchically structured. Class divisions would be imposed and perpetuated for the benefit, of course, of society.

Thus as de Certeau (1984:179) shows the intellectuals had at their disposal all of the institutions of control - Althusser’s ideological apparatuses – the administrative system, the police, the educational system, the health services and so on. The conditions of production, the structures of society, the theory of the state, the role of individual, and the definitions and functions of the state apparatus, ideology, education, were all in the hands of the intellectual.

The consequence of this for identity is that identities become fixed, they become part of the state function. One has to have a civic identity in order to function within that society. So we have National Insurance Numbers, birth certificates, passports and driving licences which define who we are and what we do. From the state’s point of view, these documents define our civic identity. Once defined it becomes virtually impossible to (legally) change the civic identity. For example, two British transsexuals lost their battle to be legally recognised as women when the European Court of Human Rights ruled they had not been treated unfairly. The Strasbourg court said the British Government's refusal to provide the two with birth certificates acknowledging their new gender was not a breach of their human rights. (The Scotsman 31 July 1988) This was the fourth attempt that British born trans-people have made in the last fifteen years to change their legal identity. On each previous occasion Mark Rees (1987), Caroline Cossey (1991) and Dr Stephen Whittle (1997) failed to persuade the court of their case.

The social function of such activity by these legislating intellectuals is that social identity becomes fixed also. Because of the hierarchical and rational organising of society, class identities, gender identities and notions of racial or ethnic identities, are concreted into the psyche of the people. The power of the rational argument purveyed by the intellectual allows that this is the way society is structured and shall always be so. So identity is effectively both legislated for and ideologically bound within the hearts and minds of the people – ‘the mindless mob’. Thus, as Althusser (1971) suggests, society ‘forges’ its individuals according to predetermined cells, spaces or functions created in it by the existing relations of production, and does this in the process itself of attributing an identity to individuals.

Intellectuals as interpreters.
However, as modern society changed, the role of the intellectual changed also, according to Bauman (1987). From the Enlightenment authority who knew how to structure and order the world through the auspices of rationality and rational thinking, the intellectual now offers instead a dispassionate account of how identity, tradition and nation are constructed. The intellectuals are now interpreters of social meanings rather than legislators of universal values.

This suggests that there has been a general depoliticalisation of the role of intellectuals in social life. Bauman (1987) suggests that because of a ‘bureaucratic displacement of the educated expert’ (Bauman, 1987:123) the intellectuals no longer fulfil the functions and privileges that they once held. Bauman also points to the failure of modern society to match the scientifically based model of social organisation they once posited. He tells us:
…none of the patterns so far produced inside of the modern world is likely ever to respond to the expectations born of intellectual practice (Bauman 1987:123).
Consequently, they have lost their place as promoters of the attitudes, values and beliefs of the state and society. The new task facing the intellectual now, Bauman suggests, is that when faced with a plurality of possibilities within the post-modern context the intellectual can and will provide and ‘read’ meanings - whether they are textual, visual or hyper.

One of the consequences of the rise of the intellectual as interpreter is their involvement in the rise of identity politics. It can be argued that notions surrounding the fragmentation of identity thesis may be firmly laid at the feet of these intellectuals who attempt to interpret rather than legislate. Wallerstein (see Intellectuals in an Age of Transition at http://fbc.binghampton.edu/iwguatpews.htm. no date) tells us that the impact of the legislative intellectual upon identity was to reify a whole series of binary distinctions which impacted upon a person’s identity and which, he suggests, gave them a ‘political importance to a degree unknown before’ (ibid:7). Thus, the individual was, or could be categorised as bourgeois/proletarian; middle-class/working-class; man/woman; black/white; breadwinner/housewife; normal/abnormal; civilised/uncivilised and so on (ibid:7).

These distinctions were built upon by the intellectuals using ancient distinctions that gave them a theoretical strength and allowed them to be used as measures of citizenship. We may argue therefore that the current vogue for interpreting identity can be laid at the door of the French deconstructionists. Writers concerned with identity politics have described the fragmenting of identity as being a distinctly foreign intellectual production. Draper (1992) argues that French deconstructionism is the driving force behind identity politics. In Draper's version deconstructionism and poorly informed relativism seem to be synonymous. ‘Some deconstructionists have argued that no one national culture or system for interpreting the external world-- science, let us say, or magic-- is superior to another’. (Draper, 1992:16). He defines identity politics by the belief that:
...the single most important way to classify people...by race, ethnicity, and gender, 'because those characteristics shape most of our behaviour and values. Each racial group in our society has a distinctive culture, it is said, but the white male culture has dominated the rest 'by using terms like rationalism, humanism, universality, and literary merit to persuade other people of their own inferiority.'... And while identity politics depicts itself as a doctrine of the Left, it echoes the themes of the European far Right in its emphasis on race and its rejection of rationalism, humanism and universality. (Draper, 1992:16)
Nevertheless as Lash and Friedman (1992) suggest, individuals are now able to consciously experiment with identity. There is, however, more risk involved in playing with the post-modern identity than previously could have been envisioned with the reified binary identities identified by the modernist intellectuals. For example, narratives concerned with global creolization focus their interest upon such topics as ethnicity and race and often-present ‘exclusive identities, emergent from an authoritative cultural structure’. (Marcus, G in Lash and Friedman 1992:312).

Much the same has happened in the field of gender/sex where writers such as Jeffery Weeks (1991) can argue that, like all identities, masculinities are ‘invented categories’. These invented identities are constructed through the use of cultural meanings which attach certain attributes and forms of conduct, they are, Weeks contends, ‘necessary constructions’ (Weeks, 1991:5). Butler (1993) writes in a similar vein about the partial, flexible and responsive nature of queer identity which contradicts those naturalised and seemingly self-evident categories of identification that constitute traditional formations of identity politics. She argues that the logic of identity politics is far from natural or self-evident. Identities consequently are open to interpretation and it is the interpreters of culture who formulate for us the game play and symbolism which are inherent in the post-modern conception of identity. Shils (1972:4) underlines this for us:
‘There is in every society a minority of persons who, more than the ordinary run of their fellow men, are inquiring, and desirous of being in frequent communication with symbols which are more general than the immediate concrete situations of everyday life and remote in their reference in both time and space. In this minority, there is a need to externalise this quest in oral and written discourse, in poetic or plastic expression, in historical reminiscence or writing, in ritual performance and acts of worship.
The Cultural Entrepreneur.
Bauman’s (1987) argument creates for us the binary distinction between the legislative intellectual and the interpretative intellectual. While Bauman’s discussion seems to provide the legislative intellectual with a clear cut and defined role, he is a little less sure of the interpretative intellectual. He tells us that the intellectuals through the interpretation of culture are ‘desperately trying to create communities and sustain them with the power of their arguments’ (Bauman, 1987:148). But it seems that this effort is ultimately to be wasted and doomed to failure. Bauman poses the question that is central to the role of the post-modern intellectual:
How can one argue the case for or against a form of life, for or against a version of truth, when one feels that one’s argument cannot any more legislate, that there are powers behind the plural forms of life and plural versions of the truth which would not be made inferior, and hence would not surrender to the argument of inferiority (Bauman , 1987:148).
Here it seems that Bauman is naively ignoring the question of ‘value-neutrality’. Within the social sciences much has been made of the notion that science is the realm of truth and politics is the realm of values, and that social scientists work within the realm of truth. Thus ‘value-neutrality’ is the appropriate attitude to be taken by the social scientist, as it is for the natural scientist and for the intellectual.

However, it may well be argued that the intellectuals of the Enlightenment were as much driven by the values and precepts of the new age of reason and science and emergent Capitalism. We saw above the contempt with which the les philosophes held the lower classes and thus were concerned to maintain their place as ‘those who know better’ (Bauman 1987:37). They were concerned with one thing and that was, according to Bauman, projecting onto society ‘their own mode of life’.

Said (1994) recognises that the neutrality of the intellectual is a myth. For him, intellectuals occupy ‘strategic locations’ which inform the objects of their studies. In his Representations of the Intellectual, Said described the true identity of intellectuals. He stressed that the intellectual must avoid the regiments of detail and particularity and at the same time try to avoid becoming some sort of a countable noun-a critic without an identity.
...I also want to insist that the intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent member of a class just going about her/his business. The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.’ (Said, 1994: 8-9).
Consequently we may want to argue that all facts and theories are value-laden, and all values are derived from ideologies which permeate and constitute what counts as facts and theories. As Feyerabend (1975:360) tells us, all terms, whether they refer to individuals or social phenomena, are theoretically defined. The observable characteristics of individuals do not give meaning to social actions but they are meaningful within a body of theory. Therefore we may argue that there are no theoretical neutral observations. Marx also made this point much earlier in the German Ideology.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expressions of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance (Marx and Engels 1970).

The organic intellectual
Marx above makes the connection between ideas and power. Gramsci, in developing Marx’s ideas in the German Ideology also refutes the argument for value-neutrality. Gramsci argues that intellectuals are rooted in their class affiliation. These intellectuals were ‘not only thinkers, writers and artists but also organisers such as civil servants and political leaders, and they not only function in civil society and the state, but also in the productive apparatus...’(Simon, 1991: 90).

Gramsci recognised that all men are intellectuals. That is, all men and women have the potential to function as intellectuals within society, by participating in a particular conception of the world and by either contributing to that conception of the world or by attempting to modify it. And in doing so, these people are engaging in intellectual activity. They are participating within a conception of the world and either perpetuating it or attempting to change it. Traditional intellectuals are frequently to be found in universities but organic intellectuals have a special position in empowering people through the provision of an alternative ideological framework.

Organic intellectuals exist in every class. The way to understand the distinctive character of organic intellectuals is in ‘the ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities (and therefore the intellectual groups which personify them) have their place in the general complex of social relations (Gramsci, 1971:8 - 9, quoted in Desai, 1994:36). Organic intellectuals produce culture and present a way of understanding society and its organisations (Desai, 1994:36). Consequently, we may argue that the organic intellectual is concerned with the common sense of the group/community or nation and they have an active participation in practical life. The organic intellectuals are then, as Gramsci suggests, ‘the constructor, organiser, permanent persuader and not just a simple orator’ (Gramsci, 1971:323).

The importance of Gramsci’s ideas concerning the role of the organic intellectual is that many post-modernist writers have continued to support Gramsci’s claim of the organic relationship between the intellectual and the group. But crucially they have moved away from a class-oriented analysis and extended Gramsci’s thought to include other groups and organisations within society. Thus, to paraphrase Gramsci, we can argue that each social group that comes into existence creates within itself one or more tier of intellectuals that give it meaning. The work of these organic intellectuals is to help to bind the group together and help it to function. We may suppose that in this Gramsci was suggesting it is this class of people, the managers, the civil servants, the lawyers, scientists and so on who create the rules of that society.

Moral Entrepreneurs
When Howard Becker (1963) looked at this same class of people – the rule creators he called them moral entrepreneurs. These people had the same goal as Gramsci’s class revolutionaries, which was to effect a change in the laws or norms that govern society. In his classic sociology ‘Outsiders’, Becker (1963) focuses on those in positions of power and authority that make and enforce the rules. His work argues that the moral entrepreneur creates rules. The moral entrepreneur is a person that takes the initiative to crusade for a rule that would right a society’s evil. The motive for doing this may be to elevate the social status of a particular group within society. Becker argues that the success of the crusade may lead to the entrepreneur becoming a professional rule creator.

However, the successful application of new rules and the impact of each moral crusade bring along with it a new group of outsiders, and a new responsibility of an enforcement agency. This creates what Becker calls ‘rule enforcers’. According to Becker (1963), the enforcement of society's rules is an enterprising act. The enforcement of a rule occurs when those who want a rule enforced, usually for some sort of gain for their personal interests, bring the rule infraction to the attention of the public (Becker 1963). The rule infraction, brought to the attention of those in positions of authority, is dealt with punitively by the entrepreneur so that the enforcement of the rule may involve the mediation of conflicts between many different interest groups by those in positions of power (Becker 1963). Rule enforcers use the process of formal enforcement to satisfy two major interests, the justification of their occupation and the winning of respect from the people he/she patrols. The enforcer is armed with a great deal of discretion and may use his/her power to label an innocent person in order to gain respect (Becker 1963). The misuse of labelling powers by enforcers may create a deviant out of a person who otherwise would not be prone to rule breaking behaviour. Nevertheless, we need to be clear that not everyone has power to label, some are more likely than others to apply a label and have it stick; these are the people that Becker calls Moral Entrepreneurs.

Becker uses the term entrepreneur deliberately, for the moral entrepreneur must create some demand so that the ‘product’ - the change in rules or norms – can satisfy that demand. He deliberately uses the metaphors of business here. Moral crusades are in many ways similar to basic business practices. The principles of alertness, the market and seizing opportunities may all be cited as basic business practices. The alert entrepreneur will be sensitive to available but as yet unnoticed opportunities. What the entrepreneur does is identify opportunities for gain that others have overlooked. The essence of these opportunities is that the entrepreneur recognises something that others have failed to recognise, i.e. that there is an opportunity waiting to be grabbed. It is the alertness of the entrepreneur that leads him/her to recognise what others and even the entrepreneur him/herself may earlier have failed to notice. The entrepreneur does not possess specific knowledge that others do not possess, what the entrepreneur does possess is a sense for discovering what is around the corner - a sense of knowing where to find knowledge.

The benefits of knowing where to find and use knowledge mean that one has a saleable item within the market place. The use of the market analogy involves the discovery of opportunities created by errors. These markets would not be separated and the opportunities for profit would not exist if others had not made mistakes that need to be corrected – if others had not overlooked that which the entrepreneur now sees. Thus the entrepreneur may be said to be working in the public interests, collecting together smaller bits of dispersed information which collectively will have a market value and a public benefit. At the same time, the entrepreneurial role also allows society to continually become aware of better ways of utilising existing resources; it is entrepreneurial alertness that generates and harnesses new knowledge, and discovers entirely new bodies of resources that had hitherto been overlooked. The moral entrepreneurs consequently are claim makers, they are able to both create and enter discourses, and raise questions about what is normal, natural and moral within any group in society. And they do that from a position that is saturated with values. As Becker tells us, the moral entrepreneur feels that nothing can be right in the world until rules are made to correct it. He/she operates with an absolute ethic; what he/she sees is truly and totally evil with no qualification. In this way Becker’s moral entrepreneurs denies Bauman’s thesis, as the moral entrepreneur is both legislator and interpreter. Not only does the moral entrepreneur attempt to define the world, he/she also is often placed to create the rules to structure that world.

Cultural Entrepreneurs.
The concept of the cultural entrepreneurs is developed through the coming together of Gramsci’s organic intellectual and Becker's moral entrepreneur and focuses upon Bauman’s ideas concerning the developing role of the interpreter. The organic intellectual’s role as we have seen is to give meaning to the group or community they belong to. As Rojek and Turner (2000) note the image of the organic intellectual is of intellectuals who know ‘what is really going on’ (Rojek and Turner, 2000:634), whereas the moral entrepreneur’s role is to be able to support what is really going on with knowledge and then to convince the audience of the authenticity of their position. Once the public is convinced the entrepreneurs set the rules and enforce them in such a way as they themselves benefit from them.

According to the post modern writers identity is phenomenologically claimed and read from various identity markers rather than being an essential part of one’s self, as many of the modernist writers claim. Many of the (post-modern) identity rules tend to be, one might argue, ‘rules of thumb’ which change given the context. For example, Maffesoli’s tribes inhabit a multiplicity of overlapping groups, playing with their identities and their identity markers as they choose. Identity in this case becomes ambiguous. Writers discussing sex, gender identity and gender roles, patterns of sexual behaviour and sexual meaning have moved away from the confinement of binary gender categories to views that argue that identity is rule bound. However, they do note that these rules and norms may be and are contested, and social structures may be and are transformed. (Kippax and Crawford, 1998:253-69). Consequently, it becomes clear that identities are worked at and negotiated through interaction. (See J. Gagnon and Simon, 1974 and Plummer, 1974 ). Thus, the individual has broken through the iron cage of a rationally structured identity to a place where the actor has agency over his or her own identity/ies. (See Foucault 1977 and Foucault, 1980).
Foucault tells us that power relations in the form of discourse can set certain norms and rules through which limits are set upon the individual and their conduct but he also points out that this also makes possible certain forms of agency and individuality. James Gee (1992) tells us, however, that each discourse in a society is ‘owned’ and ‘operated’ by a socio-culturally defined group of people who play various ‘roles’ and give various ‘performances’ within it. Further, each discourse involves ways of talking, acting, interacting, valuing and believing that, in turn, display membership in a particular social practice.

Consequently, we may argue that the cultural entrepreneur is active in creating a ‘discourse community’. A discourse community is generally accepted to be a community where the boundaries and character of which are determined by the communicative practices, as well as the social sentiments, shared norms, and cultural values of the members. The individuals in the group share habits and norms of behaviour through day-to-day contact with one another. They have their favourite topics, their local jargon, argot or shop talk, and their specialised appeals based on relations of political power and personal attraction. Crucially, for the discussion of identity formation, members of such discourse communities may never meet, but they still share a set of values and behaviours that strongly affect their discourse practices and consequently their identity. This position is clearly important for work being done on both post-diaspora communities and cyber–identities on the Internet. (See Bromberg, 1996: 143-152, Miller, 1995: 49-57, Turkle, 1995).

Both Foucault’s and Geertz’s work have been influential in the development of the concept of discourse communities. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault (1972) discusses 'discursive formations' and links them to knowledge production. He points out that that there is a relationship between the social background and discursive formations although he was also aware that knowledge shifted within these formations. Geertz's (1983) work on ‘local knowledge’ in anthropology also informs the concept. Geertz in his book Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology, explains that by understanding the way people talk about themselves we can understand the institutions, actions, events, and customs of the people who have created and used these analogies (1983:22). Once we have understood the analogies used by any group of people we can then start to make sense of and understand these people's ‘social order, historical change, or psychic functioning in general’ (ibid.). Geertz (1983) tells us that by understanding the ‘game’, ‘drama’, and ‘text’ analogies, then we will be able to see what the people or the group value and hold as important.

I do note however, that the notion of ‘discourse community’ per se can provide us with many interpretations of ‘local knowledge’. However, a central theme of the concept is the idea that ‘language… [is]… a basis for sharing or holding in common: shared expectations, shared participation, commonly (or communally) held ways of expressing’. (Rafoth, 1990:140-52). We also note that discourse communities are not ideologically innocent. But as Foucault’s work suggests they are organised around the production and legitimisation of particular forms of knowledge and social practices at the expense of others. Thus the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ can work either in the sphere of the hegemonic culture or within the minority culture.

We may suggest that the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ role is thus to present alternative narratives and to create discourses which provide a perspective on history, culture and identity. Such history discourses are then presented in conflict with those narratives and discourses which support the official memory and thus the national identity. The national identity is designed specifically to propagate the idea of the nation and is celebrated in anthems and other symbols which sweep all before them.

The ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ do this because they are able both to interpret the current cultural climate and then to legislate and produce the discourses that create and maintain group identity. It might be said however that the crucial difference between the modernist intellectuals and their influence on identity is that they produced ideas which were supported by the State. These ideas were as, Gramsci suggests, hegemonic constructs, whereas the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ not only provides ideas but also concretises the notion of identity in cultural products.

Thus, class, race, gender and so on were ideas that were supported by and legislated for by the State. We have already noted above that once thus labelled, it is very difficult, as Becker has outlined, to remove that label. These essentialist identities were not flagged (see Billig 1995) everyday, they were presented as a priori social facts. The key to the role of the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ is that they are active in cultural production rather than attempting to be disinterested intellectuals/academics. They willingly and actively work to emphasise cultural and even ethnic identity within the group. They do this through the selective strengthening of the collective memory through the narratives and discursive frameworks that they themselves are involved in creating. They point out certain characteristics of the group and help to create symbols and signs that work to unite the group through shared sentiment and common memories.

The ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ will also be involved in the re-interpretation of history, invention and re-creation of local tradition and traditional activity that work to reinforce the ideas of community, local culture and unity. Through the re-working of traditions and traditional activity both re-created, re-invented or even borrowed from other cultures the various cultural elements within the group can be transformed to re-emerge as part of the new more relevant culture.

Thus the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ engages in both a critical reflection of the traditional culture but also seeks to create and promote new community values through the products of his/her efforts. Lasch (1995) calls these people the emerging elites of professionals and managers, a cognitive elite. They are the manipulators of symbols, who are involved in the trafficking of information; they manipulate words and ideas for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are valuable commodities in the marketplace. However, Lasch, was sure that this group had little interest with regional, national, or local communities because this cognitive elite had a global focus. However, it might be argued that regional and local and marginal communities are but microcosms of society at large and that each would, through the nature of human social organisation, develop a cognitive elite of their own. Lasch’s work, however, has been linked to the work of the Eugenics movement and in particular with Murrey and Hernnstein’s work, The Bell Curve (1994), where they argue that a cognitive elite class is forming who will deservedly come to rule society. ‘Cognitive elite’ is their term for people who succeed academically and have high IQs. Herrnstein and Murray go to great lengths in their book to establish that cognitive ability has a genetic basis.

It is probably more useful to ally Lasch’s work with that of Richard Reich (1991) who talks about the ‘symbolic analysts’ who are, to a great extent, Lasch’s professionals and managers. In his work Reich defines symbolic analysts as people who solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. He listed these problem-solvers and information brokers as everyone from software developers to investment bankers, to accountants to management consultants, architects, corporate executives, film-makers, film editors, production designers, publishers, writers and editors, journalists, musicians, television and film producers, and even university professors. What these symbolic analysts do is to be active within the cultural industries and work with ideas. For example: a t-shirt transmits meaning; a club transmits meaning; the design of a beer bottle transmits meaning and a documentary on a marginal group transmits meaning. These symbolic analysts are cultural intermediaries with an entrepreneurial flair for the product – in this case identity and in particular Cornish identity.

Reich’s work on the symbolic analyst updates Drucker’s (1959) concept of the ‘knowledge worker’. For Drucker the role of the knowledge worker was to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge through continuous learning and in that way they would be able to provide society with its character, its leadership and its social profile (1959:270). Drucker’s ‘knowledge worker’ while providing society with its definitions is one who also increasingly relies on continued specialised education in order to earn a living.

Flagging Identity
However, what we see is that the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ as a knowledge worker works with both ideas and objects. He or she is able, through their use of local knowledge that includes history, traditions, myth and their understanding of on-going political, social and economic conditions, to prevail upon the cultural industry to embody the objects of identity. Identity becomes embodied within subjectivised objects and symbols such as the kilt in Scotland, the St. George’s flag of England and the black and gold rugby shirt of Cornwall.

When these subjectivised objects become public objects, they continually act as reminders of identity. They are, as Billig (1995) suggests, banal symbols of a particular identity. We are aware that identity, in the post-modern world, has become problematic. It is no longer fixed, is fluid and organic, it is fragmented and marginal. One of the ways in which identities can be fixed is for the person to consciously decide upon a particular identity. Following Billig’s model of national identity, it follows that for other identities to be maintained they to have to be put to daily use (Billig 1995:95). Thus a particular identity has to be ‘flagged’ on a daily basis until, one supposes, it becomes an endemic condition (see Billig 1995:6). This is done as Szerszynski and Urry (2000) suggest through visual symbols, such as emblems or badges which can be official and formal, such as flags or coats of arms, or can be informal, such as graffiti, bumper stickers or modes of dress (Szerszynski and Urry, 2000:5). I would like to add to this list the notion of identity as a commodity and further the activity of identity consumption itself as a marker of identity.

Informal symbols of Cornish and English Identity

Identity commodification involves the cultural entrepreneurs who, as we have noted above, are engaged in the manipulation of taste and opinion. Part of their repertoire is the construction of new signs and images, which are then propagated by the media, the market place and advertising. These signs, images and products are used to create need and structure consumption choices within the target groups, but have also evolved to become commodities in themselves. Once commodified and ‘sold’ in the market place these objects function as symbols and the product becomes linked with a particular social identity. For example Lunt and Livingstone (1992) assert that:
The material conditions of a consumer culture society constitute the context within which people work out their identities. People's involvement with material culture is such that mass consumption infiltrates meaningful psychological experience. (Lunt and Livingstone 1992, p24.).

This suggests then that the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ are engaged in the ‘identity industry’. When McCrone suggests the concept ‘heritage industry‘ he implies that this involves ‘ a product, a set of entrepreneurs, a manufacturing process, a set of social relations around this process, a market, and, of course, consumers, so too do I when I use the concept ‘identity industry’. For example, recent direct action that has involved both the defacing and removal of English Heritage signs at Cornish ‘heritage’ sites has lead to a change of policy by English Heritage to use different and symbolically relevant signs in Cornwall. (See WESTERN MORNING NEWS. 24 June 1998 and http://www.cornish-stannary-parliament.abelgratis.com/page22.html for more details of the campaign)

Thus, identities become embodied within culturally saturated products, which in themselves become banal markers of identity. These identity markers can be any object, idea, narrative or discourse which individuals associate with themselves and are presented to others as supporting evidence for an identity claim – for example Cornish Rebellion beer brewed by the St Austell Brewery. Others may also use these markers, for instance, outsiders, in order to attribute identity or assess an identity claim.

I have already noted above that identity rules tend to be rules of thumb that are impacted upon by certain contexts and conditions. These rules help to provide a course of action that maintains the rules of everyday life. The markers, as they are commodified and consumed, reinforce the identity claims they embody, so that rather than being rules of thumb, the identity concept becomes concretised within the group and thus the commodified identity becomes a social fact and therefore more resistant to challenge.

As these markers are flagged on a daily basis, simply because they are all around - on cars, on bodies, on shop shelves - the markers are interpreted and re-interpreted, combined and/or given precedence one over another. It is my contention that this activity of creation, interpretation, combining and ranking is presided over by the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ and this is their interpreting role. It is they who prosecute the infraction of rules and set the precedents. This is their legislative role.
An Irish Example
If you examine to the root a contest between two peoples, two nations, you will always find that it is really a war between two civilisations, two ideals of life (W. B. Yeats quoted in Lyons, 1979:49)
The revival of Irish logically entailed the construction of a new national culture with components taken from a dying one…it was to be un-English (Garvin, 1981:102)
The ‘recovery’ of the Irish identity can provide us with an interesting counterpoint to the example of Cornish identity that this thesis is pursuing. It enables us to show that unlike Cornwall the cultural entrepreneurs within Ireland had many more identity markers available to them to work with in the recovery of Irish identity. O’Mahony and Delanty’s (1998) work Rethinking Irish History shows how the recovery of an Irish identity is ‘representative of a new wave of inventing the nation around cultural discourses’ (p.8). Like the Cornish, the recovery of the Irish identity was subject to a historical revisionism that had its roots in the ‘Celtic’ Revivals and Romanticism found within the literary movement of the 1890’s and 1900’s.

In 1893 the Gaelic League was founded in Dublin; James Connolly’s Socialist Republican Party arrived in Dublin in 1896 and Sinn Fein in 1905 (Garvin, 1981:101). These small groups created new ideas or ‘refurbished versions of very old political ideas’ (Garvin, 1981:102). While new political ideas about an Irish identity were starting to circulate, other academics such as T.W. Moody and Robin Dudley Edwards were, in the 1930’s, attempting to abandon what were perceived to be ‘retrospective accounts of history where earlier events and structures were improperly explained’ (O’Mahony and Delanty 1998:9).

The Irish nationalists at this time were concerned to create a cultural identity that would counteract what they saw as the diffusion of English culture into Ireland. The nationalists were concerned that the Irish were losing their language, their Gaelic civilisation and their distinctive national character. Moran (1905:114) argued that:
Unless we are a nation, we are nothing, and the growth of a civilisation springing from the roots of one of the oldest in Europe will alone make us a nation, give us scope to grow naturally, give us something to inspire what is best in us, cultivate our national pride and self-respect, and encourage our self-dependence

At the forefront of this battle for Irish hearts and minds was the Catholic Church. Crotty (1986:49) tells us that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was one of the four great successes to emerge from nineteenth century Ireland. Catholicism and nationalism became fused together to provide ‘a single, overarching and coherent body of idefacts which provided the Irish with a distinct cultural identity’ (Keating and Desmond 1993:166). For the anglicised Protestants the Catholics were a vanquished race, inferior to the Protestants in all areas of their lives, and laws were designed by the Protestant ruling classes to confirm the inferiority. The Catholic Church was at the forefront of the rejection of [English] bourgeois society and the industrial spirit that had overtaken the masses in England. It was this industrial spirit and encroaching Englishness that allowed this priest, Father Martin, to comment:
I never think of England but as in that dream of Piranesi – vast Gothic Halls, machinery, pulleys, and all moving the mighty rolling mechanism that is crushing all the beauty and picturesqueness of the world…England’s mission is to destroy and corrupt everything she touches…it is our faith that makes us hate and revolt from English methods. To the mind of every true Irishman England is simply a Frankenstein monster…he has had his way everywhere but in Ireland; therefore he hates us. (quoted in O’Farrell, 1975:54)

Thus the industrial society of England was rejected as it represented godlessness, cupidity and cunning, it was common place and materialistic where as Ireland was where one could find:
…all the best things in life, domestic happiness, contentment, consciousness of his human dignity, moral and intellectual culture…his advantage in that respect over his English neighbour was due almost entirely to his Catholic faith. (quoted in O’Farrell, 1975:55)

The bishops in Ireland flocked to protect this view of a rural moral Ireland for if they did not it was their view that the Irish and their language would become extinct.

English modes of thought and English forms of expression, English fashions and tastes in politics, industrial life, and possibly after a time in religion would come into vogue (quoted in Mc Carty, 1902:154)

This ‘call to arms' loudly trumpeted by the Catholic Church was heard and taken up by the organisations such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (founded 1884) who promoted the Irish sports of hurling and Gaelic football, important landmarks (Keating and Desmond, 1993:183) in the development of the revival movement. The Gaelic League, the Celtic Literary Society and the Daughters of Erin were also at the forefront of the movement.. These associations followed broadly the similar aims of the Daughters of Erin who were formed to:
…discourage the reading and circulation of low English literature, the singing of English songs, the attending of vulgar English entertainments at the theater and music-hall, and to combat in every way English influence (Keating and Desmond, 1993:185)

The ‘combating’ of English influence was also taken up by the literary world. Keating and Desmond (1993) suggest that ‘Yeats and his coterie...contributed something that was essential to the formation of the Irish identity; they helped to develop and foster the myth of rural civilisation’. (Keating and Desmond, 1993:184). This myth solidified what the Catholic Church had been preaching and delineated the boundaries of what was Irish and what was English, different and opposite. For Sean O'Casey for example, ‘Ireland was equated with language, literature, theatre, earth, tree and with happy people, while England was characterised by reference to textiles, glass, blast-furnaces, commercialism, industry, Mammon, old age pensions, social security, meals for needy people’ (Keating and Desmond, 1993:185).

O'Mahoney and Delanty, (1998:77) tell us that it was the intellectual creators and interpreters (i.e. my cultural entrepreneurs) who sought to create nostalgic and sentimental local culture. They go on to tell us that these Irish cultural entrepreneurs ‘were not so much troubled with the truth or artistic form as with the creation of communal meaning in the form of socially effective myths’ (O'Mahoney and Delanty, 1998:77 my emphasis).

Like the Cornish the Irish nationalists also presented historical myths such as the Seven Hundred Years of Slavery rendering of Irish History. This partisan reading of history provided the identity creators with plenty of material to support their cause. Such potent images, although criticised by O'Mahoney and Delanty, (1998) are still, they concede, ‘repeated in everyday life and in the media’ (O'Mahoney and Delanty, 1998:33). Thus we can argue that the truthfulness of such myths is almost beside the point. Myths by their very definition are not ‘scientific’ accounts of events, rather they are prescriptions for action. Maffesoli (1996) tells us that the mythic function has a considerable consequence for the social group in that it will:
…reaffirm the feeling of belonging to a larger group, of getting out of oneself, that they apply to the greatest number...[it] creates an ambiance and therefore unites...[and allows for] the expression of a common emotion (Maffesoli,1996:26)

This ‘common emotion’ underpinned an Irish identity project that was conditioned by the historical-cultural myths of a particular history that allowed for:
…re-inventable' memories of confessional divide and injustice, the sundering of state and society, dissatisfaction with institutional arrangements and a rudimentary national consciousness (O'Mahoney and Delanty, 1998:62)
Although Irish history was somewhat mythologised, that is not to say that that there were not concrete markers of identity which the identity entrepreneurs could use. Indeed the creators of the Irish identity had much of their script already written for them. The Irish collective sense of self it seems, unlike the Cornish, is formed through a set of specifics (Keating and Desmond 1993:193) which allowed them to distinguish themselves from the English. O'Mahoney and Delanty, (1998:92-93) call these specifics a set of identity codes. In these codes they point to the crucial importance of the Catholic Church and also to the importance of the Parliamentary Party, Revolutionaries and Radicals, all of whom were associated with the creation of cultural values.

These four groups, according to O'Mahoney and Delanty, (1998) articulated a code of belonging. It is in these codes that we can find the crucial identity markers of the Catholic Church and the place of religion in the recovery of Irish identity. Firstly, Catholic nationalism according to Keating and Desmond (1993), intended to ‘articulate a cultural identity by delimiting the boundaries of Irishness in ways that pointed clearly to what was distinctive about it’ (Keating and Desmond, 1993:103). For example, the notion of rurality emphasised by the Church was an ‘essential element in an unchanging Irish identity’ (Brown, 1985:84). The Catholic Church also pointed to ‘the evil of the external world’ and intellectualism and the dangers of modernism (O'Mahoney and Delanty, 1998:93), which for the bishops and priests were to be found across the water in England and at home amongst the Anglicised Protestant Irish. For the Church the Irish had a better civilisation and they wanted to defend it.

The Parliamentary Party supported Catholic nationalism by fighting against the ownership of land by Protestants and challenging the political, social and economic power that the Protestant elites held. The Revolutionaries introduced romanticised myths but drew upon Gaelic themes that were still a strong tradition in Ireland. The Gaelic Revival in the late 1890s, and in particular the Gaelic League, looked to ‘an immediately recognisable Gaelic identity [which] had existed from primordial times and was still present, if only in its peasant form’ (Garvin, 1981:103) (My emphasis). The Revolutionaries were also complicit in striving to make connections between language, religion and identity. Padraig Pearse had claimed that when the Gaelic League was founded, the Irish revolution began and it is clear that the Celtic League was at the forefront of the language revival. In the year after its creation, the Gaelic League felt confident enough to call for Irish Institutions to employ only Irish speakers. (See O Fearail, P, 2000. The Story of Conradh na Gaeilge: A History of the Gaelic League. http://members.techheadnet.com/barr/story1.htm).

O'Mahoney and Delanty (1998:84) tell us that the identity project of the revolutionary separatists was imbued with primordialism that promoted a common identification of Gaelic and Catholic; it was, they tell us, a Hobsbawnian invention of tradition (O'Mahoney and Delanty, 1998:84). They go on to say that ‘Irish identities were thus less based on the peculiarities of economic and political interests as on a communitarian identification with the nation’ (ibid:85). It was this separatist wing that lead to the creation of armed nationalistic militias as a response to the problem of an Irish 'other', Protestantism. O'Mahoney and Delanty (1998:86) argue there was no middle ground - ‘the nation-state was to be shaped in the image of Catholic traditionalism’. For the radicals, the ‘other’ was capitalist imperialism. The radicals drew their inspiration from James Connolly, a socialist, whose contribution to Irish national identity ‘was that opposition positions in society could still belong to the overall cultural consensus and did not require to engage in constructing their own counter culture’ (O'Mahoney and Delanty, 1998:91). So the Irish working classes remained fixed in their local and conservative cultures and Catholic as was Connelly himself. O'Mahoney and Delanty (1998:91) tell us that Connolly's anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism could be converted into anglophobia and anti-modernism.

From this brief visit to the Irish identity project we can see that the Irish seemed to have had substantial identity markers available to them to recover their identity. First and foremost, and central to this recovery, is the influence of Roman Catholicism and the Catholic Church. Indeed, Keating and Desmond (1993) argue that the Church is the main promoter of the Irish identity and is the primary socialiser. The Irish also had a living language and a Gaelic civilisation that was available for the cultural entrepreneurs and the groups they created, such as the Gaelic League, to use, to recover and to create national unifying myths. Politically, religiously and culturally there was a deep rejection of the ‘other’. Cultural oppositions used as markers of identity included Protestantism and the attendant Anglicisation which accompanied the religion. The Irish identity project encompassed a rejection of the bourgeois urban, industrial societies of England and looked to the ‘myth’ of a rural Ireland with all the beauty of its Gaelic civilisation.

The Cornish, we will find, are faced with a much harder identity project. Unlike the Irish they do not have the benefit of a strong ‘oppositional’ church/religion, for the Cornish Protestantism was enforced and ‘inflicted’ upon them through cultural and economic imperialism and by the sword. Their language was long dead and only available to them through scraps of relics found in libraries across the United Kingdom and through reference to the other ‘Celtic’ languages. Also lost was their ‘Celtic civilisation’, centuries of inter-marriage, immigration and emigration of people across the Tamar border, and cultural imperialism has left the indigenous Cornish people with simply the ‘echoes’ of a past identity from which even the genetic markers have been extinguished.
Cornwall has not, nor will it ever be, peripheral to England in terms of its social, economic and political cultures. The people of Cornwall have been subjected to the same socialising influences and institutions as have the rest of the country. It has been a part (and at one time a very important part) of the industrial life of the United Kingdom. The people who have lived in this part of the United Kingdom have been subjected to the same cultural messages disseminated by the mass media as the rest of the country. As children, they have been subject to the socialising influences of an education system run by the centre and taught through the constraints of a common curriculum, i.e. a Cornish child receives exactly the same education as children across the country.

Consequently, the cultural entrepreneurs in Cornwall are faced with a much more difficult project than their colleagues faced in Ireland. With such a lack of strong identity markers the attempt at reviving memories of ‘divide and injustice’ and of creating a ‘dissatisfaction with institutional arrangements’, rests often on the trawl through a revived historical narrative that underlines the notions of difference the entrepreneurs wish to emphasise. Thus, we will see in the sections below, how the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs, like their Irish colleagues before them, strive to present to the Cornish people an ‘authentic’ account of Cornish identity.
The Cultural Entrepreneurs in Cornwall
It soon became clear to me that explanations of Cornishness and Cornish identity were in many ways rule bound. As Cornwall itself is often described in spatial and geographic terms with the boundaries of the land physically and symbolically located from the Tamar to Lands End (and more mystically for some, into the sea to include the lost Celtic realm of Lyonnesse) so too are the notions of Cornishness and Cornish identity 'rule' bound. For instance, to be ‘proper’ Cornish for some, one at least has to been born in the county, for others one has to be able to cite their Cornish forefathers over the past centuries. For others it is simply enough to know that they are not English and for others it’s about knowing that they belong to a Cornish community. Other markers of Cornishness may involve following the rugby and being proud of the tin mining traditions and having a deep and enduring love of the space in which they live. The ‘rules’ of Cornishness could even involve knowing what a good pasty consists of. We have noted above, that the rules concerning identity markers tend to be rules of thumb, and the Cornish rules seem to be elastic enough to included the Cornish in other parts of
the world and ‘outsiders’ who would wish to ‘become’ Cornish and ‘buy’ into this Cornishness.

This section will consider where the rules of Cornishness come from and who are the rule makers and rule enforcers – the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs. As Cornishness and the idea of a Cornish identity is a relatively new phenomenon (a Hobsbawmian re-invention) most of the work done in the re-creation/renaissance of a Cornish identity is readily available in places like the Cornish Studies Library in Redruth, the Local Studies Library in Plymouth and at the Institute for Cornish Studies in Truro, also texts that were available in the university libraries of Plymouth and Exeter. It soon became apparent to me that there was only a small group of people working in this area. They are, in the main, a group of committed academics and professional ‘interpreters’, writers, poets and so on. These are the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs. It is they who create, recreate, manage, manipulate, build and sell the Cornish identity. It is they who also manage and manipulate the social processes of identity and create the 'rules' of Cornishness.

I have already considered Becker (1963) and his classic sociology 'Outsiders' above where he introduces us to the concept of 'moral entrepreneurs'. In this section I want to develop Becker's concept and use it to define the Cornish 'cultural entrepreneurs'. Like Becker, I want to suggest that the cultural entrepreneurs have two roles, that of rule creator and rule enforcer. Becker tells us that the rule creator is not interested in the content of rules, for 'the existing rules do not satisfy him because there is some evil which profoundly disturbs him’ (Becker, 1963:145). For the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneur’ there is, as Becker suggests (Becker, 1963:148), ‘nothing right with the world’ as long as English hegemony is maintained and it is up to him/her to correct it. And in the attempt to correct it, any means, I argue, is justified, thus history can be re-written with impunity, minor irritations can be amplified and actions can be justified to get the message across. As Becker points out ‘the crusader is fervent and righteous, often self-righteous’ (Becker, 1963:148).

For Becker, moral entrepreneurs are typically found in the upper levels of the social structure. This means that they add to the power of their moral position with the power they derive from their superior position in society. A similar situation exists, I argue, for the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneur’, but we are better able to understand the role of the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ by reference to Gramsci's work on the ‘organic intellectual’. Organic intellectuals, for Gramsci, are more directly linked to the dominant mode of production. Thus:
Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its won function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. (Gramsci, 1971:5)[my emphasis]

So the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ are able to give the group homogeneity and an awareness of its own function (Gramsci, 1971: 5). It is their role to perform specific functions for the group by organising the whole fabric of society. It is also their role, according to Gramsci, to be the prime mover of feelings and passions. They take an active part in practical life, constructing it, organising and acting as permanent persuaders. (See Gramsci, 1971: 10). As Hall (1996:268) tells us it is their job:
…to know more than the traditional intellectuals do: really know, not just pretend to know, not just to have the facility of knowledge, but to know deeply and profoundly.

Becker tells us that ‘the most obvious consequence of a successful crusade is the creation of a new set of rules’ (Becker, 1963:155). He goes on to tell us that with these new rules come a new set of enforcement agencies and officials. It is through the establishment of these organisations that the crusade becomes institutionalised. These organisations become devoted to the enforcement of the rule (ibid.). Using the analogy of how a police force works to enforce rules, Becker points to how enforcers, by responding to their situation, enforce the rules in such a way that 'outsiders' are created.

One of the most obvious ways in which the Cornish ‘rules’ are enforced is through the use of the term ‘foreigner’. This term is used to demarcate who is Cornish and who is not. In the main ‘foreigners’ are those people who live over the Tamar bridge in England. I will provide evidence in the historiography below that the term has been used for many years and is still very much in evidence and in common usage in day-to-day Cornish talk. Deacon (Cornish Movement Paper. No Date) suggests that there are, in Cornwall, popular communal associations which remain highly ethnic in character and play an important role in reinforcing and moulding the Cornish identity. These take the form of male voice choirs, bands, sports clubs, certain pubs and other voluntary associations. These are visible examples of Cornish discourse communities where social sentiments, shared norms and the cultural values of the members are maintained on a day to day basis. Crucially, however, the ‘highly ethnic nature’ of such organisations and communities is maintained through the disseminating work of the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ drawing attention to such academic claims for ethnicity as Vink (1993) and Hale (1997).

The Gorsedd is also a rule creator and rule enforcer. The fact that the proceedings are held in Cornish which acts as a clear marker of who is ‘proper’ Cornish and who is not, is clearly not incidental to this analysis. Further, it is the Gorsedd that creates the Cornish Bards and to become a Cornish Bard one will have had to serve Cornish interests.
Mr. C: (Retired Chemist from Chasewater. Cornish Bard). …what it [The Gorsedd] has done is bring together people who have actually done something. You are elected to the college of bards because of something you have done. Maybe just learn the language, maybe it has been in local history, brass band or running a Cornish Association somewhere, there’s a whole raft of things…all this is part of the Cornish Movement. It’s a focus and things are beginning to come together…now with the dance society and the literature society, the leading lights in those movements are Bards or some of them are and I think we will see, as time goes on, more of a bringing together of all these efforts.
It’s beginning to matter to people because one way forward has been through competitions which have gone out to schools who sometimes produce the most fantastic quality work…and it’s bringing more people in who take an interest in Cornwall and the various aspects and the sort of things they can do. That to my mind is the Cornish Movement.
John Jenkin (Cornish Bard) To me it’s [the Gorsedd] a manifestation of one’s Cornishness the Gorsedd. You come once a year and this is a public affirmation of the fact you are Cornish. You support Cornish History and Cornish literature. I’ve had this all my life…You are recognised as somebody who is Cornish in upbringing, in character and somebody who knows a fair amount about something in some particular field or other.
Mr. D: (Unemployed from Liskeard – Cornish Bard) If you’re made a Bard then it behoves you to try and push the boat along a bit and if you do speak up in public to bear in mind you are a Bard…It is a college of Bards. It is a repository of recent experience
Even amongst the annual celebrations we can find rule making and sanctioning going on. At the Padstow ‘Obby Oss’ one can only belong to the red ribbon club if one is ‘proper ‘ Cornish and a Padstonian at that, while the blue ribbon ‘Oss’ club is open to incomers, but only after a suitable time has passed.

Cornwall fits Becker's (1963) model well in that there are a number of cultural organisations which are involved in the enforcement of the rules. That is, they all have a vested interest in the creation of, the maintenance of, the celebration of, the organisation of the cultural life of Cornwall and in the creation, maintenance, celebration and organisation of Cornish identity. That many of the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’, the rule creators, are in fact closely involved with these organisations is even more telling. And as I have noted the creation of outsiders, i.e. foreigners, is a well established 'rule' in Cornish cultural life and in many ways does precede, as the evidence suggests, the modern re-invention of Cornish identity.

So, for example, the early Celtic/Cornish revivalists were involved in the creation of the Old Cornwall Movement. These early cultural entrepreneurs, such as Morton Nance, A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, H. Jenner and A.S.D. Smith were central in the revival movement. They were historians and linguists who were at the forefront of the renaissance in Cornish identity and the revival of the language. Indeed the motto of the society ‘Gather the fragments that remain that nothing be lost’ highlights that the role of these early ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ was to spread ‘a knowledge of this past amongst Cornish people of every sort as a thing that is necessary to them if they would remain Cornish’ (Morton Nance 1970: 293 in pamphlet Old Cornwall).

These academics, scholars and historians were also instrumental in setting up of the Cornish Gorsedd. This new Gorsedd, based upon the Welsh and Breton example, would be a symbol of the revival of Cornwall as a Celtic nation. To give the new ceremonies deeper symbolism and authenticity Cornish scholars attended the Welsh Gorseth at Treorchy (August 1928) and were initiated as Bards, later the same year (September) the first Cornish Gorsedd was held and Henry Jenner was installed as the first Grand Bard.

Other organisations have since been set up to administer, document and manage the cultural revival. The most significant of these is the Institute for Cornish Studies (University of Exeter) based in Truro. The institute is now a focus for academic work on all aspects of Cornish life. Its director Dr. Phillip Payton, holds two Doctorates both of which are concerned with Cornishness. He is also a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd (named Car Dyvresow). Dr. Payton also edits a journal called 'Cornish Studies' and has written a number of books on many aspects of Cornishness as well as contributing to many journals. Indeed much of Dr. Payton's work informs this thesis.

On the political scene the Cornish revival saw the setting up of two political parties, Mebyon Kernow and the Cornish Nationalist Party (CNP). Both of these political parties have had modest success at the local level and continue to ensure that Cornish issues and Cornish identity remain to the fore in the political arena. On the peripheries of this movement is the Cornish Social and Economic Research Group which aims to provide a Cornish perspective on social, economic and political issues affecting Cornwall.

The Cornish language is also another arena where the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ take a lead. While within the movement there are schisms and antagonisms (accounted for below) it is clear that the development of a separate language is central to the work carried out by the cultural entrepreneurs. Language is a clear identity marker. Language has always played an important role in the formation and expression of identity. The role of language and dialect in identity construction is, it can be argued, becoming even more central in the post-modern era, as other traditional markers of identity are being destabilised. The Cornish language and the language movement in Cornwall, as we will see below, is used to make claims for cultural and identity authenticity that are yet powerful enough to sway the European Union who have accepted the Cornish language as a minority language.

Other cultural entrepreneurs working within the Cornish arena include the contemporary writers and commentators such as Bernard Deacon (Open University) Alan Kent (Poet and Novelist), Amy Hale (an American working at the Institute of Cornish Studies), Ken George (Linguist/University of Plymouth), Malcolm Williams (University of Plymouth) and of course the Bards of the Cornish Gorsedd who are too numerous to mention here. There is, however, a much larger group of people world-wide who take an active interest in promoting all things Cornish and the Cornish identity. (See the Cornish Associations Directory at www.Cornwall-online.co.uk/associat.htm) On the Cornish Associations Directory there are 39 Cornish Associations listed world-wide from the USA to Cuba, to Australia and South Africa. The Cornish Society of Greater Milwaukee (USA), for example, defines as its purpose ‘to preserve our Cornish heritage, stimulate interest in Cornish traditions and culture’. (Its Secretary Jean Jolliffe was inaugurated as a Bard at the Gorsedd I visited in Liskeard for the purposes of my fieldwork), while the purpose of the Cornish Association of Bendigo and District Inc. (Australia)’s is to stimulate interest in the history, antiquities, traditions and social conditions of Cornwall. There are also 18 Cornish Associations across the UK (see website).
Mr. D: (Unemployed from Liskeard. Cornish Bard) There have been some people working on histories of Cornwall. Phillip Payton, John Jenkin did a history for school kids…There’s a lot of stuff that’s been consciously researched and revived and grabbed before it got lost. People like Moira Davey have stopped it from sliding down the plughole…
There’s is a lot of recognition [of a Cornish Identity] so far. Roger Holmes who lives the other side of Liskeard is heavily involved…and there’s a lot of information and he is convinced that that is what we must do.
I’m here steering the ship. Being subversive making a bloody nuisance of myself and as far as possible making problems for Westminster and Whitehall and moving along the whole cause.
Mr. C: (Retired Chemist from Chasewater. Cornish Bard) Well in some respects there are [Cornish leaders] There are the people in the forefront of music. We have a music guild…literature, there’s a literature and there’s the Gorseth…people who have a particular interest, something to offer.
Of course you’ve got the Cornish National Party, you’ve got MK [Mebyon Kernow] and people like that…the Cornish Movement [is] intensely important and it will increase in importance the more it gets people in to actually do things and identitfy themselves with it.
…somebody who has researched very deeply inrto say place names, or into the language like Ken George, now that sort of person may command respect in academic circles.
Joy: (Writer from Truro) …and it really is people like Bernard [Deakon] and the Old Cornwall and MK [Mebyon Kernow] that have bought the consciousness of that into being.
They [the media] treat us like we don’t exist. Dr. Ken Phillips said if they [programmes such as Wycliffe and Poldark] were in Yorkshire, Lancashire anywhere, they always have someone to help with the dialect but never in Cornwall.
Mrs. B: (Retired living in Plymouth) I’m referring to the An Gof thing. It’s amazing what enthusiasm was roused for it, That is entirely historical in origin. That march would never have happened it it wasn’t for history intensifying feelings of being Cornish.
Jack: (Bar Manager from St. Neot) Well a lot of people think the world of it [Cornish Movement]. The kilts they wear for this An Gof thing. I suppose it keeps you in the limelight.
Rob (Interviewer) Do you think they are deliberately doing it to be kept in the limelight?
Jack: (Bar Manager from St. Neot) Yes I do. …some of them are. I know Jenkins one of the big Bards, a wonderful chap and…Rawl from down Padstow real loud I want to be seen to be Cornish
Di: (School Worker from St. Austell) …David Penhalligon. He was a Cornish boy and we supported the Cornish boy. He was the epitome of what we see as Cornish. He had the accent, the stature, he was strong and large, he was very convicted to each thing he stood for. He would take it right to the end which is something respected. Traditional values.
Mark: (Landlord from Wadebridge) In my life time yes [has there been a change in the culture?]. Because Mr. Morton Nance was the only man I’ve ever seen wear a Cornish kilt. I never heard of a Cornish Kilt and I’d never seen the material until I saw it in Padstow. But you do now there’

It is these people and organisations that act as the permanent persuaders, the cultural definers, who interpret the social milieu so that the essence of Cornishness is extracted. It is they who are at the forefront of the search for authentic explanations which gives their claim for distinctiveness a currency in a social world which seems to be dissolving and fragmenting, where nothing is real and the real, including the romanticised notions of the Cornish Riviera and Cornwall itself, is nothing more than a manufactured commodity. It is interesting to note that in a recent tourist guide published by North Cornwall District Council (2000) (incidentally the most ‘anglicised’ area of Cornwall, most of its place names being Saxon rather than Celto/Cornish i.e. Davidstow, Warbstow) work by the Celtic historian P.B Ellis (1974) is presented in a full page article entitled ‘Cornwall: A Land Apart’. The text which is focused on a Celtic explanation is illustrated with photographs of the Gorsedd and of Cornish Bards. The clear intention of this text, which is directly aimed at tourists, is to construct in their minds (and the minds of the Cornish who read the paper) the notion of ‘difference’ and of Celticness as a central tenet of a Cornish identity, indeed the first paragraph tells us that ‘the Cornish people of today have a fierce sense of belonging to a different nation’ (Coastlines and Countryside News 2000:4).

This ‘fierce sense’ of belonging is maintained through the everyday flagging of Cornish signs, ideas, sentiment and identity politics. For example: Ellis (1968:184) notes (even in the late 1960’s) more Cornish are wearing the kilt made with the Cornish Tartan and he cites a poem by Gwas Gwethernok, a Cornish poet:
From Celtic Cornwall’s Tartan bright
Shines Piran’s Cross all blazing white
- On Nation’s Flag we bear it!

The Kilt of black and saffron swings
Tints blazoned by her Ancient Kings
- Brave Cornishmen, we bear it!

O’er blue Atlantic breakers rough
Sours –crimson beaked – the sable Chough
-Embodied Arthur’s Sprit…

These nine lines succinctly encompass many of the tools available to the competent cultural entrepreneur. Here the poet supports his claim for a Cornish identity through the use of history with the references to the ‘Ancient Kings’ and the ‘Brave Cornishmen’ who fought the English - both on the fields of battle and more recently, symbolically at Twickenham. This use of history adds authenticity to the poets’ interpretation of Cornishness. Mythology in the name of Arthur is another banal sign which Billig (1995) notes ‘is a much repeated theme in writings’ (p.77). More contemporary signs of Cornishness are referred to when the poet calls to our attention the tartan, Piran’s cross and the flag of Cornwall. It is important to note here that tartan (the Scottish version) was, according to McCrone (1995) ‘”made” for the modern world in the relatively short time between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century’ (McCrone, 1995:51). Its function was to ‘signify the mystery of primitive society’ (ibid.).
Mr. C: (Retired Chemist from Chasewater. Cornish Bard). The kilt…It is a modern thing. This is something which is like wearing a badge almost. Some people like to use the tartan, or in my case the black kilt, which is a little offshoot, as a proper garb to wear on certain occasions. The black kilt was started by Tallick who was Grand Bard untill 1966 and he had the notion that it would be nice to have a Cornish kilt in association with other Celtic countries

Here we find crosscutting themes of myth and history. The use of the tartan is a ‘staged authenticity’ (McCrone, 1995) which seems to echo historical images but are mythical constructs which, as Samuel and Thompson note (in McCrone, 1995:207), are ‘constantly reworked to make sense of memories and lives’. Nevertheless other Cornish writers would suggest that the tartan custom seems to have persisted among the Celtic weavers to at least the time of the Norman Conquest. And that evidence of the Cornish tartan can be found on several ancient bench-ends in Cornish churches engraved with kilted figures – one playing the bagpipes.
Mr. C: (Retired Chemist from Chasewater. Cornish Bard). and he took as his inspiration a certain bench end in Alturnun Church, a man playing the bagpipes and he looks as if he’s wearing a kilt…It was a symbolic sort of thing…Cornish tartan was a later thing which was devised and made and had caught on and since then there have been other tartans which look rather attractive…It is a garb which one puts on to show one’s identity.
Mr. D: (Unemployed from Liskeard) I also think that the wearing of tartans and kilts in some ways is a good thing because it’s visible and it’s like waving the flag. It’s something different. It shows people you are defining your own identity and you’re not having it defined by others…It also increases the public consciousness
Mr. L: (Council Worker from Cambourne): …if you want to let people know who you are and if you’re proud of the fact that you are something and if there’s some form of dress that shows who you are then why not wear it?
Keith: (Ex Bank Manager now student living in Plymouth) The tartan they’ve got at the moment isn’t a real one it was manufactured a few years back. They used to wear kilts which I gather were weaved skirts. I’d probably wear a kilt now…the dress does give a bit of identity. I think the true kilt has been lost in realms of Victorianism. They used to wear them in the 17, 10 hundreds but the modern day version is very nice but realistically I don’
Mrs. L: (Shopworker from Newquay) Everybody’s doing it [wearing tartans and kilts] It’s like the renewal of the Cornish accent, everybody’s doing it. I think a lot of those symbols are fabricated by middle class English people that romanticise Cornwall and are used by elite Cornish groups of people, academics, political elites to try and establish Cornwall and they do it not for their own personal benefit but …for the group
The call to St. Piran and the Cornish flag which carries the cross of St. Piran provides, as Billig suggests (1995:41) a blatant call to nationhood. The flag which is a black banner with the white cross of the tinner's saint Piran is meaningful as it is claimed that it is the banner which led many a Cornish rebellion. It is a flag that has become more evident around Cornwall and the white cross emblem is currently being used as a potent symbol of the rejection of English heritage.
Mr. R: (Mineworker from Pool). We’ve got a Cornish flag in the house, which we got at Twickenham. I would like to have a flagpole and fly the Cornish flag.
Rob (interviewer) What would that be showing?
Mr. R: (Mineworker from Pool).Showing the world that I’m Cornish and proud of it.
Mark: (Landlord from Wadebridge) You can put up a flagpole without planing permission and fly the Union flag. You put up a flag pole and put a St. Piran’s flag and that’s advertising and needs planning permission. I say “no chance”. I’m stupid enough at my age and I’ve got the time and the contentment to go to court and say I am Cornish, my birth certificate, my fathers birth certificate, my mothers birth certificate and I can’t fly my own flag?
I’ve got two or three pairs of flags that I wear on jackets and it surprises me now the number of people that have got small St. Piran’s flags. So we’re actually coming out of the woodwork. There are people prepared to show their Cornishness.

The success of the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneur’s’ identity project can be measured by the current profile of Cornish identity. Perhaps one of the most significant factors is the fact that the government, through the 2001 census, will now collate Cornish identity. As the result of a long campaign people who choose to describe themselves as Cornish on the Census in 2001 will be captured on the central database. For the first time, the Cornish will be able to have information from the Census comparing the Cornish cultural group with other groups in British society. Also another success, as I have noted above, is the recognition by English Heritage of the discontent shown by many Cornish people over the signage at many Cornish heritage sites which will now be re-signed.
Politically Mebyon Kernow started a campaign for a Cornish Assembly on the grounds that:
Cornwall is a distinct region. It has a clearly defined economic, administrative and social profile. Cornwall's unique identity reflects its Celtic character, culture and environment. We declare that the people of Cornwall will be best served in their future governance by a Cornish regional assembly. We therefore commit ourselves to setting up the Cornish Constitutional Convention with the intention of achieving a devolved Cornish Assembly - Senedh Kernow.
The petition has been signed by 7 MPs, 2 MEPs, 28 county councillors and 93 district councillors and at 10th May 2001 the number of people to have signed the petition was 45,000. Numerous courses are being set up in the South West region and Cornwall that allows for the study of Cornish culture and history, some leading to the award of MA by the University of Exeter. Other courses focus on the Cornish language, history and culture. The ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ cited above teach many of these courses. A whole cultural movement has been generated by the influence of these few intellectuals who have the ability to interpret the cultural artefacts that they construct or re-create. For example, to mark the millennium, a book edited by Philip Payton called Cornwall For Ever! (2000) has been presented to every young person aged eighteen and under in Cornwall (some 83,000). This book purports to tell the story of Cornwall and its people over the last 1,000 years.

Thus these ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ play a key role in the maintenance of everyday life in marginal areas and in particular where identity is contested. Post-modern identity, while being fluid, fragmented, organic, marginal and contested and so on, still is a social phenomenon. That these identities are social constructions is not the issue here and is accepted. By recognising how the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ are able to set ‘identity agendas’ through the ‘manipulation and management’ of symbols and signs we can start to understand how people come to make identity claims which are often conflicting and confusing.

Gergen (1995:15) makes the point that such identity claims are made through the use of:
historical traditions, [which are] fortified by social networks, sewn together by literary tropes, legitimated through rhetorical devices, and operated in the service of particular ideologies to fashion structures of power and privilege.

More importunately is that these claims are what Gergen calls ‘street ready’ and can be paraphrased within the ‘argots of political activism’. This has been outlined above. Identity no longer is an essential part of us as the Enlightenment intellectuals would have posited. Identity today is about living together and making sense of a world that is rapidly fragmented and is understood through the electronic gaze of the mediascope. Images are disjointed and distorted, so too are our identity cues. The cultural entrepreneurs work to re-focus our gaze, to provide new cues and markers, to infiltrate the social memory, to make us remember what we once were, and what we are now before, as Baudrillard tells us, we succumbed to the faceless masses.

Chapter 4, The Management and Manipulation of the Cornish Identity

2005-11-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

Chapter Four.
The Management and Manipulation of the Cornish Identity
There is in general no guarantee of the correctness of our memory: and yet we yield to the compulsion to attach belief to its data far more often than is objectively justified (Freud 1900)
The past is what you remember, imagine or remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember. (Adler, 1974)
...the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy -- it is always the production of an ‘image’ of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image.... identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an ‘image’ of totality [my emphasis]. (Bhabha, H. 1986:xvi-xvii).
Joy: (Writer from Truro) it really is people like Bernard [Deacon] and the Old Cornwall and the Mebyon Kernow that have bought the consciousness of that into being.
Mr. D: (Unemployed from Liskeard. Cornish Bard) There have been some people working on histories of Cornwall. Phillip Payton, John Jenkin did a history for school kids…There’s a lot of stuff that’s been consciously researched and revived and grabbed before it got lost. People like Moira Davey have stopped it from sliding down the plughole…
Mrs. B: (Retired living in Plymouth) I’m referring to the An Gof thing. It’s amazing what enthusiasm was roused for it that is entirely historical in origin. That march would never have happened it it wasn’t for history intensifying feelings of being Cornish.

The chapter above outlines the role of the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ in the production of culture and in particular of identity. I am suggesting that identity becomes managed and manipulated by these ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ rather than being implicitly remembered or being sui generis to the individual or community. For the purposes of this section I intend to show how the Cornish identity is being constructed in its modern form by the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs who focus upon both language and history as the crucial markers of the Cornish identity.

I have mentioned above how Renan shows us how the group recollection of Gaulish, Franckish, Burgundian, Norman, etc. were obliterated by the French. It is this type of imposed social amnesia I argue was also at work in England. The notion of the English State and the English identity is a relatively modern creation which is currently itself the subject of regeneration by a new generation of English cultural entrepreneurs such as Paxman (1999), Marr (2000) and so on. Paxman for instance insists that the English have established a 'new nationalism', which is 'modest, individualistic, ironistic, solipsistic, concerned as much with cities and regions as with counties and countries' (Paxman 1998: 235, 263-5). There seems to be a consensus that the English are suffering an identity crisis because the previous connection between English and British identity is collapsing. As Paxman (1999) has commented:
The `imperial English' did not have to think too hard about whether being
`English' was the same as being `British': the terms were interchangeable.
Nowadays nothing will so infuriate a Scot as to confuse the terms English and
British, for England's Celtic neighbours are increasingly for striking out on their own. (1999: vii)

Social and Cultural Memory
Andrew Marr (2000) suggests that England is made up of half-remembered stories and that it is a fake, mis-remembered place, (Observer Review, 30 January 2000: 3). Built on narrative and memories of war stories, imperial guilt and disappeared green acres, of a type of ‘Rule Britannia’ nationalism which makes liberals flinch. As Lowenthal (1985:197) tells us remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity but ‘ …memories are often a dubious guide to the past’ (p.200). Psychologists (Conway 1997) as well as historians tell us that memories can be wrong and in fact sometimes they can be very wrong. Memories can also be forgotten and later remembered with surprising consequences. Memories too according to the psychologists (Ribot 1882, Conway 1990), can be incomplete and not literal records of what happened but rather are interpretations of experiences. Memories tend to also preserve what is relevant. (Conway, 1990).
All awareness of the past is founded on memory. Through recollection we recover consciousness of former events, distinguish yesterday from today, and confirm that we have experienced a past’ (Lowenthal, 1985:193.)

History then is the preserve of social memory together with the other sites of social memory – museums, archives, festivals and the like (See Urry, 1990) These are fundamentally the remains of the past, the embodiments of a memorial consciousness. The role of history, according to Lowenthal (1985) is to extend and elaborate memory by interpreting the relics and to perpetuate collective self-awareness (p. 213). However memories are also altered by revision, work by the psychologist Neisser (1982; 1994) points to the fact that memory is anything but a photographic record of experience but it is:
…a roadway full of potholes, badly in need of repair, worked on day and night by revisionist crews.

So the reconstructions of memory, both individual and social, are subject to the process of reconstruction through narrative structures. Memory then becomes plastic; it is pliable and subject to change. It is because of this tendency to change that we have social cues to remind us of particular times and events such as institutions, calendars, rituals and other similar practices which engender collective remembering (Connerton 1989). Durkheim (1912) for example, tells us that social systems have the need for some consensus story to link the historical bonds of their members and thereby provide a sense of collective identity. From this tradition, the focus is on how social solidarity is obtained through cultural transmissions of central stories in religious observances (e.g., Zerubavel, 1982), political commemorative rituals (e.g., Kearl & Rinaldi, 1982), traditions (Shils, 1981), and school history texts (e.g., Ellison, 1964) and so on. In the main these stories underline the remembrance of ancestors who epitomise the social ideals of the group, legitimate contemporary causes, and provide benchmarks for how we understand ourselves and our shared endeavours. Thus as Gramsci so pointedly tells us political regimes use history as one of the tools of cultural hegemony. Specific and partisan histories are taught in schools and colleges as part of the socialisation process on acquiring a national identity. Also outsiders who would wish to assimilate would need to learn and accept such histories as their own. Home Office ministers in Britain for example believe that immigrants settled in Britain who apply for British citizenship should be able to demonstrate a "modest grasp" of English and a simple test of their understanding of British democracy and culture. (The Guardian December 10, 2001)

Thus, the memory of the past is not only influenced but is constituted by the social contexts of the present (Middleton and Edwards 1990; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Samuel 1994). This position is expressed by David Bakhurst who claims (1990: 219f.), referring to the work of the Soviet theorist of language V.N.Voloshinov that
…to remember is always to give a reading of the past, a reading which requires linguistic skills derived from the traditions of explanation and story-telling within a culture and which [presents] issues in a narrative that owes its meaning ultimately to the interpretative practices of a community of speakers. This is true even when what is remembered is one's own past experience... [The] mental image of the past ... becomes a phenomenon of consciousness only when clothed with words, and these owe their meaning to social practices of communication.
So all that matters are the specific conditions under which such memory is constructed as well as the personal and social implications of the memories held (Berger 1963; Thelen 1989: 1125; Fentress and Wickham 1992: XI). The distinction between individual and cultural memory is thus not necessarily a sharp one. Both reflect first and foremost the conditions of the present in which they originate (Geary 1994: 10-12, 19-20).
Cultural Memory
This cultural memory renders it possible for later generations to reconstruct their cultural identity by using references to the past, to reassure the members of a society of their collective identity and supply them with an awareness of their unity and singularity in time and space—i.e. an historical consciousness—by creating a shared past John Elsner writes:
What matters ... is not that [a particular account of the past] be correct by our standards or anyone else's, but that it be convincing to the particular group of individuals ... for whom it serves as an explanation of the world they inhabit. (Elsner, 1994:226)

In other words, we are not concerned with 'real facts' or even a coherent methodology, but rather with a generalised agreement that the assumptions and prejudices of the cultural entrepreneur is shared by the audience. According to Lowenthal (1985) we see the past in our own terms and ‘revise what previous interpreters have seen in their terms, and reshape artefacts and memories accordingly’. (Lowenthal, 1985:325). This allows us to replace inadequate or uncomfortable pasts and add to what may be deemed to be an inadequate past. We will do this to justify our present actions and activities, to enhance group solidarity, to defend the group from outside influences and to validate power.

Some examples of changed memories and changing history are the Ijesha in Nigeria who made up historical references in order to strengthen specific political interests (Peel 1984). Similarly, Borofsky showed how 'ancient traditions' of an island community in the Pacific were invented during the 1970s—between the visits of two anthropologists. Another case-study has been given by Appadurai (1981) who discussed how different pasts are constructed in a south Indian temple; he argued at the same time that the past is never infinitely susceptible to contemporary invention but constrained by a set of formal norms which govern the discourse about the past.
Thomas Hauschild showed in his study of a community and its St. Donatus cult in southern Italy (1992) that traditions are also being invented in contemporary Europe. Likewise, the Popular Memory Group (1982) investigated how the past is constructed in popular memory in Britain. An alternative and much more common historical argument emphasises how past events are subject to reconstruction which emphasises some sort of an idealised past. Positive references to past events, which often involve references to a past cultural primacy, can reassure present-day identities and support particular social and political values.
We must include all the ways in which a sense of the past is constructed in our society. These do not necessarily take a written or literary form. Still less do they conform to academic standards or canons of truthfulness. Academic history has a particular place in a much larger process. In this collective production everyone participates, though unequally. Everyone, in this sense, is a historian. Popular Memory Group (1982:207)
However, the notion that memories and histories are changed implies that much is forgotten and replaced by new or re-invented traditions and cultures. When history is revised it transforms what actually happened into that which we would have liked to have happened. Thus, for example, ancient relics and places become symbols of a lost past imbued with a social memory that helps those in the present remember. Ancient monuments for example, the standing stones of Cornwall, are sites of memory (Schnapp 1996: 13; Demoule 1998) as are the 'Gorsedd Circles' in Wales. These circles are references to the prehistoric past in which stone circles were also built. They become sites of memory because they are created while remembering, and that includes interpreting and/or re-creating, an ancient tradition in a new context. It is well-known that the traditions of The Gorsedd of Bards, with its ceremonies taking place in a freshly built stone circle, were (literally)invented, like other parts of 'Welsh culture', by a Welsh stonemason turned poet and scholar, Edward Williams or Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826; see Morgan 1975; Gibson 2000). These re-inventions were then borrowed by the Cornish who used them for the same purposes as the Welsh.

That is they transport the past into our everyday lives and become foci for our cultural memory. According to Nora (1989), however, these sites are not common in all cultures and are exclusively a phenomenon of our modern time. Sites of memory replace a 'real' and 'true' living memory which was with us for millennia but now has ceased to exist (cf. Maier 1993). In Nora's view, a constructed history replaces true memory. Sites of memory are artificial, and deliberately fabricated. They exist to help us recall the past – which is perhaps necessary in order to make living in the modern world meaningful. The purpose of sites of memory is "to stop time, to block the work of forgetting", and they all share "a will to remember" (Nora 1989: 19).

It is these memory sites that have been attacked by Cornish activists aggrieved by English Heritage claiming them as part of an English culture whereas the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs and activists would claim them as part or the Cornish/Celtic culture. So places such as archives, museums, cathedrals, palaces, cemeteries, and memorials together with concepts and practices such as commemorations, generations, mottoes, and all other local rituals work along with other banal objects such as inherited property, commemorative monuments, manuals, emblems, basic texts, and symbols as the identity markers of a particular memory community.

According to Berger and Luckmann (1980) remembering the past is very significant in the socialisation of individuals and contributes decisively to the formation of their identities. Collective identities often refer to the heritage of a distant past i.e. the past beyond individual memory, and beyond the memory of other contemporaneous individuals. The distant past is particularly important for marginal groups as it carries particular weight within the culture of each present, because what happened in it is removed from the sphere of the everyday, and is a particularly crucial part of the collective memory of a society . So sites of memory and the other references to the past can support and enhance the cultural identities of groups, on a local, regional, national, supranational or even global level (see Clark 1960, Lowenthal 1985: 41-46; Friedman 1992, Kristiansen 1993: 13-28, Ashworth 1994, Atkinson et al. 1996). The underlying reasoning is usually that "long memories can make great people" (Lowenthal 1985: 393).

Cornish Memory
Material items are continually being reinterpreted and given new meanings in new contexts (Hodder 1994: 398).

Recent events in Cornwall have brought to the fore the tension between the nature of ‘official’ history and the symbolism of identity markers and the meaning placed upon them by the central bureaucracy and the meaning placed upon them by the cultural entrepreneurs. During 2000, the Bailiff of the Cornish Stannary Parliament, citing as authority the Stannary Charter of Pardon of 1508, confiscated 18 English Heritage signs at archaeological sites in Cornwall. The reasons given for this was that ‘ Pre-English archaeological sites of Celtic Cornwall are falsely described as the heritage of the English people for English racial advantage’. (See http://www.cornish-stannary-parliament.abelgratis.com/page37.html). The crux of the argument is that English Heritage, being officially known as the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, had a remit from the English government, which according to the Cornish Stannery Parliament, is tantamount to cultural imperialism at its worst.

Removal of sign at Trethevy Quoit, St Cleer Removal of sign at Bollowal Barrow, St. Just

Such historic timemarks as the standing stones and ancient sites of Cornwall, refer to a distinctive time in the past when a particular event or process was said to have taken place. These monuments provide for those claiming an identity an important and long-living link to the past, and are crucial to the inhabitants, whether indigenous or not. They enable them to create a narrative about themselves that has some coherence and authenticity in order to establish an identity and legitimise their claims to the land or to the rule over it (Evans 1985; Hughes 1995). John Chapman suggests (1997: 37) that
…there is much ideological potential in assuming the role of descendants to an unrelated group's ancestors, thereby legitimating the 'new' foundation. Thus old sites can return to life, rather like the ancestral spirits of the deceased, to restart the cycle of occupation, dis-use and re-occupation. (Chapman, 1997)
Thus, these ancient monuments, and the other signs and symbols of identity become reference points and identity markers that influence new agendas and create new meanings. We have seen above how an Irish identity narrative was created and maintained by the Irish cultural entrepreneurs who, as I have shown, had at hand more identifiable identity markers than the Cornish upon which they could make their claims. The Cornish cultural entrepreneur is faced with a more uncertain project for many of the more distinct identity markers have disappeared and the Cornish identity had to a larger extent been assimilated into the English identity through many years of cultural imperialism and economic assimilation.

However, despite the markers of identity not being so distinct as the Irish the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs have used both the arena of the Cornish language and Cornish history as evidence that a Cornish identity exists. As I show in the next chapter, which is a historiography of Cornwall written by the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs, much is to be made of the way in which the relationship between the English and the Cornish has played out over the centuries. And it is this historical and linguistic narrative which underlines much of the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs’ argument concerning the nature and the on-going salience of the Cornish identity.
Historical intelligibility requires not merely past events occurring at particular times, but a coherent story in which many events are skipped, others are coalesced, and temporal sequence is often subordinated to explanation and interpretation –historical narratives back-track to clarify casual connections (Lowenthal, 1985:223)
This new focus upon Cornishness, within the last twenty years, by the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs has created a world-wide narrative that has focused attention upon the Cornish identity. As Cornish society became fragmented and assimilated into the English culture and their argots diffused, the ‘facts of the matter’, of identity became temporally dissociated from the practice of negotiation, the path to the truth about history is progressively lost. The continued focus by the cultural entrepreneurs upon an unequal relationship between the Cornish and the English creates a narrative which shapes the way the embryonic community thinks about themselves. History and community become inextricably intertwined but it is this beginning of narratives about themselves which signals the beginning of community.

So, for example, Cornish cultural entrepreneurs within the Cornish Stannary Parliament make the claim that from 1337 to 1838 the Duchy of Cornwall charged, with parliamentary approval, a double tax on tin production in Cornwall. This was done because, according to the Stannary Parliament, the Cornish were classified as Celts (See Lewis, 1965 ) This claim brings into focus the continued claim of ‘difference’ and the unequal relationships between Cornwall and England. To underline this antagonism in May 2000, the Cornish Stannary Parliament invoiced the Duchy of Cornwall for £20 Billion in overcharged tax. (See http://www.cornish-stannary-parliament.abelgratis.com/page11.html).

The Cornish Language – an identity marker

The most evident of the identity markers that were lost to the indigenous population was the language. Native Cornish speakers were subjected to the imposition of an English prayer book and bible that saw the start of the demise of the language. This act of overt cultural imperialism enraged the Cornish to the extent that they raised an army and marched on London. In January 1549 Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity enforcing the use of the Book of Common Prayer across the country, this provided for a simplified form of service in English instead of the old Latin Mass to which the people of Cornwall had been accustomed for centuries. The Prayer Book was first used on Whitsunday but within days the Cornish were demanding their traditional masses. The Cornish marched to Exeter and made the claim ‘and so we Cornishmen, whereof certain of us understand no English, utterly refuse this new English’.

The dissolution of Glasney College during the reformation also impacted upon the death of the Cornish language as much as the imposition of the prayer book. Glasney, like other famous religious establishments throughout Britain, monasteries, priories, friaries and chantries, was the victim of Henry VIII's takeover of the English Church in the 1530s and 1540s. The unique thing about the performances at Glasney and other churches in the land was that they were in the Cornish language. Many of the works held at Glasney were from the late Middle Ages, only a few plays survive and those in Cornish "The Creation of the World", "The Passion of our Lord", "The Resurrection of our Lord", "Bewnans Meriasek" (The Life of St Meriasek - the patron saint of Camborne), all seem to have been connected with the college, and may well have been composed there. (Whetter, 2000).

More recently AGAN TAVAS a Cornish language group have outlined the continued political and institutional hostility (as they see it) towards the Cornish language over the last twenty years these include:
· The denial of Cornish language tuition to children whose first language is Cornish by Cornwall County Council.
· The refusal by Cornwall Council to survey Cornish parents to assess demand for Cornish language tuition.
· Continual delays and prevarication by the British government in recognising the Cornish language under the European Charter for Regional and Minority languages.
· Failure to identify the language as an area of culture to be promoted and protected in official documentation by Southwest English governmental bodies and the removal of references to the Cornish language and culture in Cornwall's Objective 1 documentation for economic, social and cultural recovery.
· Deletion of Cornish language phrases in promotional material by Cornwall Council.
· Suppression of Cornish language place names on official signs in favour of obscure place names in English by the Department of Transport and Cornwall Council.
· Continual failure to respond to letters and requests for meetings or to recognise Cornish language organisations when dealing with cultural proceedings.
(See http://www.clas.demon.co.uk/html/body_about_cornish.htm)

This is underlined by the government recently scrapping the Cornish GCSE in schools whereas in Wales pupils who speak Welsh are able to take this sort of formal examination and who by the end of Key Stage 3 should be able to use the spoken language correctly and generate writing which displays depth and imagination. (A Parents Guide to the National Curriculum. The National Assembly for Wales, 2002)

The success of the language narrative and the focus on the historical death of the language was most recently revealed when Cornish people recently commemorated the 400 anniversary of the 1549 rebellion by re-enacting the march to Exeter following this with a service of dedication to the 4,000 Cornish dead. This re-newed interest in the history of Cornwall and in the Cornish language as sites of resistance against the perceived English imperialism is an important tool for the cultural entrepreneur in the maintenance and management of the Cornish identity. The Cornish Gorsedd, for instance, claim that Cornishness is exclusively located in the language (Brace, 1999:130).
The gorsedd provides a focus for Cornish nationality and allegiance. ( Grand Bard George Ansell)

Within Cornwall, Cornish speakers can attend many events to meet other Cornish speakers. There are leisure activities - both formally organised and entirely informal, there are shops which will sell to you in Cornish - and others which sign, label and brand their goods in Cornish. Thus Cornish is starting to have business uses where a network of Cornish speakers is using the language once again for everyday purposes. (EKOS 2000: 22)

Research by EKOS (2000) tells that the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ active in the initial revival of Cornish were educated and middle class, this later revival however, ‘has broadened considerably in social spread’ (EKOS, 2000:18) as more people take up the language and the Cornish narrative spreads. Cornish is now found in ‘new domains of everyday life’ such as the arts, the media, public signage and language display all of which represents domains of ‘particular importance for the ‘visibility of Cornish’ (EKOS, 2000:25). Over 40 organisations[1] are involved within Cornwall promoting Cornish language and Cornish culture.

The Cornish Language - the search for authenticity
In parallel with the Celtic revival in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Cornish historians and academics had started to take an interest in the forgotten language and culture. By 1901 a group of these interested parties had formed a society which they called Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak (The Celtic-Cornish Society). It was this new focus upon all things Celtic and Cornish that underpinned the work on the Cornish Language.

In 1904 Henry Jenner had published his Handbook of the Cornish Language. This was the first book to be aimed, not just at interested academics, but at the ordinary person and was the main source for Cornish learners at that time. Jenner was central to this Celtic/Cornish renaissance in as much as he was influential in the setting up of the Cornish Gorsedd. By 1907 he had written the ceremonies in Cornish but had to wait until 1928 before there was enough interest to make the Gorsedd a viable event. Jenner was inaugurated as the first Grand Bard.

By the 1920s, however, there was some dissatisfaction with the Cornish Language as Jenner perceived it. In particular, there was some unease over the discrepancies in spelling and the lack of a modern vocabulary. Morton-Nance, another leader of the Cornish revival, studied Jenner’s form of the language, known as ‘middle Cornish’ and created a unified set of principles for spelling, phonology and grammar. This development of the language is known as ‘Unified Cornish’.

This development was very successful for the life of the language and much of the modern Cornish language literature has used this form. Many Cornish language classes were set up and Cornish-English and English-Cornish dictionaries were published in 1938 by Nance. Unified Cornish was at the centre of the revival which continued unabated throughout the century to the 1980s. In the 1980s there was a new discontent with perceived inaccuracies with Nance’s spelling system. The debates raised cause much acrimony in the Cornish camp and the Cornish movement fragmented into three main groups.

One group continued to use Nance’s Unified Cornish which is based upon the fragments of texts that still exist from the Middle Cornish period (1200-1600). Another group abandoned this form of the language and based their form on a later form of the language as was spoken in the fishing villages of West Cornwall before it died out. This is known as ‘Modern/Late Cornish’. The third group, which is the largest of all the language users uses a form of the language developed from Nance’s use of middle Cornish but have altered unified Cornish to create a more precise system of pronunciation and uses phonetic spelling which is easier to learn. It is called Kernewek Kemmyn (Common Cornish).

In 1995 the Cornish language movement fragmented even more when the debate over the base of the revived language was rejoined. It was argued that Kernewek Kemmyn was ‘faulty from the phonetic point of view and its orthography leaves much to be desired’ (Williams 1995). The new proposal from Williams concerning the new spelling system was to be called Unified Cornish Revised.

The whole nature of the fragmentation of the Cornish language is tied up in the search for authenticity. Deacon (1996) tells us that within the whole Cornish language movement ‘there is a number of possibilities all of which may be relatively ‘authentic’ according to their own lights’ (p102.) Each of the language groups look to a particular historical period to which they attribute the authenticity of their claim to be a proper representation of the Cornish language.

For example, Unified Cornish, using Ken George’s new spelling system is based upon the Cornish language as it was used around 1500 (George 1986). Others preferred to use pronunciation in vogue around 1690 (although I am not quite sure how the pronunciation of a dead language can be replicated), while Williams (1995) Unified Cornish Revised has at ‘it’s focus Tregears Homilies of 1555’ (Deacon 1996:90).

The quest for authenticity is at the centre of the antagonism between the (somewhat small) group of Cornish language enthusiasts. Each camp has made their claim for authenticity and work hard to protect that claim, so for example when the Cornish Language Board accepted George’s new spelling, it was done ‘for the sake of the authenticity of the language’. Deacon tells us (1996) that those who supported Kernewek Kemmyn did not adopt the new spelling because they opposed ‘the use of invented forms of the language which lack any historical authenticity’ (Deacon 1996:99). And those who allied themselves with Modern Cornish argued that their version had unique access to an authentic historical system of pronunciation and intonation (Deacon 1996:99). Deacon goes on to suggest that for the Modern Cornish supporters ‘authenticity is the most desirable quality of a revived language’ (ibid.). Those who support the most recent version of Cornish, Unified Cornish Revived, explain the need for such reforms ‘in the interests of authenticity’ and ask the reader to judge which version of the ‘modern orthographies looks the more authentic’ (Deacon 1996:99).

These claims for authenticity reflect the post-modern disenchantment with the modernist world of the Enlightenment (Dunn, 1994, Baudrillard, 1988) We find ourselves in a world of uncertainties, risk and doubt and as Dunn (1994) tells us, social and cultural movements are now at odds with the social order. These ‘authentic’ constructions are challenging the modern conceptions of the world, the grand narratives that in the past imposed order and certainty with interpretations and discourses that re-focus understanding and action onto the community, tradition and self-determination (Dunn, 1991:115).

The insistence upon authenticity lays claim to and re-claims the very essence of the language, history, tradition, cultural events, symbols in question. Such claims for authenticity become a viable testimony of a history that has a discernible beginning and a substantive duration from which the essence can be distilled. Once the essence is re-presented it allows for ‘authentic’ claims to be made where the representation is contested. It allows for negative contestations to be replaced with images that are positive. It is the case that the more authentic a thing is the more unique and original it can be. For the language argument we can see in the struggle for ‘authenticity’ the attempts to offer a model of a Cornish language which is fully constituted, separate and distinct when measured against the others which by implication’ are inauthentic, un-constituted and un-original.

It is clear however, that the past cannot be recovered; it is lost to us. What is available to us are representations and diverse readings of the past. When we look back we are faced with a world which has been artificially preserved and reconstructed. It is an imaginary past, which despite the attempts of historians, cannot be reconstituted. What is reconstructed becomes more real than the real. It is a manufactured past that for Baudrillard becomes the hyper-real. Baudrillard tells us that there is no longer any real to be discovered only illusions of the real and there is no illusion either. Simulation devours the real; it involves feigning and faking and leaves nothing behind but commutating signs, ‘self-referring simulacra which feign a relation to an obsolete real’. (Best, 1994)
The hyperreal is the end result of a historical simulation process where the natural world and all its referents are gradually replaced with technology and self-referential signs (Best 1994:53)

So the signs of the Cornish language authenticity are little more than illusions and illusions which, according to Baudrillard, do not exist. The Cornish linguists for example claim that their particular version of Cornishness is more ‘authentic’ than the other versions because it is based upon pronunciations used by ‘authentic’ Cornish speakers. That these speakers lived in the 15th or 16th Century and that we have no way of accessing the pronunciation of the language at that time seems to have escaped the Cornish linguists. So any discussion of a Cornish language based upon these criteria must simply be an illusion. For these illusions do not refer beyond themselves in any way to an existing and knowable world. This is simply a retreat into an imaginary past that represents the lack of creative activity by remembering and reviving.

Consequently, in the arena of Cornish language ‘politics’, a plurality of authenticities is created (Deacon 1996:100), which as Deacon (1996) suggests, and I concur with him, makes any notion of authenticity become simply meaningless. Nevertheless, what we can learn from the Cornish language debate is how this type of fragmentation is an important marker for the diffusionist shape of Cornish identity. It goes some way to locating Cornishness and Cornish identity within far wider frames of reference than the essentialist writers would have it.

The re-interpretation of history
As a response to the Cornish remembrance of the 1497 rebellion English Heritage produced a re-enactment at Restormel Castle. However this is seen in Cornwall as portraying the Cornish as ‘nasty, wicked rebels against a good English king and religion’. (See http://www.cornish.heritage.care4free.net/page15.htm). History is often re-written and altered. Past events and actors are subjectively chosen for who and what they represent. It is notable in the annals of English history how little Cornish events and influential Cornish people appear. For example when we consider the Cornish prayer book rebellion noted above, little is said in the history books about the three times within the space of fifty years that the Cornish had risen against the English Crown, on one occasion marching as far as Blackheath where once again they were decimated by the English army. More recently in June 1997, Cornish marchers once again gathered on Blackheath common in London having followed the original route to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the first Cornish rebellion.

Further, it is an issue of some contention in Cornwall that Richard Trevithick has been most successfully written out of the history books. In 1804, Richard Trevithick first harnessed a steam engine to a wagon, but it is George Stevenson, who is called the father of steam locomotion. This is despite the fact that Trevithick had demonstrated, in 1801, the world's first self-propelled, passenger carrying vehicle through the streets of Camborne. This high pressure steam-driven vehicle was the world's first car and every car, train and ship in the world today can trace its ancestry back to that one journey through the streets of Camborne. Today in Cornwall these engineers and great feats of engineering, of whom it might be said that the industrial revolution may have taken a different course if it were not for them, are celebrated and lionised in Cornwall.

The creation of a Cornish narrative to counter such historical revisionism is based upon a revived and re-interpreted history which has relatively new beginnings. There is no contention here that some of the older Cornish festivals such as the Obby Oss and the Furry days have helped to maintain a distinctive culture. Nevertheless, Trevithick Day was only established in Camborne in 1983, while a statue to ‘An Gof’ - Michael Joseph and Thomas Flamank - legendary leaders of the Cornish Uprising in 1497 was unveiled on May 24th 1997. The marches (noted above) to Exeter and to Blackheath commemorating the successive Cornish rebellions received much press coverage in Cornwall and England creating a Cornish consciousness which was much in evidence at later events such as the closing of the last tin mine at South Crofty and the closing of the Tamar bridge when over 1,000 Cornish people held a mass rally against unemployment on July 26, 1998 symbolically closing the Tamar Bridge, linking Cornwall with England.

Other more public symbols that reflect the partisan history promulgated by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ have gained more currency as part of the Cornish narrative. Items such as Cornish Rebellion beer which was brewed to commemorate the 1497 tax rebellion provide drinkers with a banal sign of Cornish identity as do the black and gold rugby shirts and St. Pirans flag that have become much evident at ‘Cornish’ events such as the rugby. Car stickers, badges and flags have become much more evident as a Cornish narrative is produced by the cultural entrepreneurs has become more manifest.

It is these constitutive parts of the narrative telling which do more than create conversational realities; they are themselves constituents of ongoing and often institutionalised patterns of societal conduct. These narratives function so as to generate and sustain and disrupt cultural traditions. Austin (1962) tells us we must not only pay attention to the constative character of narrative discourse (its portrayal of the world), but to its performative aspects - what it achieves in the very act of expression. Narration inescapably functions, then, to sustain (and transform) cultural tradition.

These narrative forms themselves become one of the chief means of self-portrayal. The stories we tell about ourselves play a major role in emplotment i.e. how we distinguish between heroes and villains, and so on. Further, these individuals play out their lives within culturally specific forms of narrative, such as the defensive, the tragedy, and difference as outlined above. These forms of emplotment and narrative structure allow the individual to present a coherent story when they are detailing their lives, their identity to others. One can then, and only then, when the narrative has a coherent base, intelligibly describe one's life in terms of a complete historiography or a common progressive narrative.

As historiographers from Mink (1969) and White (1973) to the present have made clear, we inherit a tradition of historical accounting in which history approximates the well formed narrative. Because of the way in which the cultural language has been used to index various ‘events’ people can reach satisfying agreements as to ‘what actually happened,’ and such accounts can be challenged to an extent by various ‘findings.’ It is these ‘findings’ which are supplied by the ‘cultural entrepreneur’, which allow for the Cornish person to make their specific identity claims. However, the standards of these ‘findings’ are often community specific, and the extent to which they can be sustained depends on the continued capacity of the community to negotiate reality together.

It is these two areas of history and language upon which the Cornish narrative turns. In the chapter below and in the section on the Cornish language (above) I show how the cultural entrepreneurs are re-creating memories and re-interpreting and re-writing history. It is in this creating of an intelligible story of ‘what happened,’ by the cultural entrepreneurs, that we can locate important seeds of community. And when communities of intelligibility are formed, so they more effectively generate the kinds of stories that confirm their intelligibility and their relations with each other. This creates the hermeneutic circle as our access to reality is consequently always mediated by a linguistic and conceptual grid (Heidegger 1993). This shows that when we access historical narratives an interpreter must operate between each individual part of a text or story and a previous grasp of the whole text until he/she reaches a full understanding. Thus, history is not something occurring in the past but something being lived in the present, a continuing-to-be, which does not tolerate a romantic notion of recapturing the past.
As the authenticities of such historical or cultural stories become embedded – part of a taken for granted past – so do they serve as an indicator of community solidarity. Memory and forgetting and the creation of an identity narrative can be based on experience but they can also be used strategically to give rise to different interpretations or stories of the past. The recounting of such stories, however, are crucial to the meaning given to the narrative and thus can influence social action. For example, past experience and a specific and partisan reading of history may then provide a basis on which certain stories are articulated. Social memory and forgetting are what is used to form these narratives but as this is not a one-way process, a dominant history, as I have indicated, it can also affect what people remember and forget. The idea that different societies articulate different histories (which may explicitly or implicitly involve histories of other groups) has also been noted by anthropologists (Hastrup 1992). As Herzfeld (1991:226-259) shows in the context of historical preservation, history may be severely contested within a single society.

Social Amnesia
One way we may understand why the past and history is so significant for the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ in Cornwall is through a discussion of social amnesia. Smith (1984), to remind ourselves, contended that common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions are of crucial importance in the creation of a national identity. Of course, we remember that when he was writing this he was considering a State or national identity. Urry (1996:14) picks up on these points and tells us that the common historical memories in the form of ‘heritage’ that most often get remembered are those of the elite or ruling classes. This common civic culture, together with historic territory, legal-political community, legal-political equality of members, are the components of the standard, Western model of the nation. The French writer Renan (1882) singled out what Gellner calls the crucial trait of a nation: the anonymity of membership (Gellner, 1987). A nation being a large collection of people such that its members identify with the collectivity without being acquainted with its other members, and without identifying in any important way with the sub-groups of that collectivity.

I argue that the formation of national identity can be seen as a process of social amnesia - the wiping out of the collective memory of smaller coherent groups together with the old traditions, myths and symbols of such sub-groups. This is done in order to create the common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions of the newly formed and hegemonic state Smith is talking about. For it is these older collective memories, myths symbols and traditions, which would be used as rallying calls to resist the centralising forces of the State.

Sub-groups for Renan are fluid and ephemeral and do not compare in importance with the national community. Renan is arguing that nations and nationalism are not determined by language, geography, race, religion or anything else as does Smith, but upon human will. He argues that to create the modern nation or nationalism, the group has to obliterate any recollection of their original origins. Thus, in his example Renan shows how the French have obliterated the group recollection of Gaulish, Franckish, Burgundian, Norman, and so on. Consequently, I would argue in the same way that in order to create an English identity the same sort of social amnesia had to take place. Past allegiances had to be obliterated from the collective memory of such sub-groups as the Cornish.
…only forgetting enables us to classify and bring chaos into order (Lowenthal, 1985:205)

Unlike Wales and Scotland where the processes of social amnesia seem to have had little effect, it seems to have been more successful in Cornwall than in other parts of the Celtic Fringe. Many of the markers of Cornish identity were almost lost in the forgetting process. It was not until academics such as Nance et al in the 1920s and the more recent cultural entrepreneurs started to take more of an active interest in re-creating and re-inventing a separate and distinct Cornish culture and history that a Cornish identity became more salient to those who identified with it. So the process of resistance to continued social amnesia is much more contemporary and newer in Cornwall than it is in Wales and Scotland. In England itself we are just seeing the emergence of historical memories contesting the dominant notion of what it is to be British. I note below the new focus upon newly created myths, symbols and histories of the English by English cultural entrepreneurs is starting to impact upon how Englishness is thought about. However, research in the Celtic Fringe (Roberts, 1993) notes that amongst the Welsh community there is a 'deeper historical consciousness' which helps to reassert the distinctiveness of life while in Scotland, Cohen (1982:21), also notes the importance of a 'consciously preserved culture' which creates a rhetoric of historical and cultural continuity which masks the forces of change (Cohen, 1982:21). It would seem that the cultural entrepreneurs in Wales and Scotland, as with the Irish, have more cultural and identity markers to which they can use to support identity claims.

The cultural vacuum left by this process of amnesia or memory stripping is filled with what Gramsci (1971) calls the hegemonic culture or the ‘spontaneous’consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group (cf: legislative intellectuals) . 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 (Cohen, 1982:12). So the messages circulated by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ active in dominant groups ‘infect’ our way of thinking about ourselves and about the places we inhabit. New dominant ideas replace older ideas about the self and place. We start to forget about our old allegiances and we are encouraged to create new allegiances with the centre. Marginal and sub-groups might be offered social, political and financial benefits to assimilate. To move from the traditional to the modern is applauded – out with the old in with the new! The modern has value placed upon it while the traditional, the old and the past is consigned to dusty corners of dusty museums. Older customs, older ways of thinking and living become quaint anachronisms. The peripheral, in terms of physical and mental geography become heritage parks – somewhere to visit on vacation, but not somewhere to dwell or inhabit for the present always calls us back.

The Cornish Experience
Much of what is perceived today as Cornish had been re-interpreted, re-invented or simply created by the early Cornish Revivalists (generally Anglicised middle-class academics), who had to some extent, romanticised (i.e. managed and manipulated) the nature of Cornish history and Cornishness itself. Their success is that Cornish identity continues to be managed and manipulated by the contemporary cultural entrepreneurs. As I have shown above even the Cornish language had been reconstructed and continues today to still be in the throes of construction (See Mills 1999: 193-218, Williams, 1999, 219-241 and Everson, 1999, 242-253). Even so, while this identity failed to find political expression in any sort of nationalistic sentiment, a Cornish sense of identity still survived. Payton tells us:
Cornwall remained strikingly different not only from England but even from neighbouring Devon, while Cornish politics singularly failed to participate in the new “alignment” of Conservative versus Labour. (Payton, P. 1989:307).
After the War there was a renewed interest in the affairs of Cornwall. Cornwall’s history was still being romanticised and recovered but there was also a sharper, more academic interest in the industrial experience of the county ‘there emerged a new-found appreciation of the dynamic nineteenth century Cornish identity based upon industrial prowess’ (Payton, 1989:307).
It is then amongst this new more academic interest that we may find the managers of the cultural identity - the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ - those who create, recreate, manage, manipulate, build and sell a particular identity. This new interest and increasing debate raised for many people a political debate which found its expression in a nationalistic movement, Mebyon Kernow, whose principle aim was ‘To maintain the Celtic character of Cornwall and its right to self-government in domestic affairs’, and later the Cornish National Party.

This new Cornish nationalism was in part an attempt to generate a new identity for the Cornish people. Mebyon Kernow declaring its support for the cultural activities of the Cornish raised as a cultural agenda point the whole issue of Cornish identity. The issue of Cornish identity rather than English or British identity was given a new salience and a new impetus within Cornwall by the very act of raising, manipulating and managing Cornish issues in the political arena and in the media. However, Mebyon Kernow's agenda was firmly fixed upon its vision of the Cornish being part of the wider Celtic movement and this became problematic for some people. This dissatisfaction led to the creation of the Cornish Nationalist Party (CNP). Notwithstanding this schism, the consequence of these political movements, despite being described as having a minimal political effect, (Lee in Payton 1993:263) have been implemental in raising the whole ‘forgotten’ issue of Celticness and raising a general awareness of difference which, in its turn, raised the consciousness of a new generation of Cornishmen and women.

The Cornish Poet Alan Kent (1995:31), in his work ‘Out of The Ordinalia’, gives voice to this new consciousness of Cornwall. In reflecting the fourteenth century Ordinalia, (again here we find a cultural entrepreneur seeking authenticity for his work) a cycle of three mystery plays performed in Cornwall, in Cornish he is ‘stepping back into history’. He becomes one of the elite groups of cultural entrepreneurs in Cornwall disseminating ‘new’ memories, creating a ‘new’ heritage, inventing or resurrecting ‘new’ traditions. The following poem works at the level of defending the Cornish against the impact of the hegemonic culture. It reinforces the notion of difference by calling to both the experiences of the past and the present. In one breath Kent links the problems of unemployment faced by the Cornish as their industrial base collapses with the historical past and the Cornish Rebellion lead by Mike Joseph a.k.a. An Gof. He attacks the use of English signifiers in a land that is different. In the poem Kent is attacking the facelessness of modern massification, the homogeneous society, the English Heritageness of it all. He is, in these sixteen lines, creating a Cornish signifier which calls to the ordinary Cornish person to 'put about' these words and spread the word.
He writes:
Here, I am reminded of graffiti:
‘CORNISH JOBS FOR CORNISH WORKERS’ you see.
St. Piran’s flag sprayed on concrete underpass
of the nation that looks up England’s ass
Branch-line bridges in bold read ‘TORIES OUT!’
Words which come quick to mind, to put about,
or elsewhere down at Botallack’s enclave
an ‘ANGOF’ scrawled, on brick walls engrave.
This word denotes Mike Joseph - the Smith,[i]
forged and hammered as linguistic terrorist.
The same spray whitens St. George’s Road
(Another signifier to erode).
Else roses scratched out on English Heritage goo
at Tintagel, Restormel and others too
show this land is different from England
To this imperialism I’ll make a stand.
.
Mestrovic (1994) is warning the west of its forthcoming Balkanization. He already notes the rise of metaphorical ethnic groups in the west and points not only to regional hostilities but other forms of divisiveness amongst other ‘cultural’ minority groups within society. On the level of ethnic groups and pseudo nations such as Cornwall (and one may even argue England), contrary to Fukuyama’s (1993) assertion that we have reached the end of history, history is repeating and reasserting itself in the present. The Cornish identity is a remembered identity, constructed through a ‘remembered and re-interpreted history’, and is constantly reasserting itself. Cornish history is socially managed and manipulated i.e. re-invented, constructed and imagined through what we may call Cornish, rather than English Heritage. A heritage/history re-interpreted, created, managed and manipulated by actors, groups or institutions who have a political, social or economic stake in the success of a Cornish identity. And on the more personal/more micro, common-sense level, the acceptance of such a manipulated and managed identity, consciously or unconsciously, may have material and psychological effects and benefits that the hegemonic identity does not provide.

The desire for a unified Britain lay in the state’s desire for an integrated workforce with which it could pursue the fruits of capitalism. Industrialism shattered community life and culture (Toffler, A. 1980:75). These shattered communities and cultures were swept away and were replaced with the new modernist hegemonic culture. This was/is arrayed before us in the media, symbolised in buildings and artefacts and in constructed, romanticised and managed histories. These modern identities provided security, authority, legitimacy and an identity in the present (Thelen, 1989:1126). The myths and invented tradition presented by the hegemonic leaders helped to weaken and obliterate the memories and confidence of traditionally minded people whose original identities were rooted in a much older and much more real (to them) past.

Thus, the Cornish, along with the Serbs, Bosnians, Czechs, Scots, Welsh, and the North American tribes and so on live in a remembered, re-interpreted landscape with a remembered/re-constructed/re-interpreted history which has the potential to challenge the imposition of modernist class based identities. But importantly on both levels of identity there is much management and manipulation work going on. Maffesoli’s (1996:6) masses face the struggle to remember their forgotten histories, their forgotten selves, by becoming more ethnic and more tribal than the traditional anthropological tribes.

These remembered identities still have a salience for many people and can, as we can see from the evidence of history, be managed and manipulated to be used as a defence against the alienating, amnesiac and totalizing forces of modernity. In the broadest sense, historical accounts are not just ‘about the past’. The creation of a particular past gains its chief significance in terms of its contribution to contemporary cultural life and the range of values that it promotes. It is in this manner in which we achieve an understanding of who we are in the present and how we are going to maintain our collective future

The following chapter focuses upon a history re-interpreted and constructed by the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. It is a historiography that tells the story of the Cornish from the Cornish perspective. It emphasises the ‘native’ or ‘ethnic’ achievements of the Cornish and underlines the perceived infamies of their enemies – the English. That such histories and infamies are exaggerated is of no surprise to Lowenthal who tells us that such ‘partisan histories invent or magnify enemy depravities (Lowenthal, 1985:345). Lowenthal goes on to point out that:

The past is always altered for motives that seek to reflect present needs, We reshape our heritage to make it attractive in modern terms; we seek to make it part of ourselves, and ourselves part of it; we conform it to our self images and aspirations. Rendered grand or homely, magnified or tarnished, history is continually altered in our private interests or on behalf of our community or country. (Lowenthal, 1985:348).
[1] Below are a selection of the 40 who are active in promoting the Cornish language and Cornish culture: The Gorseth Kernow – the Gorsedd of Cornwall (est. 1928), Kesav an Taves Kernewek : The Cornish Language Board (est. 1967), Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek – The Cornish Language Fellowship (est. 1979), Dalleth – Beginning (est. 1979), Agan Tavas – Our Language (est. 1986), Cussel an Tavas Kernuack – The Cornish Language Council, Teer Ha Tavaz – Land and Language (est. 1986), Cornish sub-committee of the UK Bureau for lesser-used languages (est. 1995), Esethvos Kernow – The Eisteddfod of Cornwall, The Celtic Congress, Lowender Peran – The Joy of Perran (est. 1978), Cornish Music Projects (est. 1988), Federation of old Cornwall Societies (est.1922), Awen - Inspiration (est. 1993), Cornish Dance Society (est. 1990), Cornish Music Guild (est. 1987), Mebyon Kernow, est. 1951), The Celtic League, (est. 1961), An Lyverji Kernewek – The Cornish Bookshop (est. 1997), Gwynn Ha Du – White and Black (est. 1998), Just Cornish (est. 1999), Kernow Designs, Bishop of Truro’s Ecumenical Advisory Group on Services in Cornish, (est. 1974), Bredereth Sen Jago – The Brotherhood of Saint James (est. 1988)
[i] One of the leaders of the Cornish Rebellion. A Cornish Army marched on London in 1497. It will be commemorated by another (more peaceful, one assumes) march on London by the Cornish in 1997.

Chapter 5 The Cornish Contextualized

2005-11-04T08:49:00.000-08:00

Chapter Five

The Cornish Contextualized.
The history of Cornwall is not the history of England in Cornwall nor any abstraction, however good and useful in many ways, of things and institutions. It certainly may be overlapped by, and mingled with, these other histories but its essence is indicated by some assertion of a certain acknowledged truth, We were before England was and, no doubt, we will be! (Green, 1976a:16)
The Cornish remain motivated by their profound national feeling...and so, their whole past existence is invoked as evidence of right. (Green 1976b:2)

Graffiti on an Embankment near Liskeard May 2000.(Teach Cornish Language,History,Culture to our Children)
In recent years Cornish identity has enjoyed something of resurgence through the efforts of the cultural entrepreneurs. The collapse of the mining industry during the mid 1800s and the continuing economic and political marginalisation of the 1900s has brought unemployment, mass emigration and the influx of English ‘incomers’, all of which has focused attention upon the problems the Cornish are facing within a modern society. The Cornish people have seen the closure of 4 hospitals and most significantly the closing of South Crofty, the last working tin mine in Cornwall. These economic and social tragedies (from the Cornish perspective) have seen Cornish people protesting and using as their rallying standards many of the ‘badges’ of Cornish identity, notably St. Piran’s Flag.

This chapter will attempt to contextualise the rise in a modern Cornish identity. It will show how this identity can be linked with the growth, within the last twenty years, of 'Celtic/Cornish consciousness' and an earlier 'Cornish Revival'. This is a movement that has become increasingly politicised through a process which Payton (1989) argues was bought about by the 'anti-metropolitanism' of what he calls the 'Third Peripheralism' of Cornwall's socio-economic situation (Payton, 1989). Payton (1989) argues against what he calls the
...vague and rarely articulated assumption that the historical experience of Cornwall has been one of continuous erosion of ethnic identity in the face of economic exploitation and cultural imperialism, a retreat from a "Celtic golden age" of economic integrity, territorial security, cultural fulfilment, and political self determination. (Payton, 1989:4)

He argues that the perceived 'difference' in the Cornish situation is one that has endured simply because of the historical experience of the Cornish and not despite it. The predominant concern then is to show how a modern Cornish identity, which is ‘visible’ within cultural artefacts such as newspapers, magazines and certain forms of Cornish political discourse has its roots in a re-interpreted historical experience which is presented by various 'cultural entrepreneurs' as an authentic reading of Cornish history.
Forgetting history or getting history wrong are an essential factor in the formation of a nation..(Hobsbawm, 1992:3).
As Hobsbawn notes above, the use of history is crucial in any attempt to create a new nation or new identity and as I have shown in the preceeding chapter social and cultural memory are subject to many forces. The hegemonic ‘cultural entrepreneur’, as Gramsci shows us, will use culture and dominant ideas to impose upon groups of people memories, histories and political systems. Whereas the marginalised ‘cultural entreprenuer’ will use selective and partisan histories, culture and ideas to ‘jog’ peoples memories to help them remember who they are. That these ideas or histories may be re-inventions, fictions or carefully selected facts is not the issue, it is more the fact that these ideas are disseminated as authentic identity markers that interests us in this section. (See pages 145-155)

In the next section I provide a historiography of Cornwall that spans the last millennium. It is a reading of history that underpins the narratives of Cornish identity. It is at once partisan, selective, and in places overstated. It is a history that emphasises difference and creates a discourse of otherness and is a central part of the re-invention, the management and manipulation of the Cornish identity. This particular history, ‘discovered’, re-interpreted and presented by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ allows the Cornish people to understand themselves as a people with a different historical experience than the rest of the island. It is presented as their roots, their forgotten history and the symbolism of this history was not lost on the hordes of rugby supporters who left Cornwall for Twickenham as Trelawny's army, or for those who symbolically re-invaded England recently to celebrate the 400th anniversary of earlier invasions by the Cornish army.
Steve: (Student from Lostwithiel) People’s idea of history doesn’t go back very far generally. It's more to do with Cornish traditions than history. For one thing Cornish history is not taught in schools. So it was only when the Cornish Movement decided to do a big celebration of the 500th anniversary [of the Cornish rebellion] last year the Cornish people became aware of part of their history. A lot of people were angry that they’d not heard about it before.

Identity is not only framed in the historical but also in the present. It is certainly influenced by the hegemonic culture and also by the often-contradictory impact of myths, stories and other cultural 'texts'. The creation of these myths, stories, histories, and other cultural texts plays an important role in the maintenance of the group. These are the tools of the cultural entrepreneurs. The veracity or truthfulness or factuality of these tools is not the question, it is how they are used and disseminated through the group that is of interest. Each of these fragments of information creates for the Cornish person a mosaic of meaning through which a Cornish identity is constructed. Thus Mr. J., in the quotation below, is providing Cornish people with another fragment of their history i.e. that Cornwall and Cornish people had a part in the Civil War.
Mr. J: (Retired from Truro. Cornish Bard) I was down at Foye Yacht club this week talking to them about the Civil War in Cornwall and it was quite obvious that none of them had any idea that Cornwall and the Cornish played an extremely important part in the Civil War. I suppose if they’d been asked they’d heard of Naseby and the general run of the Civil War in the Midlands but not that Cornwall had anything to do with it.

The dissemination of these Cornish narratives by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ has a crucial importance in creating a popular consciousness. We may argue that such an ‘ethnic’ history can be defined on the one hand as a ‘resistance’ history that effectively opposes the oppressive and assimilationist tendencies of the centre – the State or English/British history tradition. On the other, it is defined not in strict opposition, but as a part of English/British history - but in a unique way in so far as it forces a revision of the institutionalised canon of historical texts. The latter argument calls for the rejection of the notion of a ‘true’ and authentic history, or even the claim that there are ‘master texts’, and the breaking open of the canon for the sake of creating a truly integrated English/British history, one that includes the voices of those excluded before. Of course, the opposition between these two claims is not total, since both can be seen as inflections of an underlying goal to rewrite history in the plural, and in so doing, preserve difference.
In the telling of ‘official’ history it is often that which is untold that is as important as what is told. The historian, Davies (1997:112), argues that ‘The historian, like the camera, always lies.’ He believes that what the historian does is record a snapshot of events. So an historian might take a series of such ‘snapshots’ to give a simulation of life, or take ‘snapshots’ from many different points of view to give a more accurate impression, but always history is this record of individual events. However, these ‘snapshots’ become linked together as a narrative where the past is recreated as a living organism in which every separate element is connected. These connections are not only within the past but reach into the present.

When we view the snapshots of history presented by other historians, we find, like the re-touched photographs of the Soviet revolution, Cornwall and the Cornish missing from many of the histories of Great Britain or England. For example, Hobsbawm (1968) in his book Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain Since 1750 completely ignores Cornwall’s significant contribution to the Industrial Revolution and the economic life of Britain and relegates Cornwall’s role to two footnotes (p.80 and p.166). Indeed, according to Hobsbawm, even the steam engine was a product of British inventiveness or their capacity to use other people’s inventiveness (p.12). Trevelyan does slightly better in his (1942) English Social History where he notes that the Welsh and Cornish language in the time of Chaucer’s England were totally distinct (p.15). Plus in a footnote (p.120n) he notes, that none of the leading figures in the dissolution in Cornwall were Protestant. Neither of these two authors mentions, even in passing, the Cornish rebellions or the impact of Trevithick’s developments with the Steam engine.
Another author, Mathias (1979) in The Transformation of England dismisses the work of the Cornish engineers by telling us that the ‘improvement to the Watt-style engine itself, belonged, for the most part, to the empirical world of the obscure colliery engineers, the captains of Cornish mines, the brilliant mechanics such as Murdock’ (p.60). He notes further, with no sense of irony, that the best recorded Watt-type engine was recorded in Cornwall in 1811 and the ‘duty’[i] rates recorded on Cornish engines quadrupled between 1811 and 1859’(p.60). In an earlier work Mathias (1969 ) The First Industrial Nation had already told us that while Trevithick was only the most famous of the engineers in Cornwall he was not in the same league as the ‘scientifically literate, scientifically trained…Watt’ (p136). He then goes on to tell us that Trevitihick (‘a colliery engineer’) was ‘struggling…at Merthyr Tydfil’ to adapt the steam engine for traction (p.277) whereas ‘Stephenson had proved…the…victory of the locomotive’ (p.278).
That Cornish history has been ‘lost’ and ‘revised’ by the Anlo-centric focus of ‘standard’ histories is not lost on my respondents.
Mr. C: (Retired Chemist from Chasewater. Cornish Bard) There’s the revival that’s all part of history and at another level again the contribution of lots of Cornish people have made in the fields of science and literature and so on tend to be forgotten. I think these people ought to be recognised…Trevithick in terms of steam and Opie in terms of painting and Adams the astronomer…In teaching you get the same sort of material carried on from generation to generation bacause nobody bothers to look for anything else.
John Jenkin (Cornish Bard) Well I think because Cornwall is remote and this idea has grown up that this little place has had not an impact on British history at all whereas in fact it had a very large impact in many ways. You read the average history book and it says the inventor of the steam locomotive was George Stevenson. It doesn’t mention Trevithick at all. You may find occasionally that Trevitihick is mentioned as an aside. But I’ll guarentee that if you went into any school in Cornwall and said who invented the steam locomotive ninty percent of them would say Stevenson, they wouldn’t know Richard Trevithick
England has been the dominating culture and they have denigrated Cornwall and Cornish people. Many people from Cornwall had an impact on England, Richard Trevithick being one.
The Cornish Rebellion of 1549 (the Prayer Book Rebellion) is in other works called the Western Rebellion and is treated by authors such as Philip Caraman (1994) as a religious rebellion that had a much greater impact in the west of England rather than just Cornwall and he trys to ‘understand the strength of their attachment to their religious practice and faith which alone can account for the desperation with which they fought to the end against overwhelming odds’ (intro. p.3). He clearly does not see this simply in Cornish terms and he demonstrates in his book The Western Uprising that the uprising was caused by religious grievances. The Book of Common Prayer and its accompanying iconoclasm represented an attack upon late medieval Catholicism which was the basis of the average Englishman's conception of reality. He does note however, that the rebellion was in the main led by the Cornish gentry.

Indeed the message that we get from the ‘standard’ history books was that Henry was attempting to unify the country through religion. Henry's religious policies were the root cause - his legacy was ‘a nation divided in religion’. His changes to the Church, which had resulted, not in Protestantism, but in Henrician Catholicism (or 'Catholicism without the Pope'), had done much to confuse the nation. He had initially moved in a Protestant direction with the Act of Ten Articles in 1536, and in 1538, the insistence that all churches use a prayer book in the vernacular, but then in 1539, there was a swing back towards Catholicism with the Act of Six Articles. The religious changes in the period 1530-1559 were so rapid with the different rulers and Henry can be held partly responsible for this as he had his son, Edward, brought up as a Protestant, whereas his daughter Mary was a devout Catholic. Henry’s policies, while at the root of the religious crisis, were not the sole cause. Under Somerset the Church moved once more in a Protestant direction. However, in 1549, Henry contributed to the crisis by introducing the 1549 Prayer Book, and the First Act of Uniformity.
However, the ordinary Cornish people, ‘tutored’ by the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ through their re-interpritation of the events see the rebellion in a different light.
Mrs. B: (Retired living in Plymouth) I’m referring to the An Gof thing. It’s amazing what enthusiasm was roused for it. That is entirely historical in origin. That march would never have happened it it wasn’t for history intensifying feelings of being Cornish
Steve: (Student from Lostwithiel) So it was only when the Cornish Movement decided to do a big celebration of the 500th anniversary [of the Cornish rebellion] last year the Cornish people became aware of part of their history. A lot of people were angry that they’d not heard about it before.

Consequently, when we read first the ‘English’ history and then the ‘Cornish’ history we find a tension between the two versions. The English narrative concerning the Prayer Book rebellion is one of a King attempting to unify his country through religion whereas the Cornish history is one which underlines difference and antagonism to the cultural aspects of the Kings policies especially the impact upon their language. The anglo-centric focus on Watt and the developments of the Industrial Revolution by the writers of ‘English/British’ history reduces the impact of engineers like Trevithich upon the industrial revolution to mere colliary workers and mine captains forever in the shadow of Stephenson and Murdock (who did marry a Cornish woman and did much work in Cornwall) whereas the Cornish historians argue that these men, and Trevithick in particular, were pivotal figures of the industrial age and are lionised in Cornwall.

Within this context, do such theories of cultural and historical difference and resistance present us with an actual confrontation? One that questions in a fundamental way the history destiny of modern England/Britain, or is this merely a ‘celebration of difference’ that promotes those economic and technological imperatives for incorporating all peoples into the global market? I argue that the Cornish historical narratives are predominantly critical and ideological. This does not mean that they simply represent a given set of doctrines or dogmas. Rather, it means that as oppositional ideological forms Cornish narratives signify the imaginary ways in which historical men and women live out their lives in society, and how the values, concepts, and ideas purveyed by the mainstream, hegemonic English culture that tie them to their social functions seek to prevent them from attaining a true knowledge of society as a whole. My study shows how Cornish narratives, individually as texts and together as a genre, confront and circumscribe the limiting ideologies imposed on them. Cornish history and by extension ‘ethnic’ history are to be read as symbolic figurations of ideology which seek to reveal a cognitive dimension within the historical text. Thus history becomes a central plank in the creation of the Cornish identity.
Mrs. P. (Housewife, Redruth) [Q. Is history important to your Cornishness?] Yes I think it is. Especially the mining and fishing. I think if those go then we are going to lose our identity. Yes it will always be history because its happened but possibly then we’ll become more British if we lose our original heritage. Yes it’s important.
The historiography below represents the historical narrative presented by the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs. It is a ‘ethnic’ reading of history that has been ‘officially’ recognised by the publication of a book Cornwall For Ever! edited by Phillip Payton, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Cornwall County Council, the six Cornish district council and the Cornish Heritage Trust. This book, which presents a similar reading of history to that given below, was presented to every child in school in Cornwall. It is a reading and re-interpretation of history which according to HRH Prince Charles, the Duke of Cornwall will ‘help[ed] shape the Cornish people’ because the ‘uniqueness of Cornwall lies also in its history’ (Payton, 2000.:5)
The Search for an Identity, a search for authenticity - a very Cornish History.
Ideas of authenticity and rejected knowledge are more likely to be associated with the establishment of alternatives and identity politics in rural areas. (Hetherington, 1998:136)

Recent research has done much to focus on the ‘lost history’ of the Cornish. (Deacon, cited in Payton 1996:86)
Mr. R: (Mineworker from Pool) You didn’t get a lot of Cornish history [at school]. I think its something that should be. I can’t speak Cornish. I’d like to speak Cornish and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t try to learn, but it’s never come up. I think it should be taught in schools. Some local history should be taught. I think it would be nice if the Cornish language was revived.
Joy: (Writer from Truro) Those people [over 50] were taught nothing about history. After the Education Act in 1880, everything Cornish was taken out of the school. I wasn’t taught anything that was Cornish. I wasn’t taught about the language, all these things they’re [the cultural entrepreneurs] bringing in and trying to teach everybody, the older people of Cornwall were not even aware of St Piran, nobody knew who St. Piran was…people my age never saw a St Piran’s flag and it really is people like Bernard [Deacon] and the Old Cornwall and the Mebyon Kernow that have bought the consciousness of that into being. (my italics)
Mr. D: (Unemployed from Liskeard) : Everywhere has a distinct history I suppose. There have been some people working on histories of Cornwall. Phillip Payton. John Jenkin did a history for school kids whiich was rather good. Historians don’t always produce the goods. You need enough historians producing enough stuff and eventually there’ll be enough in it that’s useful.
There’s a lot of stuff that’s been consciously researched and revived and grabbed before it got lost. People like Moira Davey have stopped it from sliding down the plug hole. What started off as a self-conscious thing has taken on a life of its own and it’s definitely vibrant. The same has happened with the language. A self-conscious thing initially now you’ve got a thing with a life of it’s own and it’s beyond the control of a few individuals. It’s a communal thing and has an aspect of culture that’s growing and thriving.
In the quotations at the beginning of this section Hetherington and Deacon indicate the role of the cultural entrepreneurs who are active in the research of the ‘alternative’ histories of their areas. By focusing on lost histories, recovering and ‘repairing’ them the entrepreneurs are then able to disseminate their ‘works’ amongst the local populace. That there is an awareness of what these entrepreneurs are doing locally is evidenced by the quotations of my Cornish respondents.
Early Cornish History
According to the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ interpretation and local reading of history the early colonisation of Cornwall took place between the 11th and the 16th centuries. Cornwall at this time was isolated both territorially and culturally from the centre. Phillip Payton (1989), calls this the 'Older Peripheralism' of Cornwall. Athelstan, the Saxon King achieved the 'annexation' of Cornwall to England. He defeated the Celts, driving then out of Exeter to establish the boundary on the banks of the Tamar. William of Malmesbury wrote:
Athelstan ...attacked them (the Cornish) with great energy, compelling them to withdraw from Exeter which, until that time they had inhabited on a footing of legal equality with the English. He then fixed the left bank of the Tamar as the shire boundary, just as he had made the Wye the boundary for the north Britons. Having cleansed the city of its defilement by wiping out that filthy race, he fortified it with towers and surrounded it with a wall of square hewn stone. (cited in Berresford Ellis, 1985:135)
Cornwall became the territory of the 'West Welsh'. A geo-political entity. Athelstan's actions had, according to Payton (1989:82), made Cornwall "...a 'satellite' of the English State' For Green the fixing of Cornwall's boundaries was 'disguising' Cornwall as an English county and it was for Green (1976b: 85-90) the beginning of the colonisation of the Cornish ethnic peoples. Despite Athelstan fixing the boundary, the Cornish were still regarded as 'alien' (Hoskins, No date). The Saxons attempted to eradicate Cornish culture in perhaps a form of 'pogrom' that William of Malmesbury was indicating when talking of 'wiping out that filthy race'. Certainly much of the early Celtic literature was destroyed by the Saxons.
It was during this period of struggle that Arthur, the legendary king was born. Berresford Ellis interpretes the Arthurian myths claiming Arthur was a Cornish ruler who 'opposed conquest by the Saxons'. (Berresford Ellis, 1990:8) Indeed according to the Cornish legends it is believed that Arthur was a Cornishman, who defeated the Saxons in twelve successive battles. Athelstan further, in perhaps an attempt to 'accommodate' and 'subdue' the Cornish peoples, created a Cornish See in 931 with a Cornishman, Conan, as the first bishop. The new bishopric was established in Truro, and Halliday (1959) called this an 'astute move, for the ecclesiastical capital of the county was now on the eastern border instead of in the centre at Padstow, where the old Celtic monastic tradition was strongest' (Halliday, 1959:95).

The cultural entrepreneurs are able to continue to use the historical boundary markers of the Tamar and the resistance to the Saxon invaders to confirm the notion of difference and of being a separate political entity from the English state. For example, Mebyon Kernow is party to a call for a Cornish Assembly and has organised a petition to central governement to which some 50,000 people have added their names.
How can Cornwall support a government that doesn't even recognize Cornish as a minority language is beyond me.

Cornwall must make its own decisions through its own Regional Assembly and find wealth through its own individual culture.

…we should shout loud and clear that Cornwall is not a part of
England and that it has its own culture and language, ( language being the trump card.) Kernow bys Vikken. (all quotes from http://www.bbc.co.uk/cornwall/talk/mebyon.shtml)

Cornish enthusiasts protesting
Mr. L: (Council Worker from Cambourne): You’ve got to be born into Cornwall to be Cornish. This is what we’ve always said, you know, there’s water from Bude to Plymouth and as far as we’re concerned we’re a little island you know.

Mrs L. (Retired) …being Cornish is about not just belonging to a group of people but it’s actually about the land as well

Religion, however, still retained a dominant place in the day to day lives of the Cornish. The stone crosses that are still one of the characteristic sights in modern Cornwall date from this period. Clearly linked with early Christian symbolism, they harked back to earlier prehistoric standing stones. Halliday sees them as 'primarily protests, silent and even unconscious, against the Saxon intruders, symbols of Celtic nationalism'. (Halliday, 1959:98).

Recently the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ within the Cornish Stannary Parliament have attempted to reclaim these ‘silent stones’ from English Heritage who they argue is not authorised to name itself ‘English Heritage’, under section 32, (National Heritage Act 1983) or extend its activities to Cornwall, under section 42 (National Heritage Act 1983). The Stannary Parliament wants emphasis on ‘the stannaries’ as being legal and constitutional through being a ‘territorial possession’ in Duchy of Cornwall Charter/Act of Parliament 1337. This negates Duchy claims to be a private estate. The Duchy of Cornwall is legally classified as ‘a mode of descent unknown to the common law’. After removing various signs from Heritage sites in Cornwall, an action in the High Court vindicated the Stannary Parliament activisits, because English Heritage could not justify its policies to win the case against the Cornish Stannary Parliament. All the Cornish activisits were found ‘not guilty’ and new Cornish designs for signs at Cornish archaeological sites were accepted while the Cornish Stannary Parliament returned the old illegal ‘English Heritage’ signs they confiscated.
Mrs. P. (Housewife, Redruth) We just see it that they’re bound to label it English Heritage but we know it’s Cornish. I think we just sit back and let them stick a label on but we know its Cornish
Mrs. L: (Shopworker from Newquay) …the historical means something. It means something to all Cornish people because you can gain a sense of pride and knowledge of yourself and where your community comes from…that’s what nation builders use, like the nation state uses that kind of symbolism to build people’s idea of self.
Mrs F. (Retired. Plymouth) …we used to go down to Par and coming out of Lostwithiel on the way to Taphouse, in the fields were these big mounds and they were where the soldiers were buried in King Mark’s day. There are certain things, yes you need to have people who know about things…but who is there left to tell them. There aren’t any books.

Early Accommodation
As the State building activities of the Norman English developed through the Medieval period, government, in perhaps recognising the political importance of accommodating the Cornish into their State building activities, recognised the older Celtic jurisdictions by such accommodating devices as the charter by King John in 1204 creating the Stannaries. This was a form of parliament to deal with matters of law which concerned tinners. (Legislation that has been invoked during 1989 and 1990 by the Cornish Stannary Parliament in the Cornish struggle against the 'English' Poll Tax.)

The Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ claim (Payton, 1989:83) that recognition of an earlier Celtic kingdom may also be found in the creation in 1337 by Edward III of the first Royal Duchy based upon the earlier Earldom of Cornwall, which, Payton tells us, was 'in itself (the Earldom) a singular institution and was probably created as an 'accommodating’ successor of the earlier line of Cornish kings' (Payton, 1989:83). The 'new' Duchy, it is claimed, was given greater 'rights' than that of the earlier Earldom which had been the result of the Celtic peoples being driven out of the part of Devon which constituted the ancient realm of Dumnonia and defeat at the hands of the Saxons. This 'accommodation' of earlier Celtic institutions and the imposition of 'English' ruling elements, such as the creation by Athelstan of a Cornish See, and the creation of the Duchy, are for the cultural entrepreneurs, evidence of the 'English' colonisers attempting to stamp the legitimacy of their rule in Cornwall.

However, it is claimed, (Pearse, 1983:51), that far from 'accommodating' the Cornish into the 'English' state, the privileges placed upon Cornwall, by the very reason of it being a Duchy and not just another shire, reinforced the sense of 'difference' by way of the differing (from the point of view of the English shire experience) autonomy and freedom that the Cornish had over their own affairs away from central government. An autonomy that 'was strengthened...(because) the only forms of government known to Cornwall were that of the eldest son of the King (i.e. the Duke of Cornwall)...and later, of his council'. (Pearse, 1983:51).

The cultural entreprenuers, such as Payton (1989) place great emphasis on the ‘fact’ that 'accommodation' of sorts had taken place. Although the Cornish had the institution of the Duchy, Julian Cornwall (1977:42) argues, this simply gave the 'illusion of autonomy'. Power in these Middle Ages was in the hand of absolutist monarchs. As Green (1976d) points out:
Monarch, barons, land-hungry sons--England's feudal ruling class--laid hold, to varying extents, of all Celtic Communities of the British Isles. (p.3)
So despite some historians, such as Cornwall and Green, pointing to the fact that the absolutist monarchs had a powerful grip, politically and militarily across all of the country, the cultural entrepreneurs still make the claim that Cornwall’s situation was different. So while Rowse (1986) noted, 'Something of the status of conquest remained' (Rowse, 1986:40), Payton (1989) creates a Cornwall that had 'an aura of semi-independence...which stretched back into the mists of time.' (Payton, 1989:86)

Payton (1989) continues to develop his thesis of ‘separateness and difference’ in the face of ‘standard’ histories. He argues that in attempting to assimilate the Cornish into the English State through accommodation and recognising the 'differences' inherent in the activities of this period the adverse affect was accomplished. Cornwall's identity and peripheral status remained 'Celtic' and thus 'un-English'. Thus, according to the cultural entrepreneurs, these early attempts at colonisation and assimilation had failed as spectacularly as they had succeeded in the rest of Southwest Britain. The Cornish, according to these selective and partisan versions of history, still retained their own identity. Halliday for example notes that:
...the English were foreigners, their language a foreign language, and though they (the Cornish) had to obey English laws they pursued their old ways of life as much as possible, living in hamlets and avoiding towns.' (Halliday, 1959:123)
By highlighting the imperialistic (Berresford Ellis, 1969:6) and colonising designs of the Saxon, and later Norman/English rulers, it can be claimed by the cultural entrepreneurs that a Cornish culture survived. This part of the historical narrative suggests that the language continued to be spoken through the land, albeit under threat, while Athelstan had destroyed much of the early Cornish literature (Berresford Ellis, 1990:8). The Saxons imposed Christianity, and it seems that they had, to all intents and purposes, harried the Cornish until well after the Norman Conquest. But the cultural entrepreneurs claim that Celtic language and Celtic culture remained dominant. Folk tales and religious
activities, such as the erection of Celtic crosses, the veneration of holy wells, and the reverence of Holy Saints, such as St. Piran, the patron of the tinners, remained part of the everyday activities of the Cornish.
John Jenkin (Cornish Bard) All through history Cornwall has been different, It’s had an history all of its own…but I think it’s very important that we should keep this history alive and I’m very pleased to do my bit to do it…
…the biggest enemy of Cornwall has been the Cornish because they have adapted Saxon ways. This is why the Cornish language died out because it was considered inferior to speak Cornish. I can never understand why we speak English because we had so much influx from the French because in the course of history we ought to be speaking French.
Joy: (Writer from Truro) The Cornish feel that they have their own identity, i.e. they are Cornish, They are not English they are Cornish. They feel …that they are Celts and that they are a race that has inhabited this island before the Anglo Saxons and they’re proud of it.
Anyway, this Celtic thing is very new in Cornwall, but now the Celtic thing has been bought in and they are educating the Cornish to look on themselves as Celts. They wouldn’t look on themselves as Celts but they are gradually being educated into thinking they are Celts.
Another thing is this St. Piran’s flag, never seen a St.Piran’s flag till after…That’s a new thing that’s started and we have a St Piran’s day and a St. Piran’s march through Truro. That’s a good thing because the Cornish have been taught in school English history but now this is beginning to come in.
The Tudor Period (15th and 16th centuries)
Throughout the period of the late Middle Ages the English monarchs were at war with France and Spain. The Cornish mainland was the setting for many attacks upon the mainland by the French and Spanish fleets. Cornishmen and Cornish ships were certainly called upon to go to war to aid Edward III's designs upon the French crown, while later in the century a contingent of Cornishmen fought at Agincourt. Halliday, however, makes the particular point that it is significant to note, for the Cornish narrative, that the Cornish fought under a banner 'bearing the device of two wrestlers'. (Halliday, 1959:146)
These continuing wars had allowed Cornwall a period of economic prosperity (Halliday 1959). The ports of the western seaboard had supplied the English navy with ships large enough to transport troops and supplies across the channel. In the last five years of the Hundred Years War, Halliday (1959) tells us that Cornish ports supplied around 48 ships of which the largest was of three hundred tons. (p.148) However, almost as soon as the Hundred Years War had finished England was once again embroiled in a vicious civil war - The Wars of the Roses (1455-85).

Berresford Ellis (1974), a Celtic scholar (and Cornish cultural entrepreneur), tells us that the Wars of the Roses, saw 'a short lived era of hope in Cornwall' (p.52). Henry Tudor had close connections with Celtic Brittany and Cornwall and as such gained a large amount of his support from the Celts on both sides of the Channel. Henry Tudor was expected to free Wales from English domination. Upon landing in Wales on 7 August 1485 he announced that he had 'come to free this our Principality of Wales of such miserable servitude as they have long piteously stood in'. This drew to his side Welsh and Cornish supporters for what was widely seen as a 'national war of liberation' (Plaid Cymru: undated)

Berresford Ellis (1974) goes on to argue that after Henry’s succession to the Throne he rewarded his supporters with offices of State. They, however, soon became anglicised, using the English language and adopting English customs and dress. Berresford Ellis (1974), reminds us however, that these people were of the Cornish and Welsh ruling classes and perhaps had little in common with the 'ethnic' Cornish or Celtic peoples. They were still linked with the Norman occupation and the baronies created by the Norman's and largely were of French/Breton descent.

This period of the Tudor kings saw ultimate political authority grasped. For the first time the English state had a standing army and thus the control of the means of violence. This meant that the monarch could delineate, protect and extend the boundaries of their territories. This involved controlling the peripheries of Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, Scotland and, to some extent, parts of northern England. It was a process which Payton (1989) tells us involved 'military action and political treaties, but which was also manifested in more systematic taxation and the enforcement and administration of the Reformation' (Payton, 1989:105).

While English histories see this period as a crucial time of unification the Cornish historiography sees the Tudor period as a period of antagonisms and cultural imperialism enforced often by the sword and oppression. This historical development of the Nation-State, the absolutist state, becomes for Giddens (1985) a distinctive political order in several key respects. It is a move away from the older traditional states; the system of empires that rose and fell as their powers waxed and waned towards a more controlled system (Giddens, 1985:120), a system watched over by a powerful monarch with immense personal power primarily concerned with creating a bureaucratic centralism that Giddens (1985) sees as the most important element in binding the internal development of the state with the external solidifying of the state system.

The expansionist activities at home and abroad of the Tudor state needed as its base a strong unified nation that was able to complete its programme of colonisation of its 'Celtic fringe'. Cornwall up to this period had according to the cultural entrprenuers such as Berresford Ellis, '...continued to be separate in many ways from England, developing its own national culture and outlook' (Berresford Ellis, 1974:53). This claimed separateness was, according to the Cornish cultural entrepreneurs, to a large extent, compounded by the fact that until 1485 Cornwall was subject to laws that were particular to the county. Thus, for Rowse, the Cornish historian, Tudor England needed to continue the process of assimilation started by the Saxons and continued throughout the Norman period. Rowse (1975) tells us:
...the expansion of that society, both by the state and by individual enterprise, first into the margin of backward societies at home - Cornwall, Wales, the Borders, with the sweep of a sickle on the map; into Ireland, where the process involved conquest and colonisation; then across the oceans, to our first contacts with Russia, the Canadian North...(and) the colonisation of North America. (Rowse, 1975:6)
The 'assimilation' of the Celtic fringes incorporated such legitimising activities as the annexation of Wales in 1536 and attempts to forge links with Scotland through marriage. However, the attempts at assimilating Cornwall were fraught with disaffection. The king needed to impose his will on Cornwall. The western ports, Fowey, Falmouth, Saltash, Truro, Looe, Penzance were the stepping off points for further expeditions of the new colonising power and, more importantly, the first line of defence against those upon the continent who would want to invade, notably the Spanish.

The Cornish were, according to Payton (1989), soon to become disaffected with the intervention of the English state in their affairs. Attempts to tax them for the war against the Scots in 1497 infuriated the tinners who were facing hardship at home. The Cornish
...argu(ed) that a Scottish war was not their concern and that the defence of the Border was properly the responsibility of the people who lived there. (Payton, 1989:107)
The imposition of 'English' law and taxation, together with stricter rules placed upon tinners, who saw themselves as a class of independent workers 'living and working to their own rules' (Payton, 1989:91), by the Duke of Cornwall, lead to open rebellion. The Member of Parliament for Helston, William Antron, together with Micheal Joseph, a blacksmith from St. Kevern (nicknamed An Gof, the Smith), Thomas Flamank and Baron Audley were outraged. A Cornish army of some 15,000 men was raised which marched on London taking Bristol, Salisbury and Winchester en-route. The Cornish army found further success by beating off the English army of Henry VII under Lord Daubeny near Guildford.

The Cornish, having reached Blackheath in Kent by the 17th June 1497, faced an army of 25,000 hardened troops lead by the king. After a battle in which the Cornishmen lost 2000 men, they surrendered and the leaders were taken. Joseph and Flamank were hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn; Lord Audley was beheaded at Tower Hill. Payton (1989) sees Henry VII's lenient treatment of the main body of Cornish rebels as further proof of the attempts by the 'English' state to 'accommodate' the Cornish. This at a time when, as noted above, the Tudor concern was with centralisation and state building. Payton notes that Cornwall at this time was still '...a resentful and potentially ...rebellious Cornwall in urgent need of pacification.' (Payton, 1989:91)

The ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ version of history suggest that the Cornish were not pacified. The heavy taxes imposed by parliament were for the war against the Scots, who were provoking Henry by supporting Perkin Warbeck, the pretender to the English throne. Upon hearing of the Cornish Rising, Perkin made his way to Cornwall landing at Whitsand Bay near Land’s End. With a small band of men he marched to Bodmin and proclaimed himself Richard IV. This Cornish reading of history suggests that Perkin and his Cornish supporters were eager for revenge against the English, and the Cornish freely mustered to his banner. With an army of 6000 men, Warbeck marched on Exeter. However, his adventure was short lived, after failing to take Exeter, he marched on Taunton but the kings army was already close following the fleeing Cornish who had been defeated at Blackheath. Warbeck deserted his army and fled to Southampton leaving his humiliated army at the mercy of Henry. Henry surprisingly again, pardoned the offenders, except for the leaders who were arrested.

It is interesting to note that the writers such as Payton argue that the uprising was inherently a Cornish uprising. Of those who joined Warbeck none of the ruling Anglo-Norman aristocracy took part. Warbeck's support 'sprang from the Cornish people themselves, they had Cornish names; (they had) ...a common element of Cornishry, of that resentment of a conquered people against the English.' (Rowse, 1943:130).

The Cornish Rising and Cornish involvement in Warbeck's attempt upon the crown had serious consequences for early Cornish identity according to these writers. The English government imposed heavy fines which were levied with such ferocity it caused Bacon to comment 'commissioners proceeded with such strictness and severity as did much obscure the King's mercy in sparing of blood with the bleeding of so much treasure' (Bacon, 1881). This all at a time when, as Rowse notes, currency was scarce and that the punishment must have fallen heavy upon the Cornish populace much impoverishing and wasting an already hard pressed society. This was, for Berresford Ellis (1974), '...the beginning of the end of Cornwall's separate existence'. (Berresford Ellis, 1974:57)

As the sixteenth century began, Cornwall was still restless according to the Cornish historians. The state was still oppressing those who had taken part in the earlier rebellions. Rebellions that had given the English notice by the Cornish that they, because of those 'differences' created by successive epochs, would not be absorbed into a unified state without voicing their disquiet. It was around this period that a Venetian ambassador who was held up in Falmouth by bad weather wrote:

...in the midst of a most barbarous race, so different in language and custom from the Londoners and the rest of England.

The Tudor programme sees a system that is becoming more and more inherently capitalist. With the rise of mercantilism, medieval towns become centres for the merchant bourgeoisie. Technical and commercial advances, together with advancing pre-industrial manufacturing, was generating, in the centre, a feeling of cultural heterogeneity. Henry V111 proclaimed Protestantism as the 'national' religion, and English began to be used as the main language rather than French or Latin.

The first Act of Uniformity upon becoming Law in June 1549 introduced English into church services. The imposition of English saw rioting throughout Cornwall. In a further attempt to assimilate the Cornish into the 'English' state, 'Old Celtic customs...were to be stamped out' (Berresford Ellis, 1990) in a form of cultural imperialism. Edward VI sent his Commissioners to undertake the ruthless enforcement of his legislation in Cornwall.

As a result of this oppression, the Cornish once again rose in open rebellion. Led by Humphrey Arundell of Lanherene and Henry Boyer, Mayor of Bodmin, 6000 Cornishmen marched across the Tamar and laid siege to Exeter. Part of the demands made upon the King by the leaders stated: 'We the Cornishmen, whereof certain of us understand no English, utterly refuse this new English'. (cited in Berresford Ellis, 1985:137). The Cornish were again soon defeated. This time the king was not as lenient as Henry VII was in 1497. The English army invaded Cornwall hanging and burning '...a ruthless suppression followed as harsh as anything under Cromwell in Ireland, or Cumberland in Scotland'. (Berresford Ellis, 1985:137)
The Cornish Rebellion of 1549 however, is explained by other historians such as Caraman (1994) in terms of the grievences being more widespread across the west Country and indeed Caraman calls the action the ‘Western Rebellion’. Caraman (1994) argues that this was a religious rebellion that had a much greater impact in the West of England rather than just Cornwall. He clearly does not see this simply in Cornish terms and he demonstrates in his book The Western Uprising that the uprising was caused by religious grievances.

For the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ however, these uprisings are significant in their construction of a historical narrative. They have been the basis of the creation of Cornish identity markers, in that for the first time, the invasions of England by the Cornish were commemorated on the 500th year anniversary and involved marches of Cornish people to Blackheath and Exeter. They have become timemarks that allow people to remember and re-interprete their ‘forgotten’ or hidden pasts. However, while the Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ were creating ‘memories’ in regard of these events English Heritage were producing a very different version at Restormal Castle. As a response to the Cornish remembrance of the 1497 rebellion English Heritage produced a re-enactment at the Castle. However, this is seen in Cornwall as portraying the Cornish as ‘nasty, wicked rebels against a good English king and religion’. (See http://www.cornish.heritage.care4free.net/page15.htm).

Thus, the respondents quoted below use these history markers to remember their ‘forgotten’ or ‘hidden’ pasts. They are telling us that, for them, these events ‘jog’ their memories and allow them to see themselves as a unified community with a distinct identity.
Mrs. L: (Shopworker from Newquay) If you go round to every single Cornish school and see how many headmasters are English and how many are Cornish? We don’t teach about An Gof in schools and that’s a crime because what he did really sums up the whole mentality and idea of Cornish justice and the way that the Cornish people think…
Mr. C: (Retired Chemist from Chasewater. Cornish Bard) There are certainly distinct Cornish episodes in the history of the British Isles. The ’97 rebellion and the Civil War…that’s all part of history…that tend to be forgotten. [History] …it’s part of the picture because one’s past or the past of the community is what has shaped the present. It’s all tied together. I feel strongly that children ought to be taught their local history and taught it properly not with a distorted angle on things that have been used in the past.
Keith: (Ex Bank Manager now student living in Plymouth) I think it’s quite important…An Gof’s 500 year march…we do tend to march out the county and get beaten but I think that just tends to strengthen resolve to pull together. I think history is important. It’s little things that you can mark identity… What they’ve organised now isn’t so much remembering because people remember when they have their memories jogged, as an exercise…to show it happened…remembering is part of that but this is a bit more…this is good to do. It will show the rest of the country
Mr. P: (Tin miner from Pool) There was a walk recently to London. That’s what put us on the map so to speak

This suppression of the Cornish people with the Reformation as its motor dealt a 'death blow' to the Cornish language according to writers such as Berresford Ellis (1990). English was:
...forced upon Cornwall by the tyranny of England, at a time when the English language was yet unknown in Cornwall...(an)... act of...gross barbarity to the Cornish people. (Berresford Ellis, 1990:82)
Payton (1989) argues that such an action by the State was recognition of Cornwall's distinct status that led to the perpetuation and enhancement of those attributes that set Cornwall apart from the rest of Britain. The Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ point to the type of memory stripping activities that involve the destruction of the older Celtic literature and the smashing of Celtic idols and saints in the churches. The creation of the Cornish See by the Saxons and the imposition of English as the dominant language by the suppression of Glasney College (1548) - a central source of Cornish literature and language, during the Reformation as ways of erasing the identity markers from the Cornish people.

It is claimed (Halliday 1959) that the antagonisms brought about by the Reformation between Catholics and Protestants saw Cornish Catholics in retreat. But more importantly the links between Celtic Brittany, wholly Catholic and Protestant Cornwall were severed. Cornwall was becoming more and more absorbed into the English nation. The Cornish language started to retreat as English became more and more dominant, driven by the states refusal of the Cornish prayer book and bible. Halliday (1959) writes:
Now, with an obsolescent language, symbol at once of their distinction and of their conservative Catholicism, they (the Cornish) began to identify themselves with the gentry and middle classes, English speaking and Protestant. Cornish nationalism was merged, though never submerged, in a greater English nationalism. (p.184)

Although the gentry and the lesser gentry had abandoned the language, the quelling of Catholicism was somewhat more difficult. With the new Queen Mary on the throne the Cornish Catholics again took heart. The English prayer book was abolished, stone altars some of Celtic significance replaced the wooden communion tables and all the religious apparatus was restored from the hidden places. Mary's reign was however, short-lived and the age of Elizabeth began.
The Age of Elizabeth.
Protestantism was once more the 'national' religion. The stone altars were again replaced Mass was abolished and Catholic images and priests were removed. Elizabeth had cause to be worried about the strength of Catholicism in Cornwall. With the political situation with Catholic Spain rapidly deteriorating, Cornwall was once again Britain's first line of defence from a seaborne attack. She could not afford to have, as she saw it, sympathisers in such a sensitive area as the Western Approaches. Elizabeth's parliament passed a 'ferocious' act in 1581 making it treasonable to be a Roman Catholic. Cornish Catholics, we are told, were persecuted until, by the time war actually broke out, they were either imprisoned, in exile or financially impoverished. This is where Cornwall’s experience is significantly different from the Irish experience and the Cornish lost one of their significant markers of identity, while Irish Catholicism continued despite the attacks of English Protestantism.

The up and coming merchant class grasped the land released by the dissolution and the persecution of the Cornish Catholics. Although some of the land was sold to the Cornish gentry much of the land was sold for large sums to London speculators. The financial exploitation of Cornwall begun in the earlier Norman days had Payton (1989) claims started to become more systematic. The 'second peripheralism' of Cornwall was starting to take hold according to Payton (1989). Economic imperialist forces began to control all that was seen to be profitable in the county.

Financial power rested in the Capital. As the war with Spain took hold, there were fears that raw materials imperative to the war effort might be cut off. Cornwall had been for centuries one of the main suppliers of tin. The tinners had extracted this with a process known as 'streaming'. It was a process that had been protected by the creation of the Stannaries by King John. The tinners themselves had, however, been converted into wage labourers prior to the fifteenth century, when an early form of capitalism had been introduced into the Cornish tin industry (Lewis, 1965). The expanding class of merchants had financial interests in the mines and was eager to exploit the mineral resources of their newly acquired land.

Money flowed from London and under Elizabeth's royal patronage companies such as the Mines Royal Company, the Mineral and Battery Works and the new Mines Royal Company were set up. Much of the work was financed from London:
...the constitution of the Stannaries gave practically a free hand to capitalistic development, with the result in the main of the fiscal interest taken in the industry by the King. (Lewis, 1965:175).
Thus, mining and streaming activities that were earlier being undertaken by individual 'entrepreneurial' tinners protected by Stannary law fell victim to the change to wage labourer status and the onset of capitalistic devices. The monarch often used the 'ownership' of the mines as a way of fending off his creditors. By pledging mines by way of removing a debt, many of the tin workings soon found their way into private management. Wages paid by these consortiums were often not '...sufficient to sustain human life'. (Lewis, 1965:217). Lewis writes:
On these starvation wages, the tinners of the lowest class, in number 'ten thousand or twelve thousand of the roughest and most mutinous men in England' lived a life such as might have been expected of men in a like situation. The wretchedness of their existence became proverbial. They lived in hovels and bred like rabbits (Lewis, 1965:217).
Despite the interest in the tin industry by capitalist interests in London, tin mining saw a great depression during Elizabeth's reign. Central government tried measures to try and relieve the distress in the form of what Lewis calls the usual Tudor-Stuart panacea, a monopoly. Prices were fixed and loans were provided at low interest, but with the war pushing up other prices, the tin industry in Cornwall started to fail and capital and labour needing to support the need for profit turned '...from mining to husbandry' (Lewis, 1965:217).

In other areas of financial activity in Cornwall we find again and again the dominant position of the Core. Economic and political power was centred on London. If we take for example the 'privateering industry' in Cornwall, which, during Elizabeth's reign was financed by the 'seadog's' for their own advantage, from the late sixteenth century financial control was soon in the hands of London capitalists who had never been to sea at all. (Andrews, K.R.ed: not dated)

Unlike the rest of agricultural Britain, enclosure of the land had been going on since before the sixteenth century, despite Carew, a contemporary writer telling us of the impoverishment of the land and the attempts to improve it;
[The land]...through want of good manurance, lay waste and open...But since the grounds began to receive enclosure and dressing for tillage, the nature of the soil hath altered to better grain.
The Celtic agrarian system had been in use for centuries and was more distinctive than the 'common field' system used by the English farmers. Enclosure of a type was already a method well used by the earlier Celtic farmers. Rowse tells us Cornwall
...had been following its own method of enclosure since early times...The very nature of the land encouraged enclosure.(Rowse, 1943:33.)
Halliday (1959) notes however, with the more systematic use of land by the Tudors, the agricultural land in Cornwall, when enclosed, 'yielded a profitable return.'(p.206). A profitable return for whom though? The population of England was expanding and there was greater need for food to feed the populace. The land was in the hands of the aristocracy, as it had been since the Norman Conquest. Enclosure thus had deprived the peasantry of much of the traditional economic basis of their lives. They were denied the common grazing rights for their own stock and denied traditional activities such as wood gathering, berry and fruit harvesting. As farming became more profitable the disparity between the gentry, farmers and labourers widened. The ownership of land and the definitions of private property became more defined denying the labouring community access to the land for recreational pursuits.

This process of agricultural and social change has important consequences for the enhancement of social solidarity and the further enhancement of a Cornish cultural, national identity. As the farmers grew wealthier, they grew more status-conscious, emulating the English aristocratic style of living. This had the effect of distancing them from the lives and experiences of their workers, who, it must be remembered, were probably still Cornish language speaking. Thus:
...as the farmers and landowners began to adopt attitudes associated with the development of the market economy [English core attitudes], such as stricter definitions and control of rights of private property; so the labouring community, increasingly under pressure, defended traditional society and aggressively brandished their customs and ceremonies as a weapon in that defence. (Bushaway, 1979:15).
Throughout the sixteenth century London's influence began to spread. And as its influence spread thus it profited most from the mercantilist and capitalist developments. Hill (1987) notes
...that by 1600 London handled seven-eighths of English trade, its exports increasing five times in the next forty years. (p16)
Early capitalist society begins to see divisions in society based upon class and cultural imperatives. The new ruling classes, the merchant gentry and the mine operators had, as Green notes, 'a direct interest in rooting out the old way of life.'(Pamphlet 74:undated). Old Cornish customs were seen as a threat to the new order. The newly ascended Cornish gentry ridiculed the Cornish language (Kernewek).
For them Cornish custom was seen as inseparable from the previous mode of production and representing a challenge that was both economic and political. (Green, ibid:16)
Mr. D: (Unemployed from Liskeard) I’ve been to Ireland and Wales and I see the links, the cultural, political and historical links and the history of the last 1500 years is one of increasing centralism within an English dominated state. I’m not keen that that situation should continue. What I am keen on is that we should get out from under this centralist English dominated state.
The Civil War.
This split between the Cornish gentry and the Cornish people is perhaps best illustrated by the events of the Civil War. Most of the Cornish gentry and its MPs were soundly on the parliamentary side, while the people fought on the side of the King. Although this might be seen as a perfect example of the complete assimilation of the Cornish people into the English state, Coate, (1963) tells us that the attitude of the Cornish to the English Crown was not one of passive obedience. This show of royalism was according to Coate, (1963) on a more primitive basis than perhaps shown in the English shires.

Payton claims the activities of the Civil War had more of a local focus than a national struggle, he argues that the Civil War in Cornwall was used more to dispute local grievances rather than any need to solve the 'constitutional crisis' (Payton, 1989:112). Coate also points out that local patriotism and the independent spirit of the Cornish were vital elements for the Cornish people in their fight against the 'foreign' parliamentary Army. (Coate, 1963:70).

Payton sets the Cornish agenda of the Civil War by highlighting that the fighting men of Cornwall were once again called to the Cornish banner. A Cornish army, the 'Cornish Foot' (Payton, 1989:114) or the ‘Cornish Malignants’ as Parliament called them, was recruited with the basic aim (as the Cornish saw it) of keeping the English out of Cornwall. Coate writes of the 'passionate attachment of the Cornish to their own county and their own race' (Coate, 1965:351). She locates this attachment to an inherent local patriotism, racial difference and geographical isolation, which she says, '...knit together in a common unity men of differing political and religious opinions' (Coate, 1965:351).

The Cornish army distinguished itself in a number of battles but after a particularly fierce attack on Bristol in which around fifteen hundred Cornishmen perished, the Cornish, as a fighting force were finished (Halliday, 1959). Many deserted while others refused to fight. Despite these setbacks, the Cornish, however, still retained their spirit and their mistrust of the English. The Earl of Essex being assured that he only had to appear in Cornwall for the peasants to rise on the side of parliament, found himself in Bodmin and 'surrounded by a savagely hostile people, all their latent hatred of the foreigner roused by his invasion' (Halliday, 1959:228).
Mr. C: (Retired Chemist from Chasewater. Cornish Bard) …the reason why the Cornish army achieved so much in the Civil War, until they were cut to pieces in front of Bristol, was the fact that they were following their own leaders. The Godolphins, Grenvilles and so on. Almost like a tribal chief. And when the Grenvilles got killed off they weren’t interested and went home.
The major effect of Cornwall's support for the Royalist cause was that the state had to complete its programme of totally assimilating the Cornish people into English society. To this end, in 1649, the number of Cornish members of parliament was reduced to 12, the Duchy was abolished, and a County Committee was placed in charge of the administration of Cornwall. Even so Cornwall's reputation was still held to be of a cavalier nature that parliament had to beware of.

The rise of Cromwell and the success of his revolution finally cemented the foundations for a unified England. Cromwell's actions against the Celtic fringes, were in response to the rise in English nationalism which Smith (1979) locates amongst the Levellers who spoke of the restoration of 'Saxon privileges' and the removal of the 'Norman yoke' (p.21). The newly wealthy bourgeois saw the prizes that the New World was offering, but to seize these prizes they first had to complete the unification of Britain. This was to be done by weakening the established feudal powers, by abolishing feudal courts and establishing formal bourgeois property relations, not only at home in central Britain but at the furthest outposts of anti-English feeling; Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

John Jenkin (Cornish Bard) All through history Cornwall has been different, It’s had an history all of its own…but I think it’s very important that we should keep this history alive and I’m very pleased to do my bit to do it…
A chap said to me he didn’t know there was any Civil War in Cornwall and I said yes there were 6000 parliament soldiers just up the road. So it always gives me a big sense of satisfaction to be able to tell people this. I think these are things people ought to know about Cornwall
Capitalism and Colonialism
As English capitalism grew it was being fed by a form of imperialism that had been inherited from the earlier feudal experience. Not only were the 'lower orders' to be exploited but the very resources of the land upon which they lived were to be ripped out and converted into profit. And to that end it did not matter if the recipients of this force were 'wild' Welsh, 'wild' highlanders or African 'savages'. Barbara Ruheman (undated) writes:
For an understanding of the national question in Britain it is essential to understand that this imperialist element was congenital to the development of English capitalism. More than any other nation England did not wait for the highest stage of this development to be reached before it embodied some of the fundamental features of imperialism in the very foundations of its capitalist structure. (p.2)
Thus, the conquest of Cornwall, along with Wales and the North saw the end of the 'older peripheralism' which Payton (1995) claims had dominated Cornwall for around six hundred years since the first attacks upon the Cornish by Athelstan and the Saxon Kings. As capitalism started to develop, history shows that the Cornish economy prospered. Tin mining became an important source of employment for the Cornish, together with Copper mining towards the end of the seventeenth century. The development of the mining industry and the technology needed to extract the ores from the earth meant that Cornwall saw an early transition to industrial capitalism.

Despite London's dominance and pressures of cultural imperialism, the Cornish language was still not dead. The cultural entrepreneurs point to a Cornish independence which they claim was the source of the earlier rebellions. Their Celtic individuality reinforced by the differences it is claimed Cornish society had socially and politically with the English shires, found a new expression in the technological advances and religious liberalism of the new 'industrial' age. Cornish culture and identity, it is claimed, was given a renewed impetus by the pressures placed upon the working classes by capitalist forces. Cornwall still geographically, politically and economically marginalised from the centre, was set to see what Payton describes as 'the development of an assertive Cornish identity' (Payton, 1989:120).

This increasing economic dependence upon the centre rested on the political integration of the ruling classes of the periphery. Thus, the Monarch rewarded the elites in Cornwall from the Norman conquest with grants of land and patronage. As a response to this type of patronage the gentry were quickly assimilated into the cultural norms of the dominant society. Hecther (1975) writes:
Indigenous elites in these regions [the Celtic Fringes] who sought the increased opportunities afforded by (English) Union began to assimilate by learning the English language, by practising the Anglican religion, and by intermarriage. (Hechter, 1975:109)

Mrs. B: (Retired living in Plymouth) I was a few years ago researching the 1200s and writing about a local character. He was a very important man in the court of King Edward . He went with Edward on the last crusade. His life in Cornwall was very separate and very detached from his life at court and on crusade. He went to the Welsh and Scottish Wars with Edward as well but at the same time he was the Lord Manour at Carmen Oak …very little is known about his Cornish life.
However, the bulk of the population, the working classes, held onto their language and cultural identities. There is no doubt that the State, in attempting to integrate the population into the central value system, did attempt to anglicise the population. In all of the Celtic fringes cultural imperialism was used as a tool to remove and eradicate, by violence if necessary, the cultural differences that were seen as a threat to the continued unity of the State.
A struggle for existence: The impact of capitalism
Meanwhile, the working people, losing the last practical hold of their language were preoccupied with the struggle for existence being securely fastened on them by developing capitalism. (Green, Pamphlet 74)
Particular - bourgeois, patriarchal - conceptions of 'the English way of life' were more or less forcibly imposed on the majority, and this imposition is a major means through which the male English ruling class has legitimated its rule. To speak in the name - and language - of the nation both denies the particularity of what is being said (and who is saying it) and defines alternatives and challenges as sectional, selfish, partial, ultimately treasonable (Corrigan, and Sayer, 1985:195).

Capitalism came early to Cornwall. The development of mining techniques and the technological advances made to facilitate deep mining, such as the application of steam powered plant, had an important impact on Cornish identity both socially and economically. Cornwall was amongst the first to industrialise in the West and it was the changes that industrialism wrought that Payton suggests further impacted upon Cornwall's peripherality (Payton, 1989). Indeed Payton (1989) argues that these changes further alienated the Cornish and limited the integration of Cornwall into the English centre leading to a 'new manifestation of peripherality' (Payton, 1989:129).

The increasing modernisation of Cornwall's mining industry and the building of roads and railways can be seen as an integral part of the building and economic development of Britain. However, many of the Cornish capitalists were either 'foreigners' or a product of anglicisation - the Cornish ruling elites were either of Norman descent or had been assimilated into the culture and manners of the English. Halliday tells us at the beginning of the eighteenth century:
Cornwall was by no means absorbed by England; remote and still barely accessible save to the hardy adventurer, its people pursued their own particular way of life, preserving their Celtic legends, festivals and folklore, and in the far west even their own language. It was still a foreign country with a culture of its own.... (Halliday, 1959:249)
However, this particular way of life and the culture of the Cornish was under direct attack. Cultural and economic domination were the forces that further developed the Cornish sense of difference. Payton suggests that although the mines were generally in the hands of individual Cornishmen 'there was a general hostility to outside interests - capitalists from across the Tamar' (Payton, 1989:143). 'Foreigners' cynically labelled 'the wise men of the east' entered the county as economic adventurers exploiting the underground wealth within the region. The Cornish people were well aware that these foreigners (Rowe, 1953:18) were exploiting them. Indeed Carew had first made this suggestion as early as 1603. (Carew, 1811).

These suspicions came to fruition in the sharp practices of the English capitalists (Morrison, 1980:11). Rowe notes that the 'old antipath[ies] towards the 'foreign' adventurer' (1953:68) persisted and rifts were created widening the perceptions of a Cornish 'us' and an English or foreign 'them.' However, of particular importance to the development of an individualistic Cornish sense of identity was the way in which the long tradition of mining had impacted upon the Cornish psyche.
Mining became a central plank of the Cornish identity, the raison d'être of Cornwall and Cornishmen...Mining was Cornwall (Payton, 1989:145).
By the end of the 18th century a large part of the indigenous population earned their livelihood from mining and other non-agrarian occupations. The new industrial relationships however, were based not, upon the developing Capitalist model but upon the older type of feudal relationships. The tin miners were organised within a co-operative or group basis and each group had to negotiate and bid for particular pitches with the mine owner, a tribute system which dominated industrial relations throughout the 19th century (Green, Pamphlet 74. p.19).

This particular form of labour relationship suggested that the labourer was on an equal footing with the adventurer capitalist. Green, when considering why this form of economic relationship remained dominant whilst the rest of industrialising Britain entered into wage labourship, suggests that it was a continuing defence of the Cornish way of life, an example of 'the continuing vigour and cohesion of national consciousness at this level'(Green. Pamphlet 74. p.19). It is also important to remember the role of the Stannary Parliament. This was a forum which Rowe considers was designed to promote the interests of the 'adventurer' class of landlords, small capitalists, local merchants and so forth. It cared little for the interests of the labouring classes (Rowe, 1953:47) i.e. the Cornishmen and women.

This situation soon found a voice in conflict. Cornishmen, never slow in the past to rise up against what they saw as injustice were soon at loggerheads with the capitalist, both English and 'anglicised' Cornish. The working miners were badly paid and badly fed and 'was showing a disposition to disturbance and riot' (Rowe, 1953:104).

With the impact of the French Revolution still being fresh in the minds of the local and national aristocracy, affray by the local tinners caused some concern. Ministers in Cornwall were chastised for not praying for the welfare of the monarch and the royal family (Polwhele, 1836). When learning that 'associations' were being formed to resist a possible French invasion and that the working-classes were being armed the Vicar of Veryan, Jeremiah Trist warned that the:
…volunteers may turn their arms more against the farmers and the gentry, than against any invading French (Polwhele, 1836)
Much of this concern seems to be based more upon the fears of the ruling classes than the actual events. Rowe (1953) suggests that the actual court records do not present a picture of a society beset by social unrest. He does, however, go on to say that there was a very real 'fear that judicial prosecutions and punishments might only [have] provoke[d] worse incidents (Polwhele, 1836:105).

In recognising the threat presented by the Cornish, the state had again backed off from any direct attempt to assimilate the Cornish by force. This recognition that the Cornish people did pose a threat to the Cornish richer classes, i.e. the English, at a time when the terrors in France were still a sour memory, provides another indication of the notion of 'difference'. As Henry VII had been lenient, in earlier times, with Cornish rebels, the courts and the state again were lenient with lawbreakers and troublemakers, no doubt attempting to further assimilate them into the English state rather than to antagonise them further. Hay (et al, 1977:100) reaffirms the State’s leniency by noting that the dispensation of mercy by the State through the law had the consequence of 'cementing dependence with gratitude and qualifying the impersonal transcendent rigour of the law with personalised intercession'. In this way Cornishmen and women were at the mercy of what was then a legal system which terrorised, brutalised and killed for often very minor offences.

The local aristocracy of both English and anglicised Cornish saw that justice tempered with mercy paved the way to a loyal and grateful citizenry. This type of class justice was personalised as a union between patrician benevolence and merciful dispensation. But the critical issue is that it was the English state and ruling elites that were in charge and they were not going to let the Cornish forget that.
A ruling class organises its power in the State. The sanction of the state is force, but it is force that is legitimised, however imperfectly, and therefore the state deals also in ideologies. Loyalties do not grow simply in complex societies: they are twisted, invoked and often consciously created. Eighteenth-century England was not a free market of patronage relations. It was a society with a bloody penal code, an astute ruling class who manipulated it to their advantage, and a people schooled in the lessons of Justice, Terror and Mercy. The benevolence of the rich men to poor, and all the ramifications of patronage, were upheld by the sanction of the gallows and the rhetoric of the death sentence (Hay, et al, 1977:100).
Nevertheless, men and women were hanged and transported not as Sir Francis Basset would have had it for being part of the riotous mob which needed him to rush down from London and swear in fifty special constables to arrest at the dead of night fifty ringleaders - three of whom were sentenced to death, one being hung - an example to the local populace whose manners were 'suddenly changed from rudeness and disrespect to proper obedience' (Rowe, 1953:105), but, as the actual Assize records shows, for the somewhat lesser offence of stealing five pounds worth of wheat!

It is clear that the Cornish upper classes were alarmed by the conduct of the miners who were underpaid and underfed. The Cornish were still clearly seen as rebels by the English ruling classes. The records of Bodmin Assizes show that on April 13,1796 a James Watt wrote to Thomas Wilson;
I hope the military will settle your rebellion and rejoice they (the rebels) have been kept from Truro
Thompson sees this period as a final 'desperate effort by the people to re-impose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market (Thompson, 1963:73). These disturbances, across the whole of the country and, primarily, of a consumerist nature, were more concerned with the cost of bread than with wages. (Thompson, 1963:73). While the riotous nature of the late eighteenth century was crucial for Thompson in securing the dominance of the laissez-faire economics that dominated industrial society, it was also a period that saw the final assimilation of the English working-classes into their class identity - an identity inherently linked to England and all things English in both a political and social sense.
The Impact of Industrialisation.
Green suggests that while the Cornish national culture assisted the resistance to capitalist forces, the consequences of this resistance moved the Cornish away from the total assimilation of their English comrades (Green, Pamphlet 74. p.19). Hobsbawm suggests that in Cornwall political radicalism and Chartism was weak. He argues that:
Cornish industrial and social structure was, in many respects, archaic. Skilled miners, for instance, could continue to regard themselves not as wage-labourers but as sub-contractors or partners under the ...tribute [system] (Hobsbawm, 1964:29-30)
Consequently the particular form of social identity that this form of economic relationship took was a kind of dual consciousness - a consciousness which consisted of a loyalty to the economic system and an identification with the capitalist market system, but with a less developed sense of a working class identity with little or no relationship with the English experience, and a 'national' and social consciousness that was rooted in the memory and traditions of an older Cornwall. Thus, any national consciousness remained cultural rather than political.

With the opening of the post-revolutionary age, the twin forces of modernisation and economic growth saw the arrival of the modern nation state. The need for national strength was a pervasive force across the whole of Western Europe. Max Weber noted that 'Industrialisation should promote political centralisation by strengthening the central state apparatus at the expense of regional and local authorities' (Weber, 1968:336-37). In Cornwall this manifested itself in the faltering symbols of accommodation - the Duchy and the Stannaries. (Payton, 1989:145). Payton (1989) argues that the Duchy had little role in a newly industrialising country, that it represented all that was discredited, its ancient role had no place in a modern society. The Duchy, under the direction of Prince Albert lost its earlier 'accommodation' role and took on a new commercial identity within the county. Indeed, the Local Government Act of 1888 defined Cornwall as a county with equal status to those in England and Wales, thus losing the earlier special constitutional role given to it by Edward III.

Similarly, by the eighteenth century the Stannaries had become less important, its 'accommodating' role had become less while its economic role had become of more import. The Cornish mining capitalists used the Stannaries to protect their interests within the industry. English capitalists nevertheless saw the Stannaries as part of the feudal and archaic past - 'a vestige of "antique privilege"' (Rowe, 1953:194). However, it is interesting to note that it was the anglicised elites that supported the Stannary system against what Rowe calls the 'irresistible capitalistic utilitarianism towards the fettering traditions of the past' (Rowe, 1953:195). Nevertheless it was these 'fettering' traditions that gave Cornwall its distinctive forms of identity and early sense of individualness. But as Hechter (1978) suggests industrial development tends to destroy traditionally monopolistic economic organisations. And thus by the end of the nineteenth century the Stannaries had become irrelevant.

Cornwall had, for the previous two centuries, returned 44 members to the House of Commons. Prior to the Civil War, Mary Coate (1933:19) had shown that the MPs were Cornish or perceived themselves as such. But by the eighteen century this had become less so. Indeed Bishop Trelawny had commented upon the number of what he called 'foreigners' amongst the Cornish MP's. (Feiling, 1925). However, a disgruntled losing candidate revealed in 1821 that votes were being bought. Other 'rotten boroughs' soon came to light. Halliday suggests that:
Cornish seats were transferred like shares in a joint stock company; only half a dozen of the members were natives of the county, and electors were kept down to a minimum. (Halliday, 1959:288).
Bossiney, for example, returned two members with a single voter. The Reform Bill, introduced by Lord John Russell, did away with the 'Cornish mafia' and thus the remnants of 'accommodation'. Payton argues that the passing of these old symbols and mechanisms of 'accommodation', notably the Duchy, the Stannaries and the 44 MP's, 'reflected the changing nature of Cornish peripherality' (Payton, 1989:154).

Thus, Cornwall suffered a 'bureaucratic incorporation' (Smith, 1989), the ruling upper class having managed to create a strong nation-state apparatus, used its bureaucratic power to provide cultural regulation in an attempt to define and reinforce the wider cultural identity (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). The conclusion of this bureaucratic incorporation was the final fusion of the linguistic culture - the death of spoken Cornish and the subsequent common religio-political framework.

Nevertheless, at home, it is claimed, a sense of 'difference' still permeated the day to day lives of the worker and bourgeoisie capitalist. In their dealings with the English capitalists it seems that many a Cornish 'adventuring' class had no qualms in swindling the English. Upon being 'gulled' into buying mines by Cornish agents one director complained:
It really appears to me that they looked upon us as foreigners, and considered us fair game to be plucked at their pleasure (The West Briton. May 23. 1828).
Meanwhile in 1831 miners were still paying 'visits' to Wadebridge and Padstow to prevent corn being 'exported' to England. Hobsbawm and Rude argue that throughout the eighteenth century and well into the mid-nineteenth century Cornish miners were 'regarded as almost beyond the pale of civilisation' (Hobsbawm and Rude, 1973:106).

The Cornishmen of the early nineteenth century, and in particular the miners and tributers were 'free men, not wage earners, and Celtic independence, an almost fanatical individualism, made nonsense of the Cornish motto "One and All"’ according to Halliday. (1959:293). The Cornish, Hobsbawm (1973) suggests rejected the development of a co-operative class culture through Chartism. Hobsbawm suggests further that the geographical isolation of Cornwall separated Cornish workers from the impetus of class politics that solidified the working classes of England (Hobsbawm and Rude, 1973:30).

Green tells us that Chartism was an active force in some areas of Cornwall and in fact William Lovett, one of the leaders of Chartism was born in Newlyn (Green. Pamphlet 74. p.19). However, Chartism failed to make an impact and the development of the trade union movement and labour organisation was retarded in Cornwall. The first mining strike was not until 1857 at Balleswidden, in contrast, Halliday (1959) suggests, with the 'turbulent Saxon cousins' over the Tamar. Chartism had vanished from Cornwall by the mid-nineteenth century.
Religion in Cornwall
Religion is a central theme running through the history of Cornwall and the Cornish. From the days when the Celts worshipped at their stone altars through to the imposition of an English bishop and an 'English' religion - Protestantism. The 'accommodating' state had continually used religion in a failed attempt to assimilate the Cornish peoples into the mainstream of English culture. Religion, Giddens asserts 'is a framework of thought and social organisation through which many aspects of life in traditional states may be filtered, including innovative forces and schismatic ones (Giddens, 1985:75).

Religion in Cornwall, during the early modern period, Rowe asserts, no longer held society together, the clergy and the people had drifted apart (Rowe, 1953:32) The Methodists in a new wave of cultural imperialism had banned traditional activities like hurling and wrestling and further, Wesley had also disliked village feasts such as the maypole dances and the Helston floral dance. Methodists took the view that these and activities such as the Padstow Obby Oss and Celtic saint's days were 'rooted in pagan antiquity' (Rowe, 1953:33). Nevertheless, Methodism was an innovative force which drew the individualistic Cornish, despite the attack on their culture. The forces of modernisation and the cultural attacks were successful. Wesley came to be seen as a 'courageous insurgent against inert traditional institutions' (Rowe, 1953:32).

The English Church had attempted to make its mark in Cornwall but clergymen, often Englishmen, were not listened to when they rebuked their congregations, their audience regarding their views as personal or at most those of the English Church. It was, according to Rowe (1953), the community that censured offenders and was 'a deterrent more potent than any ecclesiastical warning' (Rowe, 1953:33).

However, despite the hostility towards Cornish national culture, Methodism took root in Cornwall. Their emphasis upon self-help and individual improvement struck a chord with the Cornish, whose economic life was based upon the same precepts and as a people who were already deeply superstitious were readily susceptible to the superstitious nature of the sect. Payton argues that:
Methodism certainly found itself attuned to Cornish Society and emerged in the nineteenth century as a principle strand of the Cornish identity... (Payton, 1989:162).
It was on the back of the Methodist religion that the Cornish people progressed in the eyes of the English and were finally assimilated into 'industrial society'. It was religion not radical or trade union organisation, together with the forces of the English bureaucracy that eroded to some extent Cornish folk culture. Deacon writes:
Methodism and the later teetotalism were the cultural vanguards of a new order (Deacon 1986:23)
Methodism was an 'improving' doctrine. It preached temperance, education and literary societies. It also questioned the class-isms of the trade union and labour movement with its egalitarian preaching. We must remember that the tribute system had encouraged the Cornish workers to consider themselves on an equal par with their Capitalist owners. So this doctrine was not difficult to come to terms with.
Jack: (Bar Manager from St. Neot) Cornwall and Methodism go together. .John Wesley’s effort, preached here and preached there and we’ve got Wesley House and Gwennap Pit and all those places and that’s very staunch in a Cornishmans heart
The inherent liberalist/ individualistic debate that was central to much of the Methodist creed mirrored the Cornish experience of the earlier times. Payton tells us that:
Liberalism was very much in tune with the individualistic strain in Cornish Society (Payton, 1989:166)
Di: (School Worker from St. Austell) We’re mainly Liberal around here mainly because of David Penhalligon. He was a Cornish boy and we supported the Cornish boy. He was the epitome of what we see as Cornish. He had the accent, the stature, he was strong and large, he was very convicted to each thing he stood for. He would take it right to the end which is something respected. Traditional values
For Rowse it was simply because of the individualistic and democratic nature of the Cornish that the English monarchy and aristocracy meant little to them (Rowse, 1969:17).
Mr. L: (Council Worker from Cambourne) What would happen if the Queen came to Padstow [on May Day- obby oss day] and this woman said [on the radio] if the Queen came to Padstow on May Day she’d have to take a back seat because she wouldn’t come in front of Padstow May Day. This is something we’ve got that we’ve kept going and we’ll keep it going.
Methodism, while at odds with traditional Cornish culture, had imbued the old sense of individualism and 'difference' or non-conformity with a modernising purpose. Indeed Wesley's social gospel is given credit by many historians for the fact that the United Kingdom and, specifically Cornwall, where the pressure was great, avoided the bloody Jacobean revolt taking place in France in which the dissident response to oppression was the guillotine. It is for Payton a vital aspect of Cornish culture that reflects both the historical legacy of what he calls the Older Peripheralism and the new modernising aspects of the new industrial age.

Nevertheless, Methodism whilst important, is only one aspect of the assimilation of the Cornish. The State, in its continual battle to centralise power and maintain its dominance, still attempted to reduce the cultural basis of Cornwall's distinctiveness; For example, The 1870 Education Act for Green, represents:
…a culturally elitist perspective which is recorded all over Celtic Britain as a 'murder machine' for native language and culture, and its operation in Cornwall made everything Cornish seem 'rough ready and rude' (Green. Pamphlet 74. p.20).
By 1891 the 'incorporation' of the Cornish into the unilingual state was complete. John Davey of Boswednack who claimed to be the last native speaker of Cornish had died (Berresford Ellis, 1985:139), new cultures and new traditions had entered Cornish life.
John Jenkin (Cornish Bard) …when I talk to people about various aspects of Cornish history then I certainly feel Cornish…I’ve just done a little article for our parish magazine on the Cornish language in Cornish churches because many people don’t realise that these happen…when I wrote the article certainly my feeling of Cornishness and feeling of difference came out. I am telling you people things that you don’t know and things you ought to know and these are the things that set me apart from you
John Jenkin (Cornish Bard) I think the desirability of resurrecting Cornwall as a place and the Cornish language and history has really only come in the last 100 years or so because the English came and gradually the English culures dominated.
[i] The number of pounds of water raised one foot by the consumption of one bushel of coal