Ruth Salter
Published: 21 January 2019
The mid-twentieth-century Scottish Folk Revival’s cultural-political relationship with society and consequent location within Marxist discourses of cultural dominance.
University of Edinburgh
The mid-twentieth-century Scottish Folk Revival’s cultural-political relationship with society and consequent location within Marxist discourses of cultural dominance.
Despite burgeoning interest in the Revival and its core figure Hamish Henderson, assessments of the movement’s political and social position often uphold assumptions that folk culture inherently reflects a distinct working-class leftist ideology. Henderson’s intellectual engagement with the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose theory of cultural hegemony informed his understanding of societal relations, is critically recognised.
Marxist cultural debates contemporaneous to the Revival were preoccupied with the pervasiveness of dominant ideology, problematising ideological conformity and the existence of alternative cultures within society: my project will redress scholarship’s oversight of the Revival’s relation to these broader debates. I will assess English- and Scots-language aspects of the Revival through scrutiny of archival manuscripts and recordings, as well as by conducting semi-structured interviews with persons active in the movement.
First published: 21 January 2019