afternoon
ok,a story first to illustrate what i’m talking about.
Whilst travelling i met a guy who sounded Austrailian and said he was from Sydney.
He asked what nationality i was, ‘scottish’ i replied,
‘so am i!’ he said.
It turned out his grandmother was from aberdeen, one of her kids have moved to Oz and gave birth to our Austrailian friend here.
So how is he Scottish?
To me the national identity is shaped by living in that country and all that experiences/opinions that that entails.
so how can anyone claim to be scottish (or irish, or welsh etc) when all they know about the place is second hand from their father or grandfather.
I am asking this here as it is something i’ve seen in the US too and i’m hoping someone can help me understand this phenomenon.
It’s just a way of recognizing where our ancestors came from. I’m certainly American, having been born here, as were my parents and grandparents and great grandparents, but I know that I’m of Irish descent in part, and one of my grandfathers was born of two people who were entirely ethnic Irish, so I recognize that I’m at least 1/4 Irish.
Since the guy you met had a mothe from Scotland he’s at least 1/2 Scottish, so I can understand why he’d think of himself that way.
I suspect though that he considers himself Australian of Scottish descent and was simply pointing out a commonality between the two of you.
I think when some people say “Oh, I’m Italian” or “I’m Irish” they’re saying “I’m of Italian descent.”
America is such a diverse place that saying “I’m American” doesn’t really define who your ancestors were. It’s easier just to name the country of origin.
Because in someplace like the US or Australia, where white settlement is only a few hundred years old, a lot of people tend to identify with their country of ancestry. This gives them a sort of cultural self-identity that stretches back for longer than the lifetime of their current country.
Further, in many cases, especially when the immigrant group from which the person’s ancestors came was discriminated against when they came here, the immigrants formed ethnic ghettos…“Little Italy” or “Chinatown”, for example, in many cities. This close contact with members of their own ethnic group caused them to keep a lot of customs and values they would have lost if they had assimilated…they kept their older sense of identity. Now, even though their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have assimilated, they still learned, through family stories, the culture of their family.
Ancestry, yes. I’m English, Irish, German, and Danish.
See, we’ve got a certain amount of insecurity here based on the lack of history. If we look for ties that go back for generations, we have to look in other countries, for the most part. I saw a sig line I liked once: “An Englishman thinks 100 miles is a long distance. An American thinks 100 years is a long time.”
From a slightly different perspective, both my parents are Irish - mother born Waterford, father born Dublin. They moved to England when they married in 1961. I was born in England. I have a British passport, and if asked, I state that I am English/British. My mother, however, is of the opinion that I am Irish. Her stock answer when questioned on this?
“Well now, if the cat had kittens in the oven, would you claim they were scones?”
It has always stumped me. There’s Irish logic for you…
National Identity is a strange beast - both my grandfathers died young, so my parents were each raised by thier mothers, both of whom were UK born and raised. <takes breath> As a result, I was raised by two people who, in spite of thier South African birth, were (and are) very English in thier outlook. My youth was full of Enid Blyton, the Goons, visits from English relatives, Fawlty Towers and dreams of studying at Cambridge University. When my wife and I moved to the UK three years ago, there was a strange sense of homecoming, and although I am fiercly patriotic toward South Africa and go through phases of missing it terribly (bearable because the plan is and always has been to return to raise a family when the time comes) I am also rather torn. My cultural heritage is English, but my homeland is African. And yet I am not naturally comfortable in either place - I love the wide open skies and primal oceans of Southern Africa, the friendliness of its people and the outdoor-living culture that exists there, yet there remains a connection to the UK that I cannot explain, a sense of things being as they should (White Christmases for example) that won’t go away, the sense of humor that is cutting and dry and the awareness of ancient history that pervades everything.
thanks everyone, i’m begining to understand.
i suppose it differs with every case really.
You could say that there is maybe two identities possible then, the theoretical one (knowing) and the practical (being)
nick
and Sqweticus, that is a classic!
Not only is America (and Australia for that matter) relatively recent as a nation, particularly in America a lot of the native-born population’s ancestors have arrived even more recently than the founding of the country.
My Penobscot (Native American) ancestors have been in this country for thousands of years. The first of my white ancestors (English and Welsh) in the New World got here in the 1630s. My Irish ancestors arrived in the mid-1800s. My paternal grandmother’s family, Dutch Jews, arrived in the late-1800s/early 1900s. I’ve been able to trace smatterings of a few other nationalities as well.
I identify myself when asked as Irish and Native American. Most of my ancestry is Irish, and with red hair, green eyes and pale freckled skin it’s undeniable. I include Native American because I don’t look it, but I’m very proud of it nonetheless, and I’m involved in NA culture and causes. I’m no less proud of any of my other ancestors, but they haven’t had the same influence on my life, so there’s no point keeping people all day while I list every single nationality that I’ve been able to track down in my genealogy. I don’t consider myself Jewish because a) it’s on my father’s side of the family and b) they converted to Christianity so I wasn’t raised with any awareness of it anyway.
I don’t usually identify myself as American, because if someone’s talking to me, I assume they’ve already figured that much out from my accent. Therefore, if they’re asking what nationality I am, they really want to know what nationality my ancestors were.
On the other hand, I belong to a few Irish culture-related groups online and there I doidentify myself as American. Having grown up in the US there is a lot in current Irish culture that I don’t know about, and they can’t identify me by my voice there. In that case I say that I am an American of predominantly Irish ancestry.
From Nickannan
“To me the national identity is shaped by living in that country and all that experiences/opinions that that entails.”
That is really what it comes down to.
I see no reason too look back at out great great grandfathers to find identity. Often times our ancestors left their lands because they were forced out or no longer could make a living in that land. Why should we feel any attachment to a place that our ancestors wanted (desperately in some cases) to leave?
reading the above has made another point.
i saw it, vaguely recognised it as gaelic but had to google it to see what it meant (irish gaelic - ireland forever).
In scotland at the moment only a small percentage of people know gaelic (mostly in the far north and islands), i certainly don’t know any.
But as someone pointed out, the ancestors of scots/irish who live abroad actually help keep this alive (and various customs etc) as they have this interest that few in scotland do. (as it’s taken for granted)
nick
I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of finding an identity, though it may be a case of looking for where our identities came from (if that makes any sense) or just a natural desire for connections. Besides, sometimes it wasn’t a case of our ancestors wanting to leave, rather feeling that they had to leave for different reasons. That’s not the same thing.
I met a woman, who was about my age, in India who told me she was Irish American. In the course of the conversation it transpired that her great grandfather had come from Galway.
As she obviously had seven other great grandparents, and I am interested in this type of thing, I asked her where the rest of them came from.
She had no idea about most of them, but she thought one of them might have been from either Switzerand or France. Her name was Jones, which would suggest to me that she might have had some Welsh blood in her paternal side somewhere along the way. Maybe not, of course, as spellings got mangled on Ellis Island, I’m sure or new immigrants changed their name to blend in.
Looking at my own lineage, if I go back that far, I have four Irish great grandparents and we surmise that the others were two each of Polish and Danish.
I am English.
Nationality is a funny thing.
If someone wants to use an adjective to prefix the nationality as given on their passport, that is surely their choice as long as they know that the people in that adjectival country may smirk a bit.
The thing is if most of these Irish-Americans went to Ireland and said they were Irish they would be laughed at (the idea that you can be Irish yet not know who ‘Keano’ or ‘Jackie Charlton’ are causes my Irish friends a great deal of mirth).
I went to Ireland a couple of years ago and never claimed to be “Irish.” I did acknowledge to a couple of people that some of my ancestors came from there, but I know I’m not Irish, and I felt it would be impertinent and silly to say otherwise.
I didn’t even have to go to Ireland to get laughed at. I once met a woman from Dublin and made the mistake of saying I was Irish (in the sense of Irish descent.) She put on the thickest American version of a brogue imaginable and went off on me, “My great-grandmother was from county Donegal and she came over during the Famine and …”
Well, that’s the point I was trying to make exactly… if I’m speaking to someone in person, they can patently tell I’m from America, and therefore I assume they’re asking about my ancestry as opposed to where I was born. (Although with my appearance and a name like O’Malley, I wonder why they even ask.) If I’m not speaking to the person, as in being online, then I assume they’re asking where I’m from. Then if they want to know where my ancestors came from, I clarify that. The former happens a lot more often than the latter, at least in my experience, ergo these are the terms in which I’ve come to think of my ‘nationality.’
I think the same can be said for most American-born people regardless of their descent, whether they’re European, Asian or African. Unless they have regular contact with wherever their ancestors are from, they’d be culturally lost if you just dropped them there.
Well, I would think that two people would already pretty much know what country they were from, that probably being the country they were in.
For example.
Let’s say a friend of mine is from Pennsylvania and I’m from Virginia. We both very clearly have “American” accents (hers being quite yankee). So I say,
“Jackie, where are you (is your family) from? You have gorgeous olive skin…”
Jackie blushes and replies, “Well, Henry, I’m half irish and half hungarian.” To which I say, “Wow, that’s neat, I’m irish, too! My grandmother was from ireland!”
Now, let’s say for a minute I met someone over the internet. They say ‘What country are you from?’ I don’t say “Ireland” or even “My grandmother was from Ireland.” I say either, “I’m from Virginia, USA” or “I’m from the US.” But I wouldn’t really talk about my ethnic heritage.