Author Description

This study examines the role of informal narrative (casual stories exchanged by people in everyday interactions) in the process of creating and maintaining cultural identity in relation to the inhabitants of the Orkney Islands off the Northern Coast of Scotland. These narratives serve as the means by which a community negotiates and forms its self identity and, therefore, provide a suitable window onto this cultural negotiation process. Combining symbolic interpretive theory from anthropology with performance theory from folklore, this analysis illuminates narrative as a cultural tool used to construct various identities, concepts of communality and community. This analysis, being directed towards the Orkney Islands, seeks to understand Orcadian identity in both its own perception of its separateness from mainland Scotland and the way in which it draws heavily on a sense of Scandinavian identity