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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Simon McKerrellORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
Since Scottish devolution from the United Kingdom in 1999, throughout the New Labour years and subsequently, there has been a sustained and growing commitment to Scottish traditional music, storytelling and dance, collectively defined in Scottish cultural policy as the ‘traditional arts’. The public policy discourse of traditional arts is at once politically related to a growing Scottish confidence and intimately bound into a personal and national politics of identity. Today, in this transitional time around the referendum on Scottish independence, the potential for Scottish traditional arts to make a substantial and more sustainable contribution to cultural life in Scotland is within reach, but there are some underlying problems that need to be addressed by the community of policy makers and artists. In this paper I will first examine the commodification and professionalization of Scottish traditional arts in broad terms, and then go on to use this as a means to understand the recent emergence of a national cultural policy of intrinsic worth for the traditional arts since 1993 and finally, to consider the possibilities and opportunities for a more robust cultural policy for the Scottish traditional arts post-referendum. In recognizing that traditional music has entered a new and self-conscious period of commodification today, we open the door for a debate about the ways in which traditional arts in contemporary society, can be performed and supported in a more equitable national cultural policy.
Author(s): McKerrell S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Cultural Trends
Year: 2014
Volume: 23
Issue: 3
Pages: 159-168
Print publication date: 11/06/2014
Online publication date: 11/06/2014
Date deposited: 10/10/2017
ISSN (print): 0954-8963
ISSN (electronic): 1469-3690
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2014.925281
DOI: 10.1080/09548963.2014.925281
Notes: journal special issue title: Scottish Cultural Policy
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