Bounding the Borders: Claiming Space and Making Place in Rural Scotland

Recent social geography has translated a longstanding interest in crowd behaviour into a growing literature on the relevance of popular culture, collective memory and the spatiality of social life. The emphasis has been on the significance of collective behaviour - in the forms of carnival, riot, festival and procession - as a means of claiming space in a bid to assert identity and resist oppression. These behaviours have been conceptualized as forms of ritual rebellion and are frequently linked with the strategies of marginalized urban minorities. This paper, based on the celebrations of a dominant majority in the rural Borderlands of Scotland, argues that the camivalesque is of wider significance and, in doing so, exposes the relational qualities of marginality and the ambiguity of the mainstream.