Cornish Identity: A Passion to Exist now available on Amazon

CORNISH IDENTITY

After 16 years and over 22,000 visits to this blog its about time I turned this PhD into a book. I have been editing the content below over the past months and Cornish Identity: A Passion to Exist  is NOW AVAILABLE on Amazon as an ebook Ebook link. 

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Here's a look at the cover.  If you have any comments please send them to me at  [email protected]

This book explores the Cornish Identity from a sociological perspective. Dr Burton’s PhD thesis of which this book consists was submitted to the University of Exeter in July 2000. In the intervening years debates around identity have exploded impacting upon every area of the human experiences from where and how we live to our intimate inner lives and sexuality.

 

As this book suggests identities, far from being essentialist and given are produced, manufactured, re-invented, borrowed, manipulated and marketed. Dr Burton’s thesis points to those who are closely involved in the identity business, the “cultural entrepreneurs”. In Cornwall they consist of a group of academics and activists who work to create the breeding ground for the claims of Cornishness, seeding the social milieu with claims of authenticity for such markers as the language and a specific and different history.  

 

Thus, a constructed Cornish identity is shaped through interactions with the dominant culture, the English culture, and by the continued discourse within Cornwall about Cornish identity. Cornish identity, Dr Burton argues, is in part, a castle in the air, a hybridisation of a particular social process that is unique (at the moment) to those people who live within the geographical boundaries of the country named England. The modern re-creation of a Cornish identity had its genesis in the late 1970s/early 1980s and it is in this context that we can say in 2022 that the Cornish still do have a passion to exist.

 

Rob Burton is currently a lecturer for the School of International Communications and Education at the Communication University of Zhejiang, in Hangzhou, China. He has most recently published books on Teaching English as a Foreign Language, most notably the IELTS examination and is also the author of three novels. 

Abstract

Abstract
Identities in Britain are in flux, and such identities have been to the political and social fore. Identities now traverse time and space, no individual on this planet is now immune from the impact of identity change. This thesis has, as its focus, the ‘Cultural Entrepreneurs’ who manage, manipulate and re-interpret Cornish identity. The Cornish identity is one that has not yet been widely subjected to the sociological gaze as it is, I argue, in its genesis. The active re-creation of the modern Cornish identity has taken place in the last twenty to thirty years as interested academics and writers have focused their attention onto the Cornish experience. That the majority of academics and writers are Cornish themselves is no accident. This thesis argues that Cornish identity is an identity searching for substance and directing this search is a group of ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ who manage, manipulate, interpret and construct the markers of Cornishness. For these Cornish entrepreneurs the search for a Cornish identity is a search for authenticity. Clues and facts are gleaned from historical references, signs and signifiers are ‘borrowed’ from other cultures to provide the substance from which, like the Irish, a contemporary and viable identity can be formed.
Unlike the Irish, however, the Cornish identity project is faced with the problem that there are very few, if any ‘authentic’ identity markers with which the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ could use in the same way as the Irish cultural entrepreneurs did. The Cornish ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ however have created two identity arenas wherein the narratives of Cornish identity played out. These are the arenas of language and history. The Cornish language is a case study of the search for ‘authenticity’. In Cornwall the language movement has split into three opposing camps with each claiming that their version of the language is more authentic than the other. The second arena of history shows us how important social and cultural memory is for the creation of an identity. That the history may have been re-written, re-interpreted, changed and even invented is of little consequence, for the ‘cultural entrepreneur’ is able, by dint of their cultural awareness, to provide authentic and compelling readings of history which once accepted by the group or community influence the groups narratives about themselves and thus their identity.
The epistemological consequence for this debate is that the ways in which a Cornish identity is created makes the Cornish identity an authentic knowledge tool. This tool allows us to look at the actors, - the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ - involved in the creation or re-creation of identities, such as the contemporary creation of an English identity and the focus upon Cornish identity allows us to think about how identity is managed and manipulated in new and different ways.