Scottish wilderness rejuvenated: The regional identity of scotland as a tourist destination in the scots magazine 2017–2018

Abstract

Vital academic debates concerning national and regional identities have recently been conducted in the trans-disciplinary field of Tourism Studies, in the context of today’s iden-tity-based economy. Tourist destinations compete on the market by promoting their place identities constructed in response to the needs and tastes of tourism consumers. Scotland, long preoccupied with her historically complicated cultural identity, is also involved in projecting a commodified regional identity. The following analysis of a sample of The Scots Magazine texts, approached here as elements of Scotland’s coordinated destination marketing, demonstrates the ascendancy of revived and discursively renewed wilderness as the dominant identity marker of the region.