'Tensile Nationality': National identity as an everyday way of being in a scottish hospital

Abstract

This article reports on research undertaken in a Scott ish hospital on the theme of national identity, specifi cally Scott ishness. It examines the ways and extents to which Scott ishness was expressed in the workplace: as a quotidian aspect of individual and institutional identity, in a situation of high-profi le political change. The research was to situate nationality as a naturally occurring 'language-game': to explore everyday speech-acts which deployed reference to nationality/Scott ishness and compare these to other kinds of overt affi rmation of identity and other speech-acts when no such identity-affi rmations were ostensibly made. In a contemporary Scott ish sett ing where the inauguration of a new Parliament has made national identity a prominent aspect of public debate, the research illuminates the place of nationality amid a complex of workaday language-games and examines the status of national identity as a 'public event'. © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action.