This book focuses on one of Britain's most marginalised and underrepresented ethnic minorities, Scotland's Traveller communities. The term ‘Travellers’ describes a series of interlinked social and familial communities that have existed in Scotland as distinct from mainstream society since at least the twelfth century (Kenrick and Clark 1999: 51). Recently, writers interested in these communities raised the issue of the underrepresentation of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller history in current scholarship: ‘“what field?”’, they ask, noting that ‘Gypsy and Traveller history remains something of a backwater, seemingly cut off from this same flow of historical attention’ that is given to other minority ethnic populations (Taylor and Hinks 2021: 629). The same might be said of Scotland's Travellers’ cultural heritage and this book therefore examines the unique storytelling traditions of these communities. It also reveals how stories make meaning within the communities that share them and showcases their enduring relevance to contemporary Scottish culture, and beyond.

As of 2011, Travellers have been officially recognised by the Scottish Government in the form of a separate ethnic category. The 2011 census carried out by the National Records of Scotland (NRS) included a separate response category to allow people to specifically identify themselves as ‘White – Gypsy/Traveller’ (NRS 2014: 2). According to the Scottish Government, the 2011 census results reported around 4,000 individuals as belonging to the ‘White – Gypsy/Traveller’ category (‘A Comprehensive Analysis of the 2011 Census’ 2015: 5). The same governmental report also states that it ‘should be noted that some organisations working with Gypsy/ Travellers in Scotland estimate that the population figure is much higher’ (ibid.: 6).

Virginia Woolf's study of photographs, portraits, and faces is part of her investigations of the enigma of character and the ungraspable something surrounding each human being. Critical of the biographical paradigm of the Victorian era, she attempted to depict an aspect of human life that is not about action or dialogue, but rather about emotional, thoughtful, and imaginary life. While she gave prevalence to the inner worlds of her characters, she also explored the role of visual communication. Using the technique of “showing seeing,” she dwells on situations when action and dialogue stop and a visual activity takes over. The reading of faces, with their gestures, miens, and often unreturned gazes, is a key activity in her novels, although often carried out discreetly, in scenes involving portrait photographs and painted portraits, as well as the “natural” faces of her characters. It could indeed be argued that her contribution to modernist literature is not merely her exploration of the isolated “thought worlds” of each human being, but also her reflection upon the limited access we have to other “thought worlds” and our perpetual effort to connect with others. Indeed, Woolf's brilliancy was her ability to describe the distance between people and unfold the problem of communication. She understood that in a situation where people do not understand each other and partly have lost faith in words, they are more than ever confronted with each other's faces and with unspoken feelings of sympathy, reserve, or dismay.

As we move towards the second quarter of the twenty first century, close attention to the intangible cultural heritage of Scotland's diverse Traveller communities is puzzlingly sparse. In a 1989 newspaper article, Hamish Henderson famously quipped that collecting the songs and stories of Scotland's Traveller communities at the annual berry harvest in Blairgowrie was akin to ‘holding a tin can under the Niagara Falls’ (2004: 2). Yet the abundance of material that was collected from Scotland's Traveller communities during the twentieth century – now housed in the SSS Archives, a sizable proportion of which has been made available digitally through TAD – is often underutilised. The central purpose of this book has been to address this scarcity and offer the reader a glimpse of the cultural abundance recognised by Henderson. Along with our archives, the living tradition-bearers from the Traveller communities represent robust and vibrant Scottish cultural identities. A dramatic change in working lifestyles – lamented by Duncan Campbell at the beginning of this study (1910: 24–25) – and a mainstream shift toward sedentary ideals should not mean the obliteration of marginalised cultural identities. One commentator recently put it as strongly as this: ‘Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are Britain's internal refugees – shunned and abandoned by their country of birth […] perceptions need changing. Biases need questioning. Discrimination needs challenging’ (Henry 2022: 3).

This book has shown how we can begin to address such concerns by looking closely at the cultural heritage that the communities hold dear. Despite the Rehfisches bemoaning the gallons of ink and effort that have been spent developing theories around the origins of Scotland's Travellers (1975: 272), this book gives us better understandings of how the most recent generations of the communities express their culture.

Oral narratives can and should be interpreted in the same way as artistic texts. In the same way as printed literature, oral narratives can embody sophisticated negotiations of contemporary social and cultural issues. This elevates the stories to a position where their contents shift from ‘vestigial’ understandings of an apparently simpler world to sophisticated negotiations of cultural identity. A central function of Traveller storytelling is to provide an arena where cultural identity and continuity are represented, conditioned and sustained. To demonstrate how this function manifests, Part II begins by examining a series of ‘identity strategy’ stories from two strong tradition-bearers who we met in Part I – Stanley Robertson and Duncan Williamson. What these stories represent are meaningful negotiations of Traveller identity through nuanced explorations of superficial appearances. What we find in these stories is the theme of an enigmatic inner Traveller identity, an identity that is juxtaposed with a specious outward identity.

As a recurring theme in Travellers’ stories, Braid propounds that the inclusion of this contrast functions to ‘strengthen the bonds between Travellers […] and to maintain autonomy and identity in the face of pressure to assimilate into settled culture’ (2002: 46). The core duality within these stories is that of Traveller and non-Traveller, and the function within each story is to articulate this very distinction. These stories juxtapose dualities from a distinctly Traveller perspective, where we encounter themes of justice and injustice being negotiated through protagonists with seemingly contradictory identities. We also find the concept of immutable familial bonds being used to expose the oppositional forces inherent to social existence.

Close examination and contextualisation of Travellers’ stories are potent allies when seeking meanings within the stories. Both personal and collective cultural identity strategies are at work; the stories of the strong tradition-bearers we have examined already display themes that other members of the Travelling communities can identify with – strong tradition-bearers can ventriloquise the sentiments and worldviews of broader communities of Travellers. We have focused our inquiries on the inner lives of the Travellers, and how these inner identities manifest themselves within the stories that they share. This is a theme that we return to in subsequent chapters. The present chapter scrutinises a macabre external factor that has had a demonstrable impact on Traveller storytelling. The Travellers’ oral history and storytelling traditions are replete with references to the so-called ‘Burkers’. The term ‘Burker’ is a reference to William Burke and his murderous activities as a provider of cadavers to Edinburgh's medical colleges in the early nineteenth century. A brief overview of the salient points of Burke's activities, to contextualise the term ‘Burker’, is where we begin. This overview clarifies how the term itself is understood within the Travellers’ traditions and is contrasted with more mainstream representations of Burke and his associates. We see how a combination of factors affected the way that Burkean anxiety penetrated the consciousness of the Travellers and settled population alike. The aim here is to gain a clearer understanding of the impact that such heinous crimes had on Scotland's collective imagination, then to take a close look at how the Burkers manifest in the Travellers’ tradition to the present day, presenting a new way of thinking about what they mean.

In the decades before and after 1900, portrait photographs offered new ways of studying and perceiving the human face. As we have seen, Proust, Kafka, and Woolf all took an interest in the medium and depicted how their characters engaged in the reading of portrait photographs. Yet this literary attention to the medium should be correctly understood. When Proust, Kafka, and Woolf describe the cultural and affective practices surrounding portrait photographs, these scenes are not merely representations of a set of trivial media habits, subordinated to the respective novel's course of action. Rather, such scenes serve as fictive laboratories for the study of portrait photographs and their relation to the beholder. They could be described as modernist media labs, exploring the attraction of portrait photographs and the uncertain status of the mediated face. Even if such scenes are usually not in the foreground, they are of great significance. Reading them attentively, we see that Proust, Kafka, and Woolf took the impact of portrait photographs seriously and explored the ways in which such pictures work on the beholder.

When literary texts reflect on the media situation, this allows us to consider the media as part of a lived environment and to comprehend the emotional and relational implications of media change. As media theorist Friedrich Kittler states, modernist literature was highly sensitive to the new media technology:

Identity Strategies within Traveller Storytelling

It has been recognised for some time that storytelling practices are intrinsically linked to the educational and cultural development of individuals within their communities. Niles observes that storytelling amounts to the maintenance of ‘social equilibrium by strengthening the bonds of affection between individuals while affirming the beliefs and values on which the continuing existence of a community depends’ (1999: 171–172). Before moving on to Part II of this book and looking at examples of Traveller storytelling in some detail, this chapter sheds light on debates around individual and group identity formation, and what this means in the context of the Travellers’ unique identities. Given the mostly twentieth-century-based perspectives of the opening chapters, this chapter goes on to furnish the reader with insights and perspectives from more contemporary members of Scotland's Traveller communities. We bring together the discussions from previous chapters to think about how Traveller storytelling traditions set themselves apart. Within a Traveller-centric, humanistic framework, it anticipates the detailed discussions of Part II by showing how the Travellers’ storytelling traditions represent a singularly Traveller cultural conceptualisation.

Lauri Honko has suggested that, within identity research, ‘the mainstream is towards analysing the identity of the individual, not necessarily in isolation from groups but as the final result of different group experiences, [and] shared values’ (1988: 14). This is an important insight from Honko which suggests that we can tap into the overarching values and beliefs of the group by looking closely at the identities of individuals from within the group. However, Honko perceives problems with this approach, in that the resulting analysis may reveal more about the individual than the ‘identity strategies of a collective body’ (ibid.).

With the spread of portrait photographs in the modernist period, face studies became more important than ever. Portrait photographs allowed for the reading of faces without the presence of the sitter, inviting close attention to sitters’ gazes, gestures, and ways of presenting themselves to the camera. The beholders could feel their enigmatic attraction: a human face taken out of its everyday context; a gaze that seemed to look through the viewer, infinitely out of reach. An almost ghostlike presence, transported by light. Every analog photograph has a history of pairs of eyes looking at it, investing it with emotion: sympathy, love, jealousy, dismay. Such photographs are touched, held, kissed, and tossed away; they are provided with frames or put into albums. They also have a history of fading and decay; over time, they become shaded, tainted, or folded, dissolving between someone's hands or slowly fading in a drawer.

During the decades before and after 1900, the portrait photograph started to appear as a literary motif. Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf stand out as particularly important in this respect. All of them had personal experiences with portrait photographs and were passionate about the medium. In their work, they reflected upon the phenomenon, depicting how their characters collect, behold, and cherish portrait photographs. Yet they also recognized the disturbing aspects of portrait photographs and paid attention to the difficulty of reading faces, the problem of the unreturned gaze, and the challenge of living with ghostlike doubles. Not least, they employed literature to reflect upon portrait photographs as a medium and the uncertain status of the human face.

In his fiction, Franz Kafka explores a set of inscrutable power relations and the precarious situations they create for his characters. Both metaphysical and profane forces seem to be at work, along with various technological entanglements. Portrait photography plays a role in this blend; in a variety of texts, Kafka displays a remarkable awareness of the powers of photographs. He depicts how they play a role in emotional life, creating attraction, longing, and sympathy as well as distrust and distress. He shows that they can be captivating in a limiting way, but also suggests that they can instigate processes of liberation. This engagement with portrait photographs reveals the fragile relation between human beings and technology and discloses how the premises for contact, communication, and identity formation were subject to change in Kafka's day.

Just like Proust, Kafka was passionate about portrait photographs in his personal life. The strongest evidence of this is his correspondence with Felice Bauer in the period 1912–17, which included an exchange of almost forty photographs. Kafka's letters testify to a deep emotional investment in Felice's photographs, and they reveal that he had a jealous eye and an obsessive interest in details. These letters show that photographs play a key role in creating intimacy and distant love. In Kafka's fiction as well, photographs proliferate, and especially family photographs play a key role. The characters’ relation to such photographs reveal their ties of loyalty, emotional attachments, and imaginary lives. Kafka shows how photographs have a sway over the characters and serve as the compensatory gazes of the family members. Upon closer inspection, however, the photographs are ambivalent; they depict silent gestures and suppressed emotions. Beholding such photographs, his characters undergo both emotional and intellectual processes, sometimes immersing themselves in the pictures, sometimes attempting to interpret them, and sometimes considering their own relation to the photographs.

This chapter begins by considering what a narrative's form, or structure, can tell us about its function. We have previously encountered several so-called ‘international tales’ and the present chapter will continue discussing these to present the reader with further examples and interpretations. For instance, at the beginning of Robertson's ‘Traveller-Judge’ narrative discussed in the previous chapter, he remarks that he thinks that his story might ‘come under some of the international tales […] because you find that these Traveller tales are international tales’ (TAD 38131). Considering the ATU classifications described above, Robertson's narrative does not appear to conform to the characteristics of any one tale-type. At the same time, Robertson's awareness of international tale-types is not surprising; strong tradition-bearers often combine, and reimagine, well-known international and local tales. Many Travellers’ stories come to represent a melange of international tale-types that are modified to reflect local conditions. These narrative melanges are palpable demonstrations of the distinctiveness of Traveller storytelling that has been alluded to throughout this book. In the context of the combination of tale-types and motifs, Traveller storytelling can be viewed as a distinctive mode of orality where the narrators create narrative ecotypes (cf. von Sydow 1934: 349).

The reader will recall from the previous chapter that a narrative ecotype is a version of an international tale-type that has adapted to a certain socio-cultural context. This adaptation amounts to combining and manipulating various plots and motifs that can be shown to appear in other discrete socio-cultural contexts. It is not the purpose here to ask how or why these plots and motifs appear in discrete contexts, but to examine how the Travellers’ stories become embedded with nuanced meanings that reflect their unique culture and lived experiences.