Piot, Charles DCramblit, Mackenzie2018-05-312023-04-252018https://hdl.handle.net/10161/16933<p>This is a dissertation about attachment and survival in a small community on the West Coast of Scotland: a tiny village on the edge of a vast landscape, a scenic area valued for its exceptional remoteness and wildness. Glenmara contradicts itself, and this tension creates value. It is a place that is both distant and connected, warm and wild. Remote and hospitable. A place that needs exposure but also carefully tends to its insularity. Falling in love with Glenmara is easy: everyone does. But staying the course takes work. This dissertation cares about endurance as a way of life and the sacrifices that are made for the sake of remoteness and wildness. It is a story about the exhilaration of an otherworldly place and how we struggle to live with each other when we try to hold onto things we can’t keep. </p><p>This dissertation is based on 18 months of ethnographic research conducted on the West Coast of Scotland between 2014-2016. It is situated in a small place that dramatizes everything that is human about living together: the promise and impossibility of social cohesion, the pleasures and dangers of intimacy, and the ways we both help and hurt each other, collectively.</p>Cultural anthropologyDissertation