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Accepted Paper:

Ancestral spirits and Iron pans: How Nawken navigate contested landscapes through spoken stories and objects of 'Gypsy-ness'  
Davie Donaldson (University of Aberdeen)

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper will explore how Nawken (Scottish Travellers), utilise spoken stories and traditional trails to create home within a contested landscape. Drawing from recent oral history research, and building on studies of Nawken craftsmanship and tangible heritage, this paper will seek to propose that Nawken not only 'live' the landscape through spoken stories; but that they resist the restriction of ancestral landscapes, by ensuring the presence of physical objects of 'Gypsy-ness' that unwrite authoritative sedentary cultural settings that limit ancestral relations.

Paper Abstract:

This paper will explore how Nawken (Scottish Travellers), utilise spoken stories and traditional trails to create home within a contested landscape. Drawing from recent oral history research, and building on studies of Nawken craftsmanship and tangible heritage, this paper will seek to propose that Nawken not only 'live' the landscape through spoken stories; but that they resist the restriction of ancestral landscapes, by ensuring the presence of physical objects of 'Gypsy-ness' that unwrite authoritative sedentary cultural settings that limit ancestral relations.

Through the highlighting of the significance of cultural 'objects' within the Nawken community, this paper will identify how Nawken use these objects to re-generate supra-individual belonging. How objects of 'Gypsy-ness' such as Gold jewellery, Imari pattern Crown & Derby; symbolic motifs; and so-called 'Gypsy' cast-iron pans have come to act as definitions of resistance against sedentarisation, and cultural fragmentation. It will further suggest that the presence of these objects should not solely be understood as 'tradition', but as reminders of cultural belonging and methods of silent navigation of contested landscapes.

Panel Envi06
Unwritten Indigenous Arctic Infrastructures
  Session 1