ABSTRACT
Seeing modernity as heterogeneous and ambivalent runs counter to modernity's own self-image. The modernist 'quest for order' propels attempts to segregate the traditional and the modern, and to judge between authentic and inauthentic. 'Cultures', 'communities' and 'identities' - all conceived as properly bounded, singular and distinctive —— are modernist products. One of the principal means through which modernist conceptions discount alternatives is through categorising them as pathological. Ambivalence becomes a scandal. Cultures whose elements do not 'cohere' appear dysfunctional; communities in change are depicted as 'dying'. Identities which are not unified and singular——identities which cannot express that which is authentically self - are medicalised as 'split', 'repressed', or 'schizophrenic'. Much anthropological work on the Scottish Highlands has emphasised the long history of romanticization and ways in which features of contemporary Highland life have been shaped by their relationship with wider British society.
