My Own Island Home

Abstract

The notion of ‘home’ has become a powerful motif in the contemporary popular and academic project to (re)locate identity in a globalized world of movement. Home is, however, also materialized in ‘homeland’ and, as the discourse of ‘diaspora’ has been ever more widely appropriated by a diverse range of dispersed populations, so the phenomenon of diasporic ‘ homecoming’ has burgeoned – journeys, that is, in which members of diasporic communities ‘return’ to lost homelands as heritage-tourists and pilgrims. This article provides an account of ‘The Orkney Homecoming’, a packaged event in which over 150 Canadians of Orcadian descent travelled to their ancestral islands off the north coast of Scotland. Drawing extensively on the comments of participants and organizers of the event, the author argues that, through its materiality, the Orkney heritage-landscape provides a fertile soil into which the Canadian homecomers can root their identities.