BRIGADOON, OR; MUSICAL COMEDY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF TRADITION IN MELANESIAN ETHNOGRAPHY

Abstract

‘Brigadoon’ is an American musical comedy of the 1940s and early 1950s. The story centres on a village called Brigadoon, in the Scottish Highlands. Two hundred years ago Brigadoon was threatened with an influx of witches. The village priest, fearing the evil of the influx, prayed that God would so change Brigadoon that one night in the village would last one hundred years in the outside world. Thus, to outsiders, Brigadoon appears only one day each century. Brigadoon would thus survive, each centennial appearance being so brief, in the priest's opinion, that the outside world would not affect it. Brigadoon is a picture‐postcard ‘traditional Highlands village’: Highland cattle, milk‐maids, village fairs, kilts, tartans, clans and bagpipe music overwhelm the audience. In ‘The invention of tradition: the Highland tradition of Scotland’, Hugh Trevor‐Roper (1983) demonstrates that the marks of Highlands culture so pronounced in Brigadoon were a late creation. The kilt was invented by a Quaker English ironmaster from Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson, around 1730; the image of a distinctive Highlands culture was the creation of James McPherson and the Reverend John McPherson in the 1760s; the distinctive clan tartans were created and marketed by cloth merchants in the late 18th and early 19th century, especially the firm of William Wilson & Son, of Bannockburn, and especially in preparation for the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822.

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