Local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders

Abstract

This article analyses local agricultural shows in the Scottish Borders and the way their composition and enactment relate to and reference the local farming communities that organize and host them. The context of these shows includes the ways in which depopulation, decline of local institutions, and withdrawal of local government services provide challenges to the existence and vitality of local communities in the Borders. The shows are conceptualized as public events with a logic of design consisting of three dimensions: an overall framing as festival; a ramified structure of nested sets of activities each differentially transposing the community's social ethos and iconic activities into the show; and a chronological incorporative structure of enactment in which the experiences and meanings of each set of activities are incorporated into successive sets. They provide a strategy for a fine-grained analysis of public events more generally, and of the impact on participants' experience of an event, and on the social world it references. © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010.