Katy Humberstone and Adam Kubik, ‘‘Celtic meets Slavic’: The social sustainability of Cornish and Silesian heritage in Europe and overseas’, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 22.1, 2023, pp. 1-31.
How can languages and cultures of micro-nations survive and flourish in conditions where they risk being misrepresented by media and business interests? This is the ambitious question posed by Katy Humberstone and Adam Kubik in this novel comparison of Cornwall and Silesia.
We are informed that Silesia, formerly part of Germany and now mainly in Poland, is a region where in 2011 there were half a million speakers of Silesian, while 850,000 identified themselves as Silesian. The contrast with Cornwall and its post-vernacular language is immediately stark and renders the attempted comparison a little questionable. In fact, the only obvious similarity is that both might be called regions. Even in that respect, Silesia, landlocked and subject historically to the influence of two powerful neighbours, has a very different history from Cornwall, a maritime region with just one aggressive neighbour. Perhaps inevitably, their article therefore resembles two separate case studies treated side by side rather than an in-depth comparison.
Nonetheless, some issues are shared by all minority cultures and affect their sustainability. While Silesia seems to be coping more successfully with the pressures of media attention and commodification, Cornwall is identified as more vulnerable, especially to commodification. The authors claim that when its heritage language achieved a public presence in 2002 this brought some growing economic opportunities. For example, the emergence of a ‘peripheral cool’ as business branding co-opted the Cornish language and other icons to sell stuff.
According to Humberstone and Kubik much of the supposedly greater economic activity occurs within a tourism economy that is ‘regarded as economically and culturally unsustainable’. It’s not stated who regards it this way, certainly not a local council that was captured by the tourism lobby several decades ago. But the trick is to find ways to benefit from a greater commercial visibility while preserving ‘authentic’ heritage. Apparently, there is ‘no straightforward answer’ to that conundrum. The authors are left calling for ‘fruitful cultural exchanges’, spaces where tourists and locals come together. Such a coming together over tea and a scone (jam first of course) seems a trifle unlikely in the current context of overtourism however.
The article also includes an interesting case study of the Cornish diaspora in Mexico, noting how in that instance the heritage language has vanished but the cultural influence remained and arguably deepened. Although the implications of this for Cornwall itself are left dangling. Overall therefore, this contribution highlights some of the problems shared by minority cultures but is light on answers. Ultimately it is constrained by working within an economic model that accepts commodification and profit-taking as a taken for granted feature and political structures that limit expressions of regional and national autonomy.
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