Bothy busi/yness: navigating representation, practice and agency in the Scottish landscape

This paper uses the ‘busi/yness’ of Scottish mountain bothies to explore the agency of representation and its entanglement with practice. In doing so it asks, firstly, what are the material and discursive impacts of a rise in the symbolic value of an object (or in this case a building)? Secondly, how can this symbolic value have agency at a national or local level? Thirdly, what happens when symbolic value exceeds the capacity of the place, person or material object upon which it is built? In doing so it draws on legacies of landscape scholarship within cultural geography which attend to the politics of representation, and the importance of the vernacular, and learns from more recent research which develops a lexicon able to articulate the continued importance of representation. Arguing that representation still matters in the cultural landscape, but also that it needs to be understood in terms of the complex and interwoven relationship of what representations do, this paper teases out these connections in the context of bothies as buildings which have, in the last decade, amassed social value, risen in popular consciousness and subsequently accumulated a status termed here a “bothy myth”. This myth is duplicitous, promoting both stasis and change in the landscape, while demonstrating the capacity for symbolic value to have national level agency. Thus, not only do ‘buildings stabilise social life’ (Gieryn 2002: 35), so too can their representations. Yet, they do so imperfectly. In exploring the agency of representations and their power to uphold, maintain and effect change this paper latterly uses bothies as an example to address the entanglement of representation and practice, outlining how an accumulation of agentic symbolic value can have profound effects on the use, governance and potential future of infrastructures such as these.