Theorising northernness and northern culture: the north of England, northern Englishness, and sympathetic magic

Abstract

Northernness is something that is simultaneously as real as the millstone grit of the Pennines, and as inauthentic as the simulacra Roman texts that gave the hills their name. Drawing on the work of Baudrillard, Anderson and Frazer, this paper offers a strong critique of the “common-sense” idea of northernness expressed in culture by and about the north. The paper begins by attempting to understand this construct historically and from the inside, anthropologically and sociologically. A discussion of the ways in which northernness is claimed to be constructed and performed through shared myths will allow for a wider analysis of how the north is still constructed hegemonically by outsiders: as an essential place of Othering and wilderness. I argue that previous scholarship about northern culture and northern England has also contributed to this essentialism. It will then be shown how northernness has become a form of Frazerian sympathetic magic, performed and invoked to account for cultural practices and beliefs that have been invoked elsewhere for the purposes of hegemonic power. The paper concludes by arguing that rituals of northernness have served northerners well in the past. Northernness is an invention of northerners, but shaped by the constraints that are placed on their agency by the hegemonic cultural elites of the south of England. But northerners have no choice. They must continue to perform because without the performance of northernness, the north of England, the simulation and the imagined community, will collapse.