Playing away: liminality, flow and communitas in an Ulster flute band's visit to a Scottish orange parade

This paper explores the interaction of the embodied practices of musicking and discourse in bringing forth identity and creating community in contexts of marching, playing, singing and dancing during the visit of Sir George White Memorial Flute Band from Broughshane, County Antrim, to an Orange lodge in the Ayrshire mining village of New Cumnock, on the occasion of the annual celebration of the Battle of the Boyne.

The paper shows that communal embodied experiences of musicking can both define and transcend boundaries whilst bringing forth communal identities, and also highlights the strategic uses of discourse to account for embodied ways of being in the world, and to define and redefine the nature of the community being produced.

The paper goes on to explore the long term political effects of transitory but powerful emotional experiences in bonding band members to each other and to the broader social world of working-class loyalism within which these experiences are brought forth.