In the preface to Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South, Celeste Ray explains that she had meant to write a different book, on the archaeology of Iron Age Europe. Fortunately for the anthropology of British diasporic populations, her project changed into a richly documented, long-term, multisited, regional analysis of the southern Scottish heritage movement. Centered on the Cape Fear Valley of North Carolina, home of the largest settlement of Highlanders in the United States, the study deals not only with the heritage of the approximately 20,000 Highlanders who settled in North Carolina before the American Revolution but also with that of subsequent waves of settlers from other Scottish regions, as well.

Rejecting the influential view that Euro-American ethnicity is generally in decline, Ray contends that her consultants claim Scottish or Celtic identity, distinct from and contrasting with Anglo-Saxon identity. The Scottish heritage movement celebrates a merger of "historical incidents, folk memories, selected traditions, and often sheer fantasy to interpret a past in a form meaningful for a particular group or individual at a particular point in time" (p. 7). The movement encompasses both participants with "a deep transgenerational awareness of their heritage" (p. 12) and those who have reclaimed their identity. They participate in organizations and events throughout the year involving distinctive dress, food, and religious services, often reinforced and refreshed with transnational links to the Scottish homeland. Contrasting her work with that of ethnographers who, like Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, deconstruct the invention of tradition, Ray instead focuses on ways in which fictionalized histories and new rituals constitute a mythological charter connecting participants socially, historically, and geographically with the Scottish "clanscape."

Ray organizes analysis of the movement in seven chapters dealing with the construction of Scottish identity, the emergence of the revivalist heritage movement in Carolina, the appropriation of the family metaphor of the clan system, the reinterpretation of the Highland Games in the South, the importance of heritage pilgrimages to Scotland, the polyvocal image of the warrior Scot, and Scottish heritage as a revitalization movement. She traces the emergence of Highlandism as a focus for pan-Scottish identity, drawing on a convergence of themes: the Jacobite Risings, the defeat of the Highlanders at the Battle of Culloden (1746), the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and the modern development of clan tartans as symbols of family identity. “Heritage celebration" according to Ray, "focuses on Highland life prior to Culloden, employing symbols of Scottish identity developed one hundred years after Culloden” (p. 40). In the chapter on “Scottish Heritage and Revival in North Carolina,” Ray traces the history of the movement and shows how it incorporates diverse and unrelated threads of Scottish identity into a communitas, evident, for example, through the performance of 19th-century songs commemorating and mythologizing the Jacobite period. In the next chapter on the significance of the clan system for the genealogically fascinated Carolina Scots, she describes the clanscape of the Scottish Americans. The activities of the clan societies both widen the imagined community of Scottish Americans and focus it more sharply on standard images of Scottish heritage. Ray points out that many of the activities of the clan societies are those associated with revivalism: dancing, poetry recitation, and storytelling in celebration of past ways of life. In the following chapter, Ray describes another venue for the activity of clan societies, the southern Highland Games circuit, in which the distinctive athletic events, no longer the sole focus of the gatherings, create a rationale for transnational ties with Scotland. She extends the analysis of transnational flows in the next chapter on heritage tourism in Scotland and the connections between the Highland landscapes and those that “re-place” them in Carolina (p. 150). Ray’s penultimate chapter on “Warrior Scots” is particularly insightful. She shows that the warrior image, “shaped by historical biases rather than cultural continuities” (p. 180), connects the Highland way of life directly to "military defeat—a paradigm with which Southerners are well acquainted” (p. 154). Thus, Confederate and Scottish heritages draw on parallel mythologies, according to Ray, weaving together martyrdom, militarism, strong religious faith, attachment to place and kin, and distinct gender roles. In the conclusion, Ray tantalizingly but all too briefly sketches an interpretation of southern Scottish cultural heritage as a revitalization movement, “an intentional and organized attempt to create a more satisfying state of existence” (p. 207). This interpretation again places Ray at odds with the "decline of ethnicity" theorists and their dismissal of heritage interest as simple nostalgia.

Many of Ray's consultants read and commented on portions of the manuscript and gave permission to use their real names. Ray's theoretical inspiration, which serves her well, owes more to Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony Wallace than to recent theorists of transnationalism and cultural hybridity. Lucid, accessible, and gracefully written, Ray's engrossing work sets a high standard for the ethnography of British and Celtic diasporas.