TRADITION

Anthropologists and folklorists of previous generations sometimes lamented that an age of high technology and global capitalism would result in the demise of "traditional" cultures. Today, we more often consider culture and tradition as fluid and dynamic resources which interact with (shaping as much as being shaped by) the modern world, rather than being overrun or determined by it.

TRADITION AND AUTHENTICITY

        As a dynamic process, tradition flows from and shapes individual lives, while shaping and resonating with larger patterns of worldview and culture. People’s creations draw upon unique combinations of community life and personal inspiration. Tradition flows into and from this process of convergence: "History, culture, and the human actor meet in tradition," which is "volitional, temporal action" (Glassie 1995, 409). When humans commit to willful acts of creation intended to express cultural or social connection, they are participating authentically in traditional culture (Glassie 1995, 400-401). Throughout time and space cultures change and adapt rather than die.
       Dell Hymes understands tradition in equally fluid and emergent terms: "The traditional begins with the personal. Its distribution in history, in a community, is important, but secondary, not defining. Something partakes of the nature of the traditional already when the effort to traditionalize has brought it into being. . . . Intact tradition is not so much a matter of preservation, as it is a matter of re-creation, by successive persons and generations, and in individual performances" (1975, 354, 355). Folklore and tradition both rest on notions of situation, creativity, and performance.
       One of the Native American consultants with whom I worked also understands culture as a dynamic process: "I don’t think it’s that at all [i.e., culture is not being poor, uneducated, and unemployed on the reservation]. I think it’s the – well, we talk about culture as the essence of life, and how, the way we do things, the way we do, the way we look at things. It is Nishnaabe to me, being Native." To John Cappa, "being Native" is a matter of worldview and actions – how we look at the world and how we act in it. When he hears "culture" he thinks the speaker usually intends it to mean how a group of people lived during a particular period – e.g. his ancestors or community being poor. But it is more essential than that, more like life itself: "the essence of life," based on actions, "the way we do things," and worldview, "the way we look at things." He thus intuits from his experience the same message that scholars offer about the fluid nature of culture. Culture, like identity, is a matter of lives and imagination.
      DeMallie further develops his definition of culture with consideration of the dynamic and fluid nature of culture. He notes that both symbols and their associated meanings change over time and according to various outside and inside influences, "providing the dynamic that keeps human groups in constant flux" (1988, 2). Such fluidity of culture is universal and natural. Given this fluid and dynamic definition of culture, "authentic" need only refer to moments of creativity or interpretation, "when individual commitment brings social association" (Glassie 1995, 401). So long as one acts freely, with desire to connect to the "traditional" within a society (i.e., the work and ideas of other society members which are also willful, creative, and consciously connected to values or ideals of a social group), resultant creations, expressions, or interpretations are authentic.

 

TRADITION DEFINITIONS

1.  Henry Glassie in Turkish Traditional Art Today (Bloomington:  IU Press, 1993, p. 9. It is a rich word, lacking an exact synonym, naming the process by which individuals simultaneously connect to the past and the present while building the future.  So tradition can label the collective resource, essential to all creativity, and in adjective form it can qualify the products of people who keep faith with their dead teachers and their live companions while shaping their actions responsibly.  Traditions detractors associate it with stasis and contrast it with a change, but it is rooted in volition and it flowers in variation and innovation.

2.  Mary Ellen Brown, Burns and Tradition (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1984, p. xii) Tradition is a constant process across time and in time, linking past with present, thus ensuring continuity.  It is also dynamic and ever-changing as culture and societal needs alter.  On of the elusive but preserving cultural bases which bind people to one another, it unites individuals and refutes the isolation and insularity man as a social being fears.

3.  Richard Bauman, "Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore," in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972, p. 33) Bauman sees this as the former view of tradition: Folklore is the product through creation or recreation of the whole group and its forebearers, and an expression of their common character.  It is spoken of in terms of traditions, with tradition conceived of as a superorganic temporal continuum; the folk "tradition bearers," that is, they carry the folklore traditions on through time and space like so much baggage.

4.  Alan Dundes (quoted by Ben-Amos in "The Seven Strands of Tradition") Tradition in folklore, like culture in anthropology, has become a defining and identifying aspect social life.  There is a direct and mutual relation between a group and its tradition.  Through experience, interaction, language, and history, a society builds up a tradition which, in turn, functions as its complex identity mark.

5.  Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore, p. 10. All folklore participates in a distinctive, dynamic process.  Constant change, variation within tradition, whether intentional or inadvertent, is viewed here simply as a central fact of life for folklore, and rather than presenting it in opposed terms of conscious artistic manipulation or forgetfulness [Toelken has] sought to accept it as a defining feature that grows out of context, performance, attitude, cultural tastes and the like. . . . Tradition is here understood to mean not some static, immutable force from the past, but those pre-existing culture-specific materials and options that bear upon the personal tastes and talents. . . .In the use of tradition. . .such matters as content and style have been for the most part passed on but not invented by the performer.

6.  Richard Handler & Jocelyn Linnekin, "Tradition, Genuine or Spurious" (Journal of American Folklore, 1984) (p. 120) Tradition cannot be defined in terms of boundedness, givenness, or essence.  Rather, tradition refers to an interpretive process that embodies both continuity and discontinuity.  . .  . Thus we can no longer speak of tradition in terms of the approximate identity of some objective thing that changes while remaining the same.  Instead, we must understand tradition as a symbolic process that both presupposes past symbolisms and creatively reinterprets them.  In other words, tradition is not a bounded entity made up of bounded constituent parts, but a process of interpretation, attributing meaning in the present through making reference to the past. . . . This understanding of tradition implies that society, commonly perceived as the largest unit of social reality, is, like tradition, a meaningful process rather a bounded object.  Social identity is always formulated in interaction with others, and depends upon evolving distinctions between categories that are symbolically constituted. . . . Tradition is always defined in the present. . .[and] never exist apart from our interpretations of them.

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