Tradition and Agency: tracing cultural continuity and invention

Tradition helps ensure continuity and stability in human affairs, signifying both the handing down of cultural heritage from one generation to the next, and the particular customs, beliefs and rituals being handed down. In the social sciences, tradition has been a central concept from the very start. Yet - to update the old quip about nostalgia - tradition is not what it used to be. Twenty years ago, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger helped revolutionize the understanding of tradition in anthropology, history and sociology, stimulating an enormous amount of research on invented and imagined traditions. However, most of this research has focussed on the cultural dynamics of specific local innovations and reactions to global developments. The present anthology seeks to highlight instead just how widespread the invention and revival of traditions is. The individual chapters feature a fascinating series of case studies from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Australia, and Europe, while the editors provide an overview of how the various discussions address the larger questions of cultural continuity, agency and the use of cultural resources

Tradition and Agency: tracing cultural continuity and invention

Tradition helps ensure continuity and stability in human affairs, signifying both the handing down of cultural heritage from one generation to the next, and the particular customs, beliefs and rituals being handed down. In the social sciences, tradition has been a central concept from the very start. \ud \ud Yet - to update the old quip about nostalgia - tradition is not what it used to be. Twenty years ago, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger helped revolutionize the understanding of tradition in anthropology, history and sociology, stimulating an enormous amount of research on invented and imagined traditions. \ud \ud However, most of this research has focussed on the cultural dynamics of specific local innovations and reactions to global developments. \ud \ud The present anthology seeks to highlight instead just how widespread the invention and revival of traditions is. The individual chapters feature a fascinating series of case studies from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Australia, and Europe, while the editors provide an overview of how the various discussions address the larger questions of cultural continuity, agency and the use of cultural resources

Disentangling traditions: culture, agency and power

[Extraxt] Two decades ago, Hobsbawm and Ranger published their celebrated anthology The Invention of Tradition (1983), which included articles on the emergence of new traditions in Europe, colonial India and Africa.\ud A year before, Keesing and Tonkinson edited a special issue of the journal Mankind (1982) under the title "Reinventing Traditional Culture: The Politics of Kastom in Island Melanesia", which deals with similar issues in a different region. One can only speculate about the causes for this synchronous discovery of a new field of research, but\ud one possible explanation is that this was prompted by cultural developments in the recently decolonised regions in the Pacific, Africa and elsewhere as well as a revived interest in regional traditions in Europe, as the continent was moving towards greater economic and political integration. Whether this is a sufficient explanation for the sudden academic interest in the phenomenon or not, the idea that traditions can be newly constructed and serve political and social functions freed up an enormous amount of scholarly energy among historians, anthropologists, ethnologists and political scientists, and led to the production of a substantive corpus of literature on similar\ud processes all over the world