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A key term in the study of culture, tradition refers most often to the collective customs and knowledge of a group or society. Tradition is a source of basic learning, occurring even before formal education begins and continuing throughout life. Its usual connotation is a social process of “handing down” knowledge from generation to generation, especially by oral and customary means. It therefore is associated with precedent and culturally is linked often to a group’s “heritage,” although unlike referring to history, which suggests a time and place in the past, tradition carries a sense of social and cultural patterns—ways of doing things—that continuously occurred “before.” The term has other meanings as well, referring to the substantive results of this process, such as a story or ritual, a custom given social importance through repeated practice, knowledge whose official source cannot be verified but is held widely, or a concept (i.e., a mode of thought or behavior) characteristic of people generally. Social sciences scholarship may therefore refer to a tradition in a culture as a specific song passed down in a group through time or the tradition of a culture more broadly as a way of thinking and acting.

Culture in the past was a reference to place, often to a language group bounded in space, whereas traditions were more variably social—possibly referring to family, age, and gender—and migratory. In academic circles, tradition is more broadly defined than is culture, as in the use of such terms as Western tradition and Eastern tradition; here tradition is used as a synonym for pattern. Culture, by contrast, is applied to all types of associations as well as bounded groups. The view persists that traditions define a culture, rather than the reverse, and the “science of tradition” in European American intellectual history—whose purpose is to objectify and organize tradition—has been associated with folklore and ethnological studies. As a result, many genres and groups labeled “folk” are often considered “traditional” or “tradition-oriented.”

The reverence commonly afforded to tradition indicates that people follow it, willingly or not, and—significantly for social sciences—may define themselves or their group through its presence. Whether following tradition means unconsciously adhering to a severe form of cultural authority or choosing from a tradition that one finds appropriate can be a cause for dispute among social scientists. Implied in this difference is a questioning of whether tradition forces stability and conformity or fosters change and progress. Inherent in the concept is a duality that is constantly negotiated in society: tradition’s reference on the one hand to precedent (as the source of knowledge and action) and on the other hand to the present (as living practice, often adapted and adjusted for particular needs and conditions).

Modernity And Creativity

For social scientists viewing tradition as providing the cultural authority of precedent, there is often an implication that tradition is a contrast to modernity, the latter characterized by individualism (with free will and choice), mobility, and progress. A tradition-oriented, or folk, society in anthropological and sociological scholarship (e.g., on groups such as the Amish, Japanese, Hutterites, and Bedouins) usually has the characteristics of valuing social interdependence, filial and ancestral piety, communitarian stability, and harmony or “group orientation.” Many folk-lorists, however, theorize that the role of tradition is essential to everyday life in modern complex societies, often enacted through cued and framed speech, narrative, and custom to express social identities within a mass culture or to provide a sense of control for individuals (e.g., dressing and athletic rituals).

Another duality with tradition has been with creativity, particularly in studies of artistic traditions. It is often assumed that “traditional” or “folk” art means repetition or imitation of precedent by a community, whereas “fine” or “creative” art represents individuality and novelty. The former is viewed as primitive or ordinary, whereas the latter is elite and refined. A modern philosophy of the arts incorporating tradition since the twentieth century considers tradition and creativity as intertwined in the artistic process, viewable in everyday practice as well as expressive culture.

Contested And National Traditions

Rather than use tradition to describe national or hemispheric patterns, many social scientists apply it to minority cultures and small groups. Arguably, national traditions have been categorized as histories, whereas marginal groups have often been described in terms of tradition. In public or political discourse in the United States, tradition may be invoked in proposals for maintaining national or majority “traditional values” or preserving the sanctity provided by tradition for institutions of the nuclear family and religion in daily life. Debates arose through the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first century over virtues that constituted the basis of U.S. culture. Associations such as the Traditional Values Coalition, Toward Tradition, and Citizens for Traditional Values took on the label of tradition to represent conservative religious groups in lobbying for prayer and religious programming in the schools, prohibitions on gay marriage, public support for parochial institutions, and school voucher programs. Although sounding secular and broad-based, traditional in the organizational titles came to stand for an orthodox morality upholding the centrality of religion in public life. It invoked the merit of traditional to describe national “values” proven worthy by time and by popular usage. The implication by advocates of traditional values is that rapid social change has undermined “mainstream” or national values, while opponents argue for establishment of new or multiple traditions that are culturally relative and legitimate even if they are different from the mainstream. Sometimes the culturally relative keyword of multiculturalism, implying that traditions are created anew in contemporary life, may be set against the concept of culturalism, connoting the stability of values passed from generation to generation. Both views, sometimes stated as sides in a U.S. “culture war,” invoke tradition for social legitimacy.

In other countries facing rapid social change and diversity, tradition has been a publicly contested term for viewing different priorities of building national unity and multicultural community. Modifiers to tradition such as national, ethnic, religious, folk, cultural, family, and local have implied a need to place a feeling of social connectedness, a collective memory, in an identified niche within mass society. In the Netherlands, a society with a tradition of tolerance toward minorities, a rapid rise of ethnic and religious minorities (e.g., Muslims from Turkey and Morocco) starting in the late twentieth century caused social scientists to notice political and cultural responses to define and celebrate Dutch traditions (e.g., Koninginnedag [Queen’s birthday], Sinterklaas or St. Nicholas Day) nationally as a way to mollify fears of losing “Dutchness.” While creating a sense of cultural norm-ing, applications of tradition have also been interpreted in social science as a process of “othering”—characterizing groups and individuals who do not conform. Subcultural difference can also be normed, as can be seen in the common Dutch social scientific attention to regional traditions of speech, architecture, and customs to show a type of cultural diversity, even within a small country.

The way that social scientists approach tradition can vary across national lines. It has often been argued that Japan and the United States, for example, provide contrasting views of tradition. In Japanese scholarship, tradition is associated with the reverence given to ancient customs and myths, the system of intimate group life established in hierarchical village social structures, and the everyday expressions of social relations based on rank and filial piety (e.g., different performances of respect to elders and superiors in bowing and speech). Tradition is considered the basis of a unified society, and the concept of modernization is integrated with tradition (technological progress and mobility while maintaining a group orientation). In the United States, tradition is tied to the recent past and is viewed as more varied, befitting a multicultural country. It is a more malleable, privatized concept, with less force of authority, and indeed is often seen as “threatened” or “nostalgic” in a postmodern society. Tradition in the United States is more often associated with religion than public life, although American social scientists frequently discuss organized efforts to “construct” tradition (e.g., folk revivals, ethnic and social movements, “roots” organizations, nationalistic movements).

Adapted And Invented Traditions

A binary has emerged in cross-cultural studies of tradition between the naturalistic associations of genuine/authentic and the artificial connotations of invented/organized. The concept of “invented tradition,” defined by the social historian Eric Hobsbawm as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past” (Hobsbawm 1983, p. 1), suggests a linkage of organizers’/inventors’ motivations for creating practices that invoke tradition and instill senses of the past and of belonging, especially within national contexts concerned with the modern displacement of heritage and community. These invented traditions usually are of recent origin but appear or claim to be old. They also try to construct cultural meanings in the public marketplace, which can be contested, such as the ritual of national founding principles in the American Thanksgiving marked by a twentieth-century reenact-ment of “Pilgrims’ Progress” celebrating the seventeenth-century settlement of the New World and protested by a simultaneously held “National Day of Mourning” sponsored by Native American groups starting in 1970.

Set against the background of change, tradition’s role in the way people live and view the world commands renewed attention as new forms of communication arise. As industrialization and urbanization supposedly ushered in a “break with tradition” in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century trends of computerization and globalization raise questions anew about the processes of tradition for individuals and the various groups with which they identify, many of which have emerged only recently with invented traditions to promote bonding and expression. Social science inquiry has thus taken up tradition as a concept of social existence relating to modernization, diversity, and identity.

Bibliography:

Bronner, Simon J. 1998. Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Bronner, Simon J. 2002. Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Bronner, Simon J., ed. 1992. Creativity and Tradition in Folklore: New Directions. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Finnegan, Ruth. 1991. Tradition, but What Tradition and for Whom? Oral Tradition 6 (1): 104–124.
Gailey, Alan. 1989. The Nature of Tradition. Folklore 100 (2): 143–161.
Glassie, Henry. 2003. Tradition. In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, ed. Burt Feintuch, 176–197. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. Introduction: Inventing Traditions. In The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Shils, Edward. 1981. Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.