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DOI: 10.7330/9780874218992.c06 6 Trajectories of Tradition Following Tradition into a New Epoch of Human Culture Tok Thompson “To defy the laws of tradition is a crusade only of the brave!” —Les Claypool Tradition is a nexus of the past, the present, and the prospective future, a place where human agency engages with some of the more substantive constructs of the past. As Henry Glassie once wrote, “(h)istory, culture, and the human actor meet in tradition” (Glassie 1995, 409). Today the world’s societies are undergoing an unprecedented era of rapid change, in large part brought on by new communicative technologies. This opens up new ruptures and fissures in our relationships to the past and, alongside these, new possibilities for rearticulating the past for our present and future selves. The need for critical understanding of the concept of tradition may therefore increase in importance in our postmodern age as people create new linkages with the past. Due to the shifting of traditions—in turn due to the rapid technological and social changes in the last two hundred years—and the current ongoing change brought on by the digital revolution, coming to understand the word tradition is both tricky and necessary. In this chapter, I examine tradition as a “living word”—a word that is constantly adapted and changing in a dynamic, productive language—a word that has been around before, during, and after modernity. With each epoch, tradition has been shaped in part by different communication technologies: from live performances, manuscripts, and printed literature to, most recently, Trajectories of Tradition 150 digital traditions in the online realm. In following this line of reasoning, I propose a workable definition of tradition based on performative models, which, although borrowing heavily from folkloric theories, should apply to the concept in the most general sense, including literary traditions, cinematic traditions, and online traditions. In searching for elemental meanings of multifaceted words, core definitions remain important as a sort of anchor for all the various meanings and reinterpretations; I think it is safe to say, as a most basic definition, that something absolutely, completely new cannot be considered traditional—a starting point, perhaps, but a limited one, since even most “new” things (a new prophecy, a new novel, a freshly coined word or joke) seem to have connections to other things (prophecies, novels, words or jokes) in the past. The measurement of “how original” a particular piece might be is often held in reverse correlation to its connections to the past. When something can become traditional is a thornier question. Most of our actions have their counterparts in the past, but this does not mean that nearly everything is traditional. In a recent article, Jack Santino (2009) carefully delineates between etic and emic perspectives in tradition and ritual, arguing that what one person or group considers to be traditional might not be considered so by the next.1 According to Santino, this implies that tradition (along with some other terms he explores, like ritual) must be viewed as at least slightly self-conscious: in calling something tradition, we are consciously evoking what happened in the past in our present activity, underlining the activity’s rhetorical relevance and importance. As with much of folklore, traditions are self-conscious performances that frequently involve a good deal of questions about identity (such as whose performances are we referencing?). Hence, we have national traditions, religious traditions, family traditions, and even office traditions or online group traditions. When we celebrate traditions, we choose which traditions to celebrate and how to adapt them in the present, for the sake of the future. Yet not all traditions are performed in the same way. One major differentiation has to do with the media of communication through which traditions are performed. Folklorists tend to focus on live events, yet we can certainly point to other traditions outside of this category, such 1 This continues a long line of anthropological inquiry into emic and etic categories, as chronicled and explained in Marvin Harris’s (1976), “History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction.” Trajectories of Tradition 151 as literary, cinematic, or online traditions. This indicates the important role that communicative technologies play in the construction of the meaning of tradition, a role that will be investigated at length in this chapter. New communicative technologies thus necessitate a new, and more encompassing, view of tradition and perhaps hold out the possibility for transcending the long-dominant “tradition versus modern” binary. Communicative technologies have...

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