What is Tradition?

In her opening essay to the wonderful catalog of the exhibition Memory and Imagination: The Legacy of Maidu Indian Artist Frank Day, Rebecca Dobkins (1997:1) asks the almost impossible question "What are the meanings of'tradition'?" What a question! She might as well have asked "What is life?" And at the Memory and Imagination in Twentieth-Century Native American Art Symposium on April 19, 1997, Frank LaPena and I were supposed to answer this question in our thirty minute presentations. Just as life has death as its opposite, so tradition is often said to be opposite to innovation. But just as within Christianity and other religions there is life in or after death, so there is a "tradition of innovation," as in contemporary Western art traditions, or there may equally be the "innovation of tradition," as in the commonly referred to "invention of tradition." The latter topic has been the subject of a growing body of literature in the last two decades, following the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger's book by that title (1984). In my discussion of tradition, I am indebted to the work of Alice Horner, whose Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology, "The Assumption of Tradition," is perhaps the best thing ever written on the topic (see Horner 1990). Horner reminds us that tradition refers both to theprocess of handing down from generation to generation, and some thing, custom, or thought process that is passed on over time. Thus we can say, for instance, that a multi-generational dance is an item of custom, a performance, and at the same time, such a dance is an occasion for the passing of the technique and the feeling of the performance from older to younger generations. Until recently, this handing on was a natural , unself-conscious part of the dance. Until the continuity was threatened, until the possibility of the inability to hand things down arose, people were not so self-conscious of the process of the handing on of tradition. This takes us back to the origin of the concept of tradition in the European world, but I want to make it clear that we can probably draw parallels in most of the rest of the world: a consciousness of tradition arose primarily only in those historical situations where people were aware of change. Tradition was the name given to those cultural features which, in situations of change, were to be continued to be handed on, thought about, preserved and not lost. Although it is somewhat of an exaggeration, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1966:233-34) has divided up societies into two types: those that believe that every generation recreates the past and that time is a series of cycles, which he calls "cold" societies, and those that are conscious of change and of the irreversible direction of history, which he labels "hot" societies. In a lecture given at Berkeley in 1984, he tried to trace the emergence of one kind from the other by reference to ninth-to-eleventh century Japanese Heian court society. During that period the usual marriage rule requiring the marriage of men to their cross-cousins (mother's brother's daughters or father's sister's daughters) broke down when people began to break the rules and marry strategically for status and personal gain. He was able to show how the former kind of society, found traditionally in much of the world, is one that reproduces the social structures every generation (so that men fell into the same positions as their fathers and grandfathers, and women, their mothers and grandmothers). Whereas in the latter kind, every generation is different and, according to the literature of that age, more exciting, so that new family relationships and kinship structures were formed every time. This kind of excitement and period of intrigue he called "The Birth of Historical Societies." Originally the concept of tradition, literally from the Latin meaning "something handed over," in slowly changing societies was almost equivalent to inheritance. Tradition was both the means of