This chapter lays groundwork. It first looks at how ‘tradition’ gets translated into other languages, at the meaning of that word in English, and at its many, often vague, uses in the study of religions. It then sets out different dimensions of the idea of tradition: content (things passed down); lineages (themes and variations over time); carriers (types of people who play roles in transmission); processes (transmission, emergence, consolidation, transmission etc.); normative evaluations (whether reified or constructed); social effects (functions of traditional authority); and social boundaries (the line between those who follow a tradition and those who do not). This book’s approach is to explore connections between ‘tradition’ and other concepts. This brings up the issue of ideology: how believing certain things about tradition gives some people more power than others. The focus is less on what tradition is than on what different groups of people believe about it.

This chapter looks at the idea of pure tradition (unchanging, unaltered, immune to the forces of history) and contrasts it with a historical view of tradition (something that changes over time). The idea of pure tradition has great power when people believe it, even if it is not true. This underlines the value of looking at what people believe about tradition, not at what a given tradition truly is. For example, orthodox and conservative religious groups often portray themselves as the only groups that has the one and only pure, authentic, unchanged tradition. Perennialist views of tradition are discussed to illustrate these ideas. This is the view that there is a stream of ancient tradition kept alive over the ages, and only preserved in certain living communities. Perennialism is prominent in esotericism, but is also found in the study of religions, for example in the idea that all religions are expressions of the same ancient spiritual truth. This highlights the contrast between religionist (crypto-theological and perennialist) and historical/critical discourses on tradition. This book takes the latter approach. It investigates the historical, social and ideological processes that constitute traditions, and analyzes their conceptual presuppositions and implications.

This chapter discusses the distinction between authentic and invented traditions. Invented traditions are new ideas and practices that are presented as if they were old: they are innovations masquerading as traditions. Inventing a tradition is a common and powerful strategy – in and beyond religions – because the idea of tradition comes with normative authority built in: old ways are best. However, there are several problems with trying to use the authentic/invented distinction as a tool of scholarship. (1) Historical evidence can be hard to come by. (2) Invented and authentic tradition both work in the same way: what matters is that people believe that they are authentic, not whether they actually are. (3) The viewpoints from which scholars make judgments about tradition are also themselves historically, culturally and ideologically positioned. (4) And many traditions are quite open about the fact that they change over time: they walk a self-conscious strategic line between tradition and innovation. This calls into question the idea that a tradition must be a simple case of static repetition in order to be authentic. At the other extreme, some scholars insist that all traditions are invented: both those we study and our own academic traditions. But this view is also problematic: it doesn’t help us study traditions, because we still need to explain why people believe that some traditions are true and what effects this has. National folklore traditions illustrate how elusive and problematic the category of authenticity is. The take-home point is that it is more useful to study how ideas of tradition are used in particular groups and contexts than to search for historical proof of authenticity.

Tradition is often opposed to modernity. Tradition’s status as a key source of authority was eroded in Europe over the past five hundred years. But it is misleading to divide history into two different periods, traditional and modern. On the one hand, political and religious uses of invented traditions as a source of authority were already prominent in ancient Rome (so, tradition’s authority was not some natural, automatic feature of pre-modern cultures). On the other hand, tradition continues alive and well in cultures around the world today (so, tradition is also modern). The tradition vs. modernity binary is a modern invention. Counter-Enlightenment reactions (trying to reclaim aspects of pre-modern, traditional worlds) started appearing at the same time that this binary began to have great influence. That is, important meanings of ‘tradition’ were invented at the same time that modernity and anti-modernity were invented. This is a sign that we see ideology at work. Scholars now talk of multiple, entangled and fragmented modernities, and religion is important to these discussions. Tradition is now used in many contexts, in differing, creative and unpredictable ways, especially by marginalized groups. For example, many Indigenous peoples resist, critique and reject colonial structures and ways of thinking by creatively reframing the idea of tradition for their own purposes. An emphasis on a plurality of modernities and traditions shifts our attention from over-generalized contrasts – like traditional vs. modern – to the wide variety of modernizing and traditionalizing moves that are beings shaped by local interests today.

This chapter unpacks the view that tradition is unthinking, passive reception of ideas and practices from the past. This view portrays ‘traditional’ people as irrational and lacking agency. The fact that many languages have no verb to go with ‘tradition’ makes it hard to even talk about how people make tradition. In this light, tradition is related to ritual: people follow a script in both. This obscures the ways in which people creatively work with tradition. A logic of displaced agency lurks at the heart of the colonial tradition vs. modernity binary: modern agents act for good reasons; but non-modern traditionalists unthinkingly follow tradition. This views leads to tradition being seen as a threat that needs to be policed, and it rules out of bounds the more dynamic uses of tradition that are central to the strategies and tactics of Indigenous and other subaltern groups. Denying active, creative work with tradition can be a colonial tool of oppression: if we define Indigenous communities as unchanging (authentically traditional), this hinders their ability to defend their interests in current political, legal and economic debates. The chapter discusses these issues from the perspective of postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies.

This chapter looks at some important published views of tradition, noting that each is limited, because it reflects its conceptual work and theoretical agenda. Maurice Halbwachs sees tradition as inherently social, because the past is always a group reconstruction. Hans-Georg Gadamer sees tradition in terms of a hermeneutic circle: we make sense of past and present as part of a dynamic, open-ended mutual interpretational relation. Paul Ricoeur tries to develop Gadamer’s view by building in a viewpoint for ideological critique. Jan and Aleida Assmann distinguish between (i) the living dynamics of communicative memory and(ii) the institutional memory of canon (key texts that many people are aware of) and archives (stored but accessible, like libraries). Pascal Boyer’s cognitive analysis sees tradition as a type of social interaction that structures people’s representations. Olivier Morin offers a different but related cognitive view. He sees tradition not as the transmission of content but of cues that allow people to reconstruct something very like that content, using their evolved cognitive abilities.