Invention and Authority
Tradition - A Critical Primer - Steven Engler
Steven Engler [+]
Mount Royal University
Description
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.