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