thread: 2006-09-08 : Ben on breaking tradition
On 2006-09-11, Jonathan Walton wrote:
I'm coming way late to this discussion, but this is what I study for a living nowadays, so...
Adam Yuet Chau, who's a brilliant anthropologist of popular Chinese religion, describes tradition as "a complex, dynamic, ever-changing cluster of institutions, practitioners and consumers, knowledge and practices fully amenable to innovations, inventions, and reinventions all the time."
I don't know if I can say it much better than that. Tradition is constantly changing and reinvented. People who make arguments about This Thing or That Thing being 'tradition' are often making a power play. So I don't really believe in breaking tradition so much. Even that is a symbolic act of power and therefore, part of the tradition.
However, I will agree with Ben on the potential danger in taking things out of their proper context. Using a sharp knife to clean your teeth is a bad idea. Likewise, when you take certain ideas and drop them into alien cultural environments you can get crazy, dynamic, dangerous results that may be interesting for society and the world has a whole, but, boy, I would rather not be around when it happens. (Cf. Christianity and/or Marxism in China.) Still, dangerous and dramatic ideological mixing is still pretty much unavoidable, in the long run. But then the world has never been a boring place, huh?
