Tradition
Authors: Tonkinson Robert 
Published: September 2017

As a benchmark or beacon guiding a society's conventions and daily behavior and justifying beliefs and practices, “tradition” comprises the body of values, beliefs, rules, and patterned behavior that is transmitted intergenerationally via word of mouth and social practices. As such, it is an integral element of socialization that includes informational and moral components such as the nature of things, right and wrong behavior, and unanswerable questions about the meanings of life and death. In homogeneous small‐scale societies, where tradition is the only blueprint for acceptable behavior, strong connotations of fixity, stability, and continuity are inherent in the notion. Normally, tradition tends to be unquestioned and, whatever its truth value, logic, or consistency, it may be regarded as sacred lore (Hunter & Whitten 1976). Where orally transmitted, however, tradition is always open to variation, contestation, and change; it can also be adjusted, reworked, or reinterpreted to accommodate changing circumstances. Such lability contradicts conceptions of tradition as essentially fixed and immutable, and in recent decades has attracted the attention of scholars, notably historians and anthropologists. In an interesting convergence of focus, two edited volumes on the “construction” and “invention” of tradition appeared in the early 1980s. (Anthropologists ceased using the more inflammatory term “invention” in the 1980s after some widely publicized exchanges with indigenous people, who objected to the implication that they had fabricated their pasts; see Linnekin 1992; Lindstrom & White 1993; see also Turner 1997, on the “authenticity” of invented traditions.) The first volume to appear (Keesing & Tonkinson 1982) led to a burgeoning interest by anthropologists and others in cognate disciplines in “the politics of tradition.” This collection was concerned with the rise of nationalistic movements in the Melanesian region that demanded new ways of imagining tradition (Lindstrom & White 1993). Known in Melanesian Tok Pisin lingua franca as
kastom
, semantically opposed to “modern” or “foreign,” tradition became a rallying cry of pro‐independence movements. In an area famed for its cultural pluralism, the uses of “tradition” highlight the nature of political ideologies and the power of abstract symbols in disguising and mediating contradictions that potentially threaten broader unities (Keesing 1982). In much of Melanesia, one impact of Christianity was a devaluing by converts of their traditions, leading them to dichotomize their past into what they now regard as a shameful pre‐European era of darkness and evil, contrasted with the post‐contact Christian era of virtue and light. This prior refiguring of the past was to cause considerable confusion in some areas when leaders of independence movements began invoking the uniqueness and strength of
kastom
(explicitly opposed to non‐indigenous European and Christian elements) in their rhetoric, which was aimed at fostering a shared national identity and unity (Tonkinson 1982). Such appeals to tradition encouraged anthropologists to investigate the heuristic possibilities inherent in tradition's seemingly paradoxical malleability.