Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Social Science Customs & Traditions

Questions of Tradition

edited by Mark Phillips & Gordon Schochet

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2004
Category
Customs & Traditions, Historiography, History & Theory
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780802082725
    Publish Date
    Oct 2004
    List Price
    $53.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802044983
    Publish Date
    Sep 2004
    List Price
    $102.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442678958
    Publish Date
    Sep 2004
    List Price
    $99.00

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Tradition is a central concern for a wide range of academic disciplines interested in problems of transmitting culture across generations. Yet, the concept itself has received remarkably little analysis. A substantial literature has grown up around the notion of 'invented tradition,' but no clear concept of tradition is to be found in these writings; since the very notion of 'invented tradition' presupposes a prior concept of tradition and is empty without one, this debunking usage has done as much to obscure the idea as to clarify it. In the absence of a shared concept, the various disciplines have created their own vocabularies to address the subject. Useful as they are, these specialized vocabularies (of which the best known include hybridity, canonicity, diaspora, paradigm, and contact zones) separate the disciplines and therefore necessarily create only a collection of parochial and disjointed approaches.

Until now, there has been no concerted attempt to put the various disciplines in conversation with one another around the problem of tradition. Combining discussions of the idea of tradition by major scholars from a variety of disciplines with synoptic, synthesizing essays, Questions of Tradition will initiate a renewal of interest in this vital subject.

About the authors

Mark Salber Phillips is a professor in the Department of History at Carleton University.

Mark Phillips' profile page

Gordon Schochet is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University.

Gordon Schochet's profile page