Comments on: The traditionality of modernity

By: NDR

NDR — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 17:27:39 +0000

"... the problem of the nineteenth century was not that it invented traditions, either ex nihilo or on remnants of the past, but that it invented the category of tradition: the culture that was the spontaneous expression of the people/nation (often rooted in or preserved by its peasantry) and that was endangered by the transformations set forth by modernity ..."

By: agm

agm — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 23:23:10 +0000

I mean, what is the difference really between 2006 and 1996?

iEverything. (refering to iPod and people chasing its success).

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:33:01 +0000

Chris, the hat is right, but as you imply, it’s the exception that proves the rule, and ceased to be obligatory quite early in C20 (Orwell comments on a story by Gissing where the loss of a hat leads to fatal disaster – the fact that the story could be written is an indication that the norm was on the way out). Apart from hats, the changes in male dress since about 1850 have been trivial by comparison with any comparably long period since (at least) the Middle Ages. Women’s fashions have been more changeable, but I think the pace of change is slowing.

adm, I agree with everything you say in your most recent comment, which is why I see C20 and C21 (so far) as stable by comparison with the Renaissance, Reformation and so on.

y81, sidesaddle riding as a cultural norm was killed in late C19 by the bicycle.

sharon, my claim is that there are no (well, very few) examples of traditions inherited from hte past surviving C19 unchanged, whereas many traditions remained fixed for much or all of C20. The obvious approach to disproof is by counterexample. Sabbatarianism and Monday as washing day seem to fit the bill, but are, in my view, not enough to invalidate the claim.

By: rollo

rollo — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:13:32 +0000

What are traditions members of the class of?
Things that people do as individuals in common with a collective?
Does tradition-bound mean having more traditions or being more bound by the ones we do have?
What did people do in the 19C? Work, eat, go to church on Sunday, unless you were part of the aristocratic minority – but then most of us try to imagine middle-class lives as counterpart to ours now, thinking the majority then were like the majority now. But there wasn’t much of a middle-class for most of the 19C was there? Most men worked long-houred 6-day weeks, and women worked the bulk of their time in the home, and they amused themselves as families with local home-made things. Novelty was not a widely available drug in those days.
My unresearched impression is virtually every aspect of daily living was colored by if not conformed to some kind of tradition.
One example of something most of us view as solidly historic, but that’s completely fabricated and less than a few generations old, is the “tradition” of the diamond ring as central to marriage, esp. to the proposal and engagement.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:59:36 +0000

A clarification here, since I think we might be losing sight of an important distinction: “a tradition”, a specific ritualised phenomenon supported by an appeal to the past, is not the same as “tradition” in general. Specific traditions change and that’s relatively easy to trace; the cultural importance of tradition (or “custom”) is more enduring but much harder to evaluate and compare across cultures.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:09:31 +0000

I wasn’t really asking to prove a negative, and whether traditions have survived or not is irrelevant to the more fundamental point I was making, which was that it is just wrong to make the form of statement “today we are more [whatever phenomenon] than [in a previous time in the past]” if you only give evidence about today and none for the earlier period(s) with which you’re making the comparison (as you put it: “we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages”).

Traditions change, adapt, die out, new ones are created; this is an implication of the whole invented traditions concept. Chris gave several past examples. From Wales, another invented tradition of the late 17th/18th century that died out by the mid-19th century was the gwylmabsant (parish wake). And now I have to go to work to teach a bunch of students about the moral economy of the early modern crowd.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 03:00:52 +0000

English common law changed massively in the nineteenth century; not so much by what it did itself, but because it changed from being to all intents and purposes the law—to a first approximation all the law there was— to being no more than an adjunct to statute law.
Men’s clothes, too, were set in the early nineteenth century and have lasted essentially unchanged ever since (a man from 1806 could easily walk into 2006, but not into 1606) except, and it’s a major exception, for the hat, which after a reign of a millenium died in a remarkably short period after 1945. The hat surely qualifies as “a tradition inherited by C19, passed on unchanged to C20 and then abandoned or radically transformed”. My grandfather’s letters from 1903 record an occasion when he lost his hat and had to lurk at work till after dark when he could sneak home by the laneways, as if he’d lost his trousers.

By: 'As you know' Bob

'As you know' Bob — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 02:44:27 +0000

This seems to be the cultural evolution version of punctuated equilibrium: a decade or two of innovation and change followed by a century or two of stasis.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:55:00 +0000

Well, John, you did have that “more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages” thrown in there ;-) And it’s hard to think of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment without considering their reappropriation and redefinition of classical and medieval tradition. And one might argue that Luther and some of the other early Protestants were (re-) creating traditions.

By: y81

y81 — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:55:42 +0000

Arrived before 1800, left after 1900? Women riding sidesaddle.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:48:07 +0000

Chris, my claim on sectarianism is that it didn’t survive past 1900, certainly not in the form that was inherited in 1800. In between you had Catholic Emancipation, the repeal of the Test Acts, Irish Disestablishment and lots more. By contrast, the whole 20th century passed without even managing to remove the anti-Catholic provisions of the Act of Settlement or the Established status of the CofE.

I’m willing to concede on sabbatarianism, though.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:19:50 +0000

Actually, adm, I can’t say mos maiorum. When I learned my little bit of Latin, we still had ‘j’ for ‘i’ and it was pronounced as spelt .

But in any case, I’m not making a comparison with ancient Rome or Egypt, only with the 19th century.

As for “Any number of seasonal folk/religious rituals?”, that’s surely the point. Our existing rituals seem mostly to have been invented 100 to 150 years ago, and to have been preserved essentially intact for the last 100 years.

As to Common Law, I don’t know the facts, but the claim would be that many “traditional” elements, like wigs and gowns for example, and modes of pleading, are actually relatively new and took their present highly codified form in the 19th century.

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:09:50 +0000

So you want things that arrived before 1800, and left between 1900 and now? Sectarianism still fits, as does sabbatarianism. If you really think that either arrived in the nineteenth century, then I have a civil war to tell you about.

Saint Monday got hammered (boom boom) from the 1880s, but saw out the nineteenth century, justabout. Ditto rough music, AKA charivari.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:08:33 +0000

Saint Monday (aka the Long Weekend) was alive and well in Oz until very recently, and is I think on the way back.

One more Billy Bragg song explained for me. Thank you.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 23:27:44 +0000

The temperance movement, sabbatarianism (at least industrial strength) and funeral clubs were all 19th century innovations that didn’t last, as I assume was convalescing on the Isle of Man.

As for religious sectarianism, it declined drastically over the course of the 19th century, notably in Britain. You had the Gordon riots and Church and King mobs still active at the end of the 18th.

Washing on a Monday sounds right, though. I’ve never heard of Rough Music, but it sounds interesting. Linky?

Saint Monday (aka the Long Weekend) was alive and well in Oz until very recently, and is I think on the way back. As a generally accepted day off, though, I don’t think Saint Monday survived the 19th century.