The Nature of Tradition

Abstract

The temporal aspect of ethnology' includes the fact that artifacts and technologies have been used over often considerable time-spans in the past, customs have been perpetuated, and linguistic patterns maintained. These continuities come together in practical patternings of the working of human minds over time, which is to say that they are cultural continuities. 'Tradition' is the word which commonsense applies to such cultural continuity, often in a more particularistic way with reference to 'a tradition'. The sociologist Edward Shils concurs with this view. 'In its barest, most elementary sense.. .' tradition is '. . anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present', Shils taking his cue from the Latin origin of the word.2 He stresses that as a concept, tradition has no regard for substance or institutional setting.

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