TRADITION EDWARD SHILS

All novelty is a modification of what has existed previously; it occurs and reproduces itself as novelty in a more persistent context. Every novel characteristic is determined in part by what existed previously. Past things possess or acquire metaphysical, religious and aesthetic significances for human beings. Memory makes possible but it does not compel preoccupation with the past, the love and hatred of the past which are more than love and hatred of the present things inherited from the past. The terms tradition and traditional are used to describe and explain the recurrence in approximately identical form of structures of conduct and patterns of belief over several generations of membership or over a long time within single societies (with a more or less delimited territory and a genetically continuous population) and within corporate bodies as well as over regions which extended across several bounded territorial discrete societies which are unified to the extent of sharing in some measure a common culture, which means common traditions. The substantive content of traditions has been much studied but not their traditionality. The modes and mechanisms of the traditional reproduction of beliefs are left unexamined. The traditionality of traditional societies is assumed and the structures of these societies are described and studied without reference to the ways in which and how tradition determines them. Hypothesis: the relations of two generations alive at the moment of study. THE NATURE OF TRADITION A. THE TEMPORAL CHARACTER OF SOCIAL AND BELIEF SYSTEM 1. THE PRESENTNESS OF THE PAST A person who arrives in a situation which is new to him must become or do something which he had not previously been or done and he will so do by acquiring beliefs which are already believed in his new environment or by performing actions which are already being performed in his new environment. Those who are already there believe certain beliefs (evaluative, appreciative and cognitive judgments) about their immediate situation, about what is right and what is wrong in each of those situations. The newcomer has to fit in. He is instructed by authorities, he sees what others are doing and infers from his perception of their actions beliefs about what is required. He hears what they say about what they are doing and what they believe. All these are given to him to receive. He is, when he first enters the situation, a recipient of what is given, of the already existent. The situation is in very important respects the same for a child born into and growing up in a family. He becomes part of the bridge which carries the past into the present, or put somewhat differently, causes the present and prospectively the future to bear a close resemblance to the past. Traditions are beliefs with a particular social structure; they are a consensus through time. In their content they might well be atemporal (i.e. they might make no reference to past or future) and they might not even have a temporal (traditional) legitimation. They are beliefs which are believed by a succession of persons who might have been in interaction with each other in succession or at least in a unilateral chain of communication. We often speak of the traditional acceptance of a belief as an unthinking acceptance of a belief previously accepted by others.

Beliefs which are rationally recommended and received and which are not in that sense traditional do enter into and form traditions. Their traditionality is less homogeneous or pervasive than that of beliefs which are substantively traditional. Beliefs can also be accepted on the grounds of the charismatic qualities of their recommenders. Traditional reception is different from a belief received solely on the grounds that its recommender appears to the recipient to be so intensely and concentratedly charismatic that possession of the belief and its observance in conduct place the recipient into direct contact with the locus of charisma. A belief which refers to sacred things can be structurally traditional; it can be in part rational as well as charismatic. Beliefs about sacred things can be transmitted and accepted unthinkingly. Such beliefs about charismatic things are most often transmitted traditionally; they are recommended largely and are accepted largely on traditional grounds, i.e. that they have been accepted in the past. Max Weber: charisma as being revolutionary and anti-traditional. Yet in the course of the process of routinization, which means transmission to a succeeding generation, charisma becomes traditionalized There is a marginal case of traditional transmission when living elders recommend a belief or a practice (explicitly or by providing a model) and it is difficult to say just how much of the authority of the proffered model derives from the pastness which the elders represent. Where the elders offer traditional legitimation (e.g. it has always been done that way among us or our forefathers always believed this to be true) then it is clearly traditional but they need not do so, and yet the simple fact that they are older than those to whom the proffer the model makes them representative of an ill-defined pastness.