Explaining traditions

"Why do people hold onto traditions? Many pundits predicted that modernization and the proliferation of mass culture would eliminate traditions, particularly in America. But modern cultural practices constantly invoke tradition for the development of identity, heritage, and community. In Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture, Simon J. Bronner discusses the underlying reasons for the continuing popularity of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life. Traditions have weathered criticism and survived social upheaval across the globe; they have outlived empires and counter-culture revolts, despots and revolutionaries, but their lasting power is the ability to connect people. Traditions create and sustain communities while also providing a sense of self that helps individuals navigate the modern.^ Explaining Traditions reveals how traditions connect the past and the present by honoring, engaging, and adapting practices as symbolic projections of anxieties, hopes, and aspirations. Explaining Traditions exposes the underlying logic of traditions in everyday life. For example, why does football have a special hold on Americans? Why are people captivated by do-it-yourself projects? Where do the scatological themes of German American storytelling come from? How do Holocaust survivors removed from the places of their birth relate the meaning of their disturbing experiences in Europe? Concerned that conventional approaches in a variety of academic disciplines stop short of using traditions to explain our ideas and actions, Bronner proposes a methodology to account for the psychology of anxieties about mass culture and to explain why people create, maintain, adapt, and discard customs.^ This timely work uncovers the symbols, deep-seated values, and political and psychological implications of traditions in modern culture and confronts the complex attitudes scholars hold toward traditions as an analytical concept. Challenging prevailing notions of tradition as a relic of the past, [this book] provides deep insight into the purposes of--and prejudices toward--living traditions in relation to modernity. Bronner's work forces readers to examine their own traditions and imparts a better understanding of raging controversies over the sustainability and meaning of traditions in the modern world."-- Book jacket.