Explaining Traditions

Explaining Traditions PDF Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081313949X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Why do humans hold onto traditions? Many pundits predicted that modernization and the rise of a mass culture would displace traditions, especially in America, but cultural practices still bear out the importance of rituals and customs in 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 significance of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life, from old-time crafts to folk creativity on the Internet. Challenging prevailing notions of tradition as a relic of the past, Explaining Traditions provides deep insight into the nuances and purposes of 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 of traditions in the modern world.

Explaining Traditions

Explaining Traditions PDF Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081313949X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do humans hold onto traditions? Many pundits predicted that modernization and the rise of a mass culture would displace traditions, especially in America, but cultural practices still bear out the importance of rituals and customs in 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 significance of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life, from old-time crafts to folk creativity on the Internet. Challenging prevailing notions of tradition as a relic of the past, Explaining Traditions provides deep insight into the nuances and purposes of 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 of traditions in the modern world.

Reason, Tradition, and the Good

Reason, Tradition, and the Good PDF Author: Jeffery Nicholas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268036645
Category : Critical theory
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nicholas addresses the failure of reason in modernity to bring about a just society, a society in which people can attain fulfillment.

The Practice of Folklore

The Practice of Folklore PDF Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496822641
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Winner of the 2020 Chicago Folklore Prize CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 Despite predictions that commercial mass culture would displace customs of the past, traditions firmly abound, often characterized as folklore. In The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition, author Simon J. Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life. Bronner proposes a distinctive “praxic” perspective that will answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people enjoy repeating themselves. The significance of the keyword practice, he asserts, is the embodiment of a tension between repetition and variation in human behavior. Thinking with practice, particularly in a digital world, forces redefinitions of folklore and a reorientation toward interpreting everyday life. More than performance or enactment in social theory, practice connects localized culture with the vernacular idea that “this is the way we do things around here.” Practice refers to the way those things are analyzed as part of, rather than apart from, theory, thus inviting the study of studying. “The way we do things” invokes the social basis of “doing” in practice as cultural and instrumental. Building on previous studies of tradition in relation to creativity, Bronner presents an overview of practice theory and the ways it might be used in folklore and folklife studies. Demonstrating the application of this theory in folkloristic studies, Bronner offers four provocative case studies of psychocultural meanings that arise from traditional frames of action and address issues of our times: referring to the boogieman; connecting “wild child” beliefs to school shootings; deciphering the offensive chants of sports fans; and explicating male bravado in bawdy singing. Turning his analysis to the analysts of tradition, Bronner uses practice theory to evaluate the agenda of folklorists in shaping perceptions of tradition-centered “folk societies” such as the Amish. He further unpacks the culturally based rationale of public folklore programming. He interprets the evolving idea of folk museums in a digital world and assesses how the folklorists' terms and actions affect how people think about tradition.

Theory of Religious Cycles

Theory of Religious Cycles PDF Author: Mikhail Sergeev
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004301070
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity and the Bahá’í Faith Mikhail Sergeev offers a new interpretation of the Soviet period of Russian history as a phase within the religious evolution of humankind by developing a theory of religious cycles, which he applies to modernity and to all the major world faiths of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Sergeev argues that in the course of its evolution religion passes through six common phases—formative, orthodox, classical, reformist, critical, and post-critical. Modernity, which was started by the European Enlightenment, represents the critical phase of Christianity, a systemic crisis that could be overcome with the appearance of new religious movements such as the Bahá’í Faith, which offers a spiritual extension of the modern worldview.

The Social Theory of Practices

The Social Theory of Practices PDF Author: Stephen P. Turner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745678289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
This book presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. The concept of a practice, understood broadly as a tacit possession that is 'shared' by and the same for different people, has a fatal difficulty, the author argues. This object must in some way be transmitted, 'reproduced', in Bourdieu's famous phrase, in different persons. But there is no plausible mechanism by which such a process occurs. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea of the interpersonal transmission of these supposed objects. Without the notion of 'sameness' the concept of practice collapses into the concept of habit. The conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion.

Tradition

Tradition PDF Author: Edward Shils
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226753263
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Explores the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole. This book reveals the importance of tradition to social and political institutions, technology, science, literature, religion, and scholarship.

Tradition and the Black Atlantic

Tradition and the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr
Publisher: Civitas Books
ISBN: 0465022634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Tradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the discipline's roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke. Throughout Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates shows that the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/ors -- tradition versus modernity; Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humor, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course.

Senses of Tradition

Senses of Tradition PDF Author: John E. Thiel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195137264
Category : Tradition (Theology)
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
"John Thiel attempts to counter this tendency toward "ecclesiastical fundamentalism" by proposing an interpretive schema for tradition analogous to the four senses of scripture."--BOOK JACKET.

Tradition as Truth and Communication

Tradition as Truth and Communication PDF Author: Pascal Boyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521374170
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Tradition is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is commonly treated as unproblematic. Dr. Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition, its constitution and transmission. He treats tradition "as a type of interaction which results in the repetition of certain communicative events," and therefore as a form of social action. Tradition as Truth and Communication deals particularly with oral communication and focuses on the privileged role of licensed speakers and the ritual contexts in which certain aspects of tradition are characteristically transmitted. Drawing on cognitive psychology, Dr. Boyer proposes a set of general hypotheses to be tested by ethnographic field research. He has opened up an important new field for investigation within social anthropology.

The Invention of Tradition

The Invention of Tradition PDF Author: Eric Hobsbawm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521437738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book explores examples of this process of invention and addresses the complex interaction of past and present in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism.