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Online access to this book is only available to eligible users.
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Description
This book discusses the underlying reasons for the continuing popularity of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life. The book argues that despite intellectual and political movements to dismiss tradition as a force in social life, the concept has persisted and remained important to people in the formation of modern culture and folklore. The book points to the functions of traditions as cultural expressions connecting the past and the present, and engaging and adapting practices as symbolic projections of anxieties, hopes, and aspirations. Traditions that are covered include architecture, craft, legends, tales, sports, and the Internet. With regard to conventional approaches in a variety of academic disciplines, it has been discouraged to use traditions to explain cultural ideas and actions. The book proposes a methodology and theory of “cultural praxis” to explain the modern anxieties about mass society and the creation, maintenance, and adaptation of traditions in modern life.
Publication Date
2012
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
978-0-8131-3406-2
eISBN
978-0-8131-3407-9 (pdf version)
eISBN
978-0-8131-3949-4 (epub version)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813134062.001.0001
Keywords
Folklore, Folklife, Ethnography, Tradition, Modernity, Practice theory, Psychoanalytic approach
Disciplines
Cultural History | Folklore | Politics and Social Change
Recommended Citation
Bronner, Simon J., "Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture" (2012). Cultural History. 28.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_cultural_history/28
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