Questions of Tradition

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
most recently published works are Biblical Religion and Family Values,
Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics, and Religion and
Technology.

People routinely appeal to—or rail against—tradition, yet scholarly
literature focusing on the idea of tradition is not nearly as available
as one might assume. This collection of papers is based on contributions
to a 1997 conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey. There is a
brief, perfunctory preface by the co-editors and a more useful
introductory essay by co-editor Phillips. The 11 remaining essays are
somewhat arbitrarily divided into two parts. The contributors come from
diverse fields, including history, art history, literary studies,
ethnology, law, and political philosophy. In each of the two parts,
there is an overview of other papers in that part, and the two overviews
are useful. However, most of the papers focus on highly specific
subjects that may not be particularly helpful to a reader interested in
the concept of tradition as such. There are specialist papers, for
example, on Iroquois masks, the Zwarte Piet tradition in Dutch culture,
and Philippe Ariиs. The contributors generally do share an interest in
the “cultural studies” approach to cultural theory, and several
address the theme of “invented tradition” treated in the work of
Eric Hobsbawm and other academics. Three of the contributors are
currently associated with Canadian institutions: Mark Salber Phillips,
Ruth B. Phillips, and Andrea Laforet.

I suspect that most people who take this volume off the shelf will be
interested in fewer than half the papers. There is a conspicuous absence
here of a contribution by a theologian or general religious studies
scholar, though co-editor Phillips and a few other contributors at least
touch on religion and tradition in passing. The volume lacks a
bibliography and an index, and here as in other ways, it manifests
weaknesses frequently characteristic of books based on conference
papers. While I found some of the papers stimulating, I was ultimately
left reflecting on how much better I might have understood the idea of
tradition had one of these contributors gotten down to the job of doing
a systematic, comprehensive investigation of it.