T. O. Ranger (1929–2015)

Shumë nga traditat të cilat i mbajmë si me origjinë të lashtë, në fakt janë shpikur relativisht së fundi. Ky libër hulumton disa raste të këtij procesi shpikjeje: krijimi i "kulturës kombëtare" të Uellsit dhe Skocisë; përpunimi i ritualeve mbretërore britanike të shekujve XIX dhe XX; origjina e ritualeve perandorake në Indinë britanike dhe Afrikë; dhe përpjekjet e lëvizjeve radikale për të zhvilluar kundërtraditat e tyre. Ky libër, me shtrirje kaq të gjarë, synon të hetojë ndërveprimin kompleks të së shkuarës me të tashmen, në një studim brilant të ritualit dhe simbolizmit. Lexuesi shqiptar nuk do ta ketë të vështirë të vërejë mekanizmat e shpikjes së traditave dhe përdorimin e tyre edhe në diskursin bashkëkohor shqiptar për të legjitimuar ekzistencën dhe veprimet e shtetit – komb modern… (mais)

This very influential collection of essays grew out of a conference organised by Past & Present, the academic journal Hobsbawm co-founded. The contributors look into some of the ways that nations and other social groups have created, or attempted to create, new "traditions" that look back to some more-or-less fictitious glorious past, and the purposes that these invented traditions serve.

The way this process works is perhaps seen at its bluntest and most absurd extreme in Hugh Trevor-Roper's opening essay on Scotland, where there was a clear need to define a distinct national identity after the political upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries. Bizarrely, most of the cultural symbols adopted as "Scottish" were not drawn from mainstream Scots culture but from an exotic, fringe minority that was completely foreign to most Scots, the Catholic, Gaelic-speaking, harp-playing highlanders, who had up to that point drawn their cultural identity mostly from Ireland. Moreover, most of these adopted symbols turn out to have been either blatant forgeries like Macpherson's "Poems of Ossian" or new ideas introduced to the highlands by outsiders after the Stuart rebellions (kilts, tartans, bagpipes, etc.). Trevor-Roper very neatly exposes where all these things came from, and how they came to be reinforced as "Scottish traditions" through their adoption by Queen Victoria (and Sir Walter Scott, who should have known better, and regretted it afterwards...). It would perhaps have been nice to have a bit more explanation about how they still persist in the popular image of Scotland, even though "everyone knows" how bogus they are.

Prys Morgan does a similar kind of hatchet job on Wales, looking into the reinvention of the "druidic tradition" in the 18th and 19th century and its later extinction in the appropriation of notions of Welshness by Methodists and Socialists, and David Cannadine does what he does best by picking out the way the British royal family rediscovered the uses of royal ceremonial from the 1870s on (and the interesting way that the ceremonial became more important and more "traditional" in direct proportion to the decline of the political influence of the crown).

Another, perhaps less obvious, aspect of the uses of tradition is covered by Bernard S Cohn's essay on India after 1858 and Terence Ranger's piece on colonial Africa: Britain and other colonial powers arbitrarily reinvented the pre-colonial past of the territories they were ruling in order to create a "traditional" hook to define their right to political power, in the process often making fixed hierarchical structures out of relationships of authority that had previously been much more fluid and dynamic, and leaving a mess for their post-colonial successors to sort out. One interesting aspect of this that Ranger picks up is the way that invented colonial traditions provided structure and status for people like soldiers, teachers, bureaucrats and ministers of religion, but did nothing for productive workers (where there were strong working-class traditions, e.g. in South African mines, they were carefully kept exclusive to white skilled workers).

Hobsbawm concludes the book with an essay on Europe between 1870 and 1914, where he looks at the ways new polities like the German Empire and the French Second Republic selectively used "historical" symbols to define themselves, and at the rapid development of new class-based traditions, including of course his old favourite, the invention of the 1st of May as a workers' holiday, but also looking into the role of sport, where there were clearly separate developments for working-class (professional soccer, cycle racing) and middle-class (tennis, golf). Another way the (upper-)middle-class defined itself was through education, and Hobsbawm also charts the development of Greek-letter fraternities in the US, the student Korps in Germany, and the "old-school-tie" network in Britain, all of which saw a rapid acceleration during this period.

The essays are very interesting in themselves, and all the contributors are capable, lively writers. The concept of "invented tradition" has embedded itself into mainstream history long ago, so there's not much that you are likely to find radical and shocking any more 35 years on, but this is certainly a book that it's still worth reading. Even if you take the line that the question is rather academic because all traditions are human inventions at some point in their history, this stuff still matters, because people around the world are still justifying unpleasant acts and attitudes with the argument that "it's our tradition". If you have an understanding of where traditions come from, you are in a better position to challenge (or defend) such things.… (mais)