Reviews for The invention of tradition

The average rating for The invention of tradition based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-20 00:00:00 Steven Weitz Own up, all of you who watched even an excerpt from the TV coverage of the recent wedding of the future King and Queen of UK and thought, well, yes, sure the Brits are good at this kind of thing, after all they've had hundreds of years of practice at it. Ummm, no actually. As by far the most readable of the essays in this volume claims, it was not until the very late nineteenth century that the monarchy was aggrandized through elaborate public ritual: William IV's coronation was mockingly known as the Half-Crownation, and at the beginning of her reign, Victoria was obstinate and obstructive, and those responsible for devising ceremonies were incompetent. Did you know, for example, that Victoria's coronation was completely unrehearsed? The clergy lost their place in the order of service, two trainbearers talked throughout the entire ceremony, and the choir was 'inadequate'. Indeed, the function of these ceremonies is as old as the monarchy itself, but the form that the ceremony should take is a reflection of how the role of the monarch is conceived, and that is different in different ages. In his essay, David Cannadine sees a correlation between the waning of royal influence and the growth of enhanced ceremonial - the beginning of what he calls the 'cavalcade of impotence'. He analyses the theatrical performances of royalty between 1820 and 1977, taking in the first show that I remember watching on TV, the investiture of the Prince of Wales - which, as I clearly recall, struck me at the time as a load of humbug. Another highlight in this volume is Hugh Trevor-Roper taking delight in riling the 'Scotch' as he insisted on calling them, to the annoyance of Scotsmen and women everywhere who normally like to be kept distinct from the stuff sold in bottles. He takes every possible opportunity to remind the reader that it was an Englishman who invented the kilt in the early eighteenth century. With enormous gusto he describes how the idea of a separate tartan for each clan was a 'hallucination' sustained by economic interest, and is surprisingly indulgent and forgiving of the (English) Allen brothers who styled themselves the Sobieski Stuarts and were virtually single-handedly responsible for the creation of the mythology around the 'ancient' Highland dress as a vestige of an early rich civilization - as represented by Ossian. Those clever Englishmen, forging a Scottish national identity and duping the Scots into believing in their own cultural superiority. Equally informative, if a tad drier, is the piece on Wales by Prys Morgan. Welsh national costume? Invented by the wonderfully named Augusta Waddington."In 1834 she was not even clear as to what a national costume was, but she was sure there ought to be a costume that would be distinctive and picturesque for artists and tourists to look at." Eisteddfods, druids, bards, national heroes? All in the interest of creating a romantic concept of nationhood through cultural history. I could go on with more examples of the excellence within these covers: the essay 'Representing Authority in Victorian India' (Bernard S. Cohn) could almost be hilariously funny if it weren't for the fact that, sadly, this is all true. Mr. Cohn concentrates on the great assemblage of 1877 whose function was to establish the authority of Victoria as Empress. The arrangements and the attention to hierarchy, symbolic acts and representational insignia is utterly astonishing, and ridiculous, and tragic: when the salute was fired, the noise of the cannon and gunfire stampeded the assembled elephants and horses, killing a number of bystanders and casting a pall of dust over the rest of the proceedings. Terence Ranger's own contribution on the invention of tradition in colonial Africa is the one I found least enjoyable, probably due to my own lack of knowledge of African history, thus making it hard to grasp. Hobsbawm's essay on Europe is also not an easy read, but there I felt it was the intense concentration of his ideas that made for the slight difficulty. On second reading, it is a magisterial account of the reasons for the mass production of traditions in Europe in the period 1870-1914. He sees these invented traditions as a kind of social cement, collective group self-representations that create cohesive structure in a changing world. He's also excellent on the problematic nature of analysing these inventions - do they come from the top down? Well, yes, but they can only take hold if they touch on a need that is already there. This is the kind of book that causes a huge shift in the way that you see the world. Magic.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-31 00:00:00 Lukasz Lukasinski The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, is a selection of essays by different historians. To quote the blurb: Many of the traditions which we think of as ancient in their origins were, in fact, invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention [...] There's a great quote in the section on the British monarchy. This is Lord Robert Cecil in 1860, after watching Queen Victoria open parliament: Some nations have a gift for ceremonial. [...] This aptitude is generally confined to the people of a southern climate and of a non-Teutonic parentage. In England the case is exactly the reverse. We can afford to be more splendid than most nations; but some malignant spell broods over all our most solemn ceremonials, and inserts into them some feature which makes them all ridiculous... Something always breaks down, somebody contrives to escape doing his part, or some bye-motive is suffered to interfere and ruin it all. 150 years later, the British have bigger, more pompous and more gilt-ridden ceremonies than almost anyone, and we see ourselves as especially good at pageantry: the opening of parliament, coronations, jubilees, royal weddings and funerals, and all of it presented as though it was ancient continuous tradition. And in fact much of the content, at least for the coronation, is ancient: it's just that between the early 17th and late 19th centuries, the preparation was generally half-arsed and the results shambolic. Apart from anything else, the symbolism was awkward; Britain was a democracy of a sort, and as long as the monarch was a partisan political figure people were reluctant to surround them with all the trappings of divinely-provided power. It was only once the monarch was reduced to a figurehead that we could safely put them in the centre of these grand pantomimes. The book also has an essay about the Scots (all that twaddle about clan tartans) and the Welsh (druids and the Eisteddfod), but those stories were broadly familiar, so in some ways the bits I found most interesting were about the British inventing traditions out in the Empire. For example, in India, where they had the problem of how best to assert Imperial authority over a 'country' which was in fact hundreds of small kingdoms held together by force, and how to project Queen Victoria as the focus of that authority while she was thousands of miles away. And although the British had been in India for a long time by then, this represented a new focus, since it was only in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny/India's First War of Independence in 1857 that control of India was taken from the East India Company and taken over by the state. So in 1876 they held the 'Imperial Assemblage' to mark Victoria's accession to her imperial title as 'Kaiser-i-Hind' when Indian kings/princes/maharajas gathered with their entourages at a site near Delhi to take turns to approach a pavilion decorated in British heraldic imagery, and each was presented with a banner which had a coat of arms in the European heraldic tradition, designed for the occasion by a Bengal civil servant called Robert Taylor. It sounds like an extraordinary event: apart from the basic weirdness of it, the scale was immense; 'at least eighty four thousand people' attended in one role or another. Thinking about all this reminded me of my own little moment of inventing tradition. When I was at university, there a couple of people at my halls of residence who wanted to start an all-male discussion club where the members would take turns to present a little speech on some interesting topic, and then everyone would drink sherry and discuss. A couple of friends and I took great delight in coming up with a ludicrously silly constitution for the club, which laid down arcane traditions and provided bizarre titles for the various officers. For example, every meeting was supposed to start with 'the toasting of the Pope': a different Pope each week, working through them in chronological order from St Peter onwards. There was no Catholic connection, pro or anti; I think it was just that the phrase 'the toasting of the Pope' was amusing. In the event there was one meeting and then the club fizzled out. And a good thing too, frankly. Actually, though, the whole episode was rather fitting; after all, the University of Bristol itself is an institution whose landmark building is a vast Gothic edifice built not in the middle ages, or even at the height of the Gothic Revival in the mid C19th, but in 1915. Pretending to be older than it is ' pretending to be Oxbridge, really ' is what Bristol does. Anyway, the book is interesting; some of the essays are better than others ' Hobsbawm's own contribution struck me as especially weak ' but I'm glad I read it. A slight typographical gripe: irritatingly, quoted passages are marked only by the left margin being indented exactly as much as the first line of each paragraph is indented, which makes it extremely unobvious which paragraphs are quoted. I'm not suggesting that's a reason to avoid the book; I was just irritated by it.