L'inventività della tradizione / The Inventiveness of Tradition

Marshall Sahlins (1993, pp. 3–5) describes how, between the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe had suddenly been populated by artists and intellectuals fascinated by the idea of reconnecting their own existence to an irremediably lost civilization. For this reason, those artists started to resurrect ancient pagan cults and graft archaic architectural codes onto the facades of recent buildings, reformulating their intellectual works as
imitations. All of this would have sounded artificial and strange to anyone able to observe those intellectuals, so seriously committed to inventing, out of the blue, their tradition. It is with hindsight, however, that we can look back at the activity of these persons as a highly creative moment: Renaissance, for the European culture, was precisely this, the invention of a tradition and, simultaneously, the foundation of modernity. Such a paradoxical anecdote allows Sahlins to make a fundamental move in the endless debate that started from The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. A book, the latter one, which intended to “unmask” the ideological operations hidden behind the insidious concept of tradition, but that, according to Sahlins, tried to do so without challenging the fundamental prejudice linking the invention of tradition to inauthenticity. Such a bias stemmed, according to Sahlins, from the specific perspective adopted by the authors, a perspective which aimed at revealing the impostures perpetrated by others while completely overlooking their own.
The question appears to be very relevant today. Independentist movements such as the Scottish or Catalan ones demand the self-determination of their people, appealing to a communal distinctiveness handed down from generation to generation. On the other hand, xenophobic policies are implemented by many conservative governments, in the name of a necessary “protection” of innermost traditions from the difference embodied by migrant communities. “Unmasking” the invention of tradition, in front of those who
nowadays present themselves as the custodians of its authenticity, might appeal to some as a necessary step to reduce the assertiveness of the latter’s claims. This approach, however, ends up providing a reductive (and therefore criticisable) representation of the dynamics it tries to describe, clothing the very social forces that act on such inventions with an aura of intrigue and conspiracy – while also implying that if false traditions
can actually be “unmasked”, there can be true ones. For what reason, adds Sahlins (1999), should we accuse the cultures we study of being false or counterfeit, based on some superior form of true knowledge safeguarded by the academic world? It is rather evident how all traditions are invented and hybridised (an obvious example being Renaissance or North American culture itself), but this does not imply that we should judge them as “false”. In other words, even when applied to cultures that are historically and geographically distant from our own, the approach of The Invention of Tradition is, according to Sahlins, strongly denotational and Eurocentric, because it postulates a historical truth based at the same time on an alleged intellectual and moral superiority of scholars, and thus on a new form of modern Western cultural colonialism.
After all, according to what is argued by Roy Wagner (1975), culture itself should be understood as a process of invention, based not so much on true/false criteria, but on the principles of creativity and efficacy. Ritual, but also advertising, arts, music, and youth fashion, are nothing but mechanisms of cultural invention, which use social conventions as a basis for creative improvisations, namely culture itself in its making (Padoan 2021).
We might also rethink such dynamics in light of the notion of enunciative praxis (Bertrand 1991, pp. 54-56) namely within a mechanism consisting in evoking stereotyped and sedimented cultural forms and schematisations that are summoned and transformed by daily action and by the different forms of cultural production, in order to be sent back upstream, as products of usage. Such a dialectic oscillation between generation and genesis of meaning might take into account how, through the creation of styles (Floch 1995) and forms of life (Greimas 1993), tradition finds its raison d'être precisely in a process of constant reinvention (de Certeau 1980). This inventive process – similar to what Gianfranco Marrone (2010) argues with regard to the production of textuality – turns out to be necessary but almost involuntary, culturally founding but often concealed or denied. In light of these reflections, the analysis of lifestyles in different sociocultural collectives becomes particularly significant, as the one conducted by Constantine Nakassis (2016) within youth groups in Tamil Nadu, in South India. Here Nakassis explores the mass-media culture that populates such groups, between producers and consumers of counterfeit garment brands, music videos, and commercial films. In his book Doing Style, he shows in fact how the circulation of these texts generates a citational style, highly reflexive and metapragmatic, which maintains an ambivalent liminality between the taking up of Western “traditional” forms, adopted from global brands, and their performative subversion among the Tamil Nadu youths, following mediatic roles of “traditional” Indian masculinity and ethnicity offered by the stars of local cinema.
A semiotic perspective on these issues might therefore focus on recognizing the problem of tradition within a broader theory of cultural transmission through generations. Rather than chasing “the idol of the origins” (see Bloch [1949] 1954, as quoted by Montanari [2019] 2021), such a perspective might offer a description of the complex social dynamics involved in this process, which could better be understood as dynamics of translation (Sedda [2003] 2019). The target of such an investigation, rather than being some specific traditions per se (confirmed by their authenticity or, on the contrary, to be unmasked), would then be their framing within a system of culture, as well as the mechanisms that control, regulate or trigger their production. This would be possible by rethinking tradition as an effect of meaning (effet de sens), a contingent outcome of social interaction, rather than an a priori assumption. This line of inquiry might focus, in short, on tracing the anthropological configurations that affect the production and diversification of traditions in time and space, looking at the fictional, mythical, and narrative forces that, by acting on the social bodies, help reshaping traditions as semiotic entities, renewing their existence and perhaps mitigating their fears.
These are some of the reasons for producing a volume dedicated to the constructive dimension of traditions, in search of a semiotic theory that might help understand their inventive character, through specific case studies and reference to some of the key areas encompassed by media discourses.