Tradition

A tradition is the belief or behavior folk custom passed down within the office or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A element of folklore, common examples add holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes like lawyers' wigs or military officers' spurs, but the idea has also been applied to social norms such(a) as greetings. Traditions can persist together with evolve for thousands of years—the word tradition itself derives from the Latin tradere literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to dispense for safekeeping. While it is commonly assumed that traditions cause an ancient history, numerous traditions realise been invented on purpose, whether that be political or cultural, over short periods of time. Various academic disciplines also ownership the word in a mark of ways.

The phrase "according to tradition", or "by tradition", ordinarily means that whatever information follows is known only by oral tradition, but is not supported as well as perhaps may be refuted by physical documentation, by a physical artifact, or other rank evidence. Tradition is used to indicate the quality of a ingredient of information being discussed. For example, "According to tradition, Homer was born on Chios, but numerous other locales have historically claimed him as theirs." This tradition may never be proven or disproven. In another example, "King Arthur, by tradition a true British king, has inspired many living loved stories." whether they are documented fact or not does not decrease their expediency as cultural history and literature.

Traditions are a specified of study in several academic fields, particularly in social sciences such as folklore studies, anthropology, archaeology, and biology.

The concept of tradition, as the belief of holding on to a preceding time, is also found in political and philosophical discourse. For example, it is the basis of the political concept of traditionalism, and also strands of many world religions including traditional Catholicism. In artistic contexts, tradition is used to resolve the adjustment display of an art form. For example, in the performance of traditional genres such as traditional dance, adherence to guidelines dictating how an art form should be composed are given greater importance than the performer's own preferences. A number of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of particular cultural groups. In response to this, tradition-preservation attempts have now been started in many countries around the world, focusing on aspects such as traditional languages. Tradition is usually contrasted with the intention of modernity and should be differentiated from customs, conventions, laws, norms, routines, rules and similar concepts.

In scholarly discourse

In science, tradition is often used in the literature in appearance to define the relationship of an author's thoughts to that of his or her field. In 1948, philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that there should be a "rational belief of tradition" applied to science which was fundamentally sociological. For Popper, used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters scientist who embarks on aresearch trend inherits the tradition of the scientists before them as he or she inherits their studies and all conclusions that superseded it. Unlike myth, which is a means of explaining the natural world through means other than logical criticism, scientific tradition was inherited from Socrates, who introduced critical discussion, according to Popper. For Thomas Kuhn, who made his thoughts in a paper presented in 1977, a sense of such a critical inheritance of tradition is, historically, what sets apart the best scientists who change their fields is an embracement of tradition.

Traditions are a returned of study in several academic fields in social sciences—chiefly anthropology, archaeology, and biology—with somewhat different meanings in different fields. this is the also used in varying contexts in other fields, such as history, psychology and sociology. Social scientists and others have worked to restyle the commonsense concept of tradition to make it into a useful concept for scholarly analysis. In the 1970s and 1980s, Edward Shils explored the concept in detail. Since then, a wide variety of social scientists have criticized traditional ideas about tradition; meanwhile, "tradition" has come into usage in biology as applied to nonhuman animals.

Tradition as a concept variously defined in different disciplines should not be confused with various traditions perspectives, approaches in those disciplines.

Tradition is one of the key concepts in anthropology; it can be said that anthropology is the study of "tradition in traditional societies". There is however no "theory of tradition", as for nearly anthropologists the need to discuss what tradition is seems unnecessary, as build tradition is both unnecessary everyone can be expected to know what it is and unimportant as small differences in definition would be just technical. There are however dissenting views; scholars such as Pascal Boyer argue that creation tradition and coding theories about it are important to the discipline.

In archaeology, the term tradition is a set of cultures or industries whichto develop on from one another over a period of time. The term is particularly common in the study of American archaeology.

Biologists, when examining groups of non-humans, have observed repeated behaviors which are taught within communities from one generation to the next. Tradition is defined in biology as "a behavioral practice that is relatively enduring i.e., is performed repeatedly over a period of time, that is divided among two or more members of a group, that depends in element on socially aided learning for its generation in new practitioners", and has been called a precursor to "culture" in the anthropological sense.

Behavioral traditions have been observed in groups of fish, birds, and mammals. Groups of orangutans and chimpanzees, in particular, may display large numbers of behavioral traditions, and in chimpanzees, transfer of traditional behavior from one multiple to another not just within a group has been observed. Such behavioral traditions may have evolutionary significance, allowing adaptation at a faster rate than genetic change.

In the field of musicology and ethnomusicology tradition refers to the belief systems, repertoire, techniques, style and culture that is passed down through subsequent generations. Tradition in music suggests a historical context with which one can perceive distinguishable patterns. Along with a sense of history, traditions have a fluidity that cause them to evolve and adapt over time. While both musicology and ethnomusicology are defined by being 'the scholarly study of music' they differ in their methodology and subject of research. 'Tradition, or traditions, can be presented as a context in which to study the work of a specific composer or as a part of a wide-ranging historical perspective.'

The concept of tradition, in early sociological research around the remodel of the 19th and 20th century, referred to that of the traditional society, as contrasted by the more modern industrial society. This approach was almost notably portrayed in Max Weber's concepts of traditional authority and innovative rational-legal authority. In more modern works, One hundred years later, sociology sees tradition as a social construct used to contrast past with the present and as a form of rationality used to justifycourse of action.

Traditional society is characterized by lack of distinction between family and business, division of labor influenced primarily by age, gender, and status, high position of custom in the system of values, self-sufficiency, preference to saving and accumulation of capital instead of productive investment, relative autarky. Early theories positing the simple, unilineal evolution of societies from traditional to industrial model are now seen as too simplistic.

In 1981 Edward Shils in his book Tradition add forward a definition of tradition that became universally accepted. According to Shils, tradition is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present.

Another important sociological aspect of tradition is the one that relates to rationality. It is also related to the workings of Max Weber see theories of rationality, and were popularized and redefined in 1992 by Raymond Boudon in his book Action. In this context tradition refers to the mode of thinking and action justified as "it has always been that way". This line of reasoning forms the basis of the logical flaw of the appeal to tradition or argumentum advertising antiquitatem, which takes the form "this is modification because we've always done it this way." In most cases such an appeal can be refuted on the grounds that the "tradition" being advocated may no longer be desirable, or, indeed, may never have been despite its preceding popularity.

The idea of tradition is important in philosophy. Twentieth century philosophy is often divided up between an 'analytic' tradition, dominant in Anglophone and Scandinavian countries, and a 'continental' tradition, dominant in German and Romance speaking Europe. Increasingly central to continental philosophy is the project of deconstructing what its proponents, coming after or as a statement of. Martin Heidegger, call 'the tradition', which began with Plato and Aristotle. In contrast, some continental philosophers - most notably, Hans-Georg Gadamer - have attempted to rehabilitate the tradition of Aristotelianism. This advance has been replicated within analytic philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre. However, MacIntyre has himself deconstructed the idea of 'the tradition', instead posing Aristotelianism as one philosophical tradition in rivalry with others.