Research Catalog

Title

Explaining traditions : folk behavior in modern culture / Simon J. Bronner.

Author

Bronner, Simon J.

Publication

Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, c2011.

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Holdings

Details

Description

xiii, 530 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

• "Why do people hold onto traditions? Many pundits predicted that modernization and the proliferation of mass culture would eliminate traditions, particularly in America. But modern cultural practices constantly invoke tradition for the development of identity, heritage, and community. In Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture, Simon J. Bronner discusses the underlying reasons for the continuing popularity of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life. Traditions have weathered criticism and survived social upheaval across the globe; they have outlived empires and counter-culture revolts, despots and revolutionaries, but their lasting power is the ability to connect people. Traditions create and sustain communities while also providing a sense of self that helps individuals navigate the modern.^
• Explaining Traditions reveals how traditions connect the past and the present by honoring, engaging, and adapting practices as symbolic projections of anxieties, hopes, and aspirations. Explaining Traditions exposes the underlying logic of traditions in everyday life. For example, why does football have a special hold on Americans? Why are people captivated by do-it-yourself projects? Where do the scatological themes of German American storytelling come from? How do Holocaust survivors removed from the places of their birth relate the meaning of their disturbing experiences in Europe? Concerned that conventional approaches in a variety of academic disciplines stop short of using traditions to explain our ideas and actions, Bronner proposes a methodology to account for the psychology of anxieties about mass culture and to explain why people create, maintain, adapt, and discard customs.^
• This timely work uncovers the symbols, deep-seated values, and political and psychological implications of traditions in modern culture and confronts the complex attitudes scholars hold toward traditions as an analytical concept. Challenging prevailing notions of tradition as a relic of the past, [this book] provides deep insight into the purposes of--and prejudices toward--living traditions in relation to modernity. Bronner's work forces readers to examine their own traditions and imparts a better understanding of raging controversies over the sustainability and meaning of traditions in the modern world."-- Book jacket.

Uniform Title

Project Muse UPCC books

Subject

• Folklore > United States
• Oral tradition > United States
• Communication in folklore > United States
• United States > Social life and customs

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Defining tradition: on the meaning and politics of a "handy" concept -- Explaining tradition: on folk and folkloristic logic -- Building tradition: on control and authority in vernacular architecture -- Making tradition: on craft in American consciousness -- Adapting tradition: on folklore in human development -- Fading tradition: on a dying language and lore -- Personalizing tradition: on storytelling by an African American father and son -- Symbolizing tradition: on the scatology of an ethnic identity -- Sporting tradition: on the praxis of American football -- Virtual tradition: on the Internet as a folk system.

ISBN

• 9780813134062 (hardcover : alk. paper)
• 0813134064 (hardcover : alk. paper)
• 9780813134079 (ebook)
• 0813134072 (ebook)

LCCN

^^2011017139

OCLC

720634924

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library