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Definition: Tradition from The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences

A general term used to describe the beliefs, legends, rituals, or customs handed down from one generation to the next, especially orally or by example. Traditions may be societal, cultural, or religious and function as a way to transfer knowledge. While traditions are often assumed to be ancient, many traditions, in order to survive, adapt to contemporaneous economic, social, political, and cultural environments. Some scholars argue that tradition may be invented to maintain hegemony or power.

Tradition

From Encyclopedia of Governance
Traditions are webs of related practices comprised of inherited patterns of thought and actions. They are constituted by beliefs and practices that are handed down from the past. A tradition is a temporal chain that exhibits the historical continuity of the individual beliefs and practices that make it up, each of which expresses some formative influence on subsequent incarnations. In addition to the temporal connections that result from providing the starting point for its later exemplars, the instances properly thought to make a tradition embody conceptual connections with one another. The beliefs and practices of a tradition that are transmitted over time exhibit at least a minimal level of conceptual coherence and consistency, forming an intelligible whole that evinces why they go together. Thus, we call tradition the chain of variant interpretations that people make, as in the Kantian tradition or the liberal tradition. As a sequence or chain of interpretive variations that people…
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Full text Article tradition

From Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
A comprehensive treatment of this topic can be found readily available under “Tradition” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001, ed. Neil Smelser and Paul B Bates), where there are several separate essays by R. Bauman, Edward Tiryakian, and S. Langlois. …
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Full text Article tradition

From Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought
A highly charged and often commendatory term, which is used by certain forms of conservatism in order to assert the validity of its respect for the past, together with a belief that the present must be understood as a continuation, and never as an initiation, of social and political identity . The…
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Full text Article Tradition

From Key Concepts in Education
In everyday conversation, a tradition means hardly more than a local custom or a little ritual which is consistently re-enacted by a particular group, and serves as a nexus or collecting-point of cherished memories, whether of people or places, special dates or well-loved practices. Such a meaning…
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Full text Article TRADITION

From Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity
Faced with the question of tradition in the ancient church, we must first recall that the * Canon of the NT was not formed until the end of the 2nd c. If we set aside the OT, which by this point had already received its definitive canonical form and therefore did not pose a problem of tradition, but…
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Full text Article Tradition

From The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion
‘Tradition’ is a term used in everyday communication, one which people use with ease and assumed understanding. The definition of the term is not difficult to come by; ‘tradition’ derives from the Latin (Old French) word tradere , meaning to transmit; ‘something handed over’. However, closer…
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Full text Article Tradition

From Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology
The word ‘tradition’ derives from the Latin verbal root tradere , ‘to hand down’ or ‘to bequeath’, and in its Christian use refers to a body of authoritative beliefs, teachings, or practices that, in the faith of believers, conveys the gospel message of Jesus Christ. The earliest Christian…
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Full text Article tradition

From The New Penguin Dictionary of Music
Body of ideas and practices that has had some consistency through time; thus an attachment to instrumental colour in Rameau and Boulez could be seen as characteristic of the French tradition. One may also speak of the symphonic tradition, the violin tradition, etc. When used without qualification, …
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Full text Article tradition

From The Macquarie Dictionary
the handing down of statements, beliefs, legends, customs, etc., from generation to generation, especially by word of mouth or by practice a story that has come down to us by popular tradition., traditions that which is so handed down the traditions of the Inuits., traditions a. Theology (in…
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Full text Article tradition

From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
In its literal sense, tradition refers to any human practice, belief, institution or artefact which is handed down from one generation to the next. While the content of traditions is highly variable, it typically refers to some elements of culture regarded as part of the common inheritance of a…
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Full text Article TRADITION

From The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
Not to be confused with the concept of a ‘canon’ or convention in its modernist reincarnation. This term is of particular significance because, if anathema to the AVANT-GARDE principles of aesthetic rupture, HIGH MODERNISM sought reciprocity rather than either rejection of or subjection to the past. …
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