Life taught me that you can’t be certain about anything, even about what’s in my mind…
The pearls of wisdom which life bestows - on some!
Maybe it’s the other way around.
Witness the impact of the Nazi theatre of the Nuremberg Rallies and sundry other spectacular parades etc as having the impact to draw in adherents and impress even unbelievers.
I was conscious in my comments on the Tridentine Mass that it revealed a preference for theatre over faith, but it’s the rituals which sometimes matter more to humans than the belief the rituals represent.
You present a strong case for invented traditon, RS.
“‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past… However, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of ‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it is largely fictitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.”
I have some vague recollection of Hobsbawm from university in the 1970s or something soon after (when parts of my brain were still somewhat active), but not for anything specific.
There is a contrary possibility to “invented tradition” on the academic front, which is the creation of traditions and a myth by sloppy or plain fraudulent research. The best example of this is challenges to Margaret Mead’s supposedly ground breaking research which for several decades stood as virtual dogma. http://www.stpt.usf.edu/~jsokolov/314mead1.htm
That’s odd, I was certain your uni days would have pre-dated the 70’s ?
There is a contrary possibility to “invented tradition” on the academic front, which is the creation of traditions and a myth by sloppy or plain fraudulent research. The best example of this is challenges to Margaret Mead’s supposedly ground breaking research which for several decades stood as virtual dogma. http://www.stpt.usf.edu/~jsokolov/314mead1.htm
Interesting how these ‘academic cathedrals’ are eventually brought down.
The case for ‘invented tradition’ seems pretty straight forward and examples of it are everywhere. It seems that Mead was ‘inventing’ invented traditions where they didn’t exist for her own academic ends re: Samoa - cheat?
They should have started in 1968 (if I’d gone to uni, but the original plan was to go to agricultural college to learn to run and expand the family farm) but I left school (and, for the final and joyous time, home on the same day) in 1965 at 15 and knocked around in a variety of jobs and places.
When I had reached the dizzying heights of being a railway shunter at 19 with the prospect of spending the rest of my life on rotating day / afternoon / night shifts (rotating shifts seriously bugger up your social life and drinking cycle) I changed jobs so I could go to night school.
I qualified for university, although my aim was rather more modest when I started night school, at 23.
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Assuming Mead’s research and publications were unreliable in some respects, and they seem to be, it remains that she was working in a newish area which wasn’t ‘hard’ science and that she was guilty of rather less than a lot of others in areas of harder science in the same era, such as the use of phrenology by the Nazis and many others and lobotomies as a cure for psychiatric illnesses.
I suspect that part of the appeal of Mead’s work was that it had elements of ‘the noble savage’ in it, demonstrating that people in a relatively primitive society avoided the problems of those in her contemporary American society. Not to mention a good bit of sexual liberality among the naughty natives, which was titillating at the time and for several decades afterwards.
Salute
You got a burnt parsnip for Easter? 
You scrape the horseradish onto the kielbasa and egg the shoot the VO shot then chew the heck out of the egg kielbasas and shredded horseradish. It’s kind of like the tequila salt and lemon ritual. It’s an Easter thing before church,LOL.
