manipulate traditions and play a role in maintaining them
has been clearly established by three centuries of critical anal-
ysis. What is not so clear is the extent to which traditions are
the invention of power elites. The difficulty lies in the con-
cept of legitimation. The legitimation, via tradition, of ar-
rangements favorable to a power elite works only as long as
the tradition is actually perceived as escapsulating a truth that
transcends the elite. If the target audience—including the
power elite itself—loses faith in the objective or unconstruct-
ed truth of a tradition, the latter quickly becomes useless for
political as well as all other purposes. Legitimation thus
proves to be an ambiguous concept: it combines political and
transpolitical elements without clarifying the relationship be-
tween them.
The persistence of the tao-tEai pattern (the animal mask
or dragon figure) in traditional Chinese ritual and art can
serve as an example of the dilemma faced by the interpreter
of any enduring tradition. Widely disseminated by the Shang
rulers of China in the second millennium BCE, especially as
a motif on the bronze ritual vessels of the period, the tao-tEai
and related patterns have been called “signs or emblems of
Shang authority” (Hsu and Linduff, 1988, p. 19). Yet the
origins of the pattern are almost certainly to be looked for
in a shamanistic spirituality that long predated the Shang.
Moreover, when the Chou dynasty overthrew the Shang in
the late twelfth century BCE, the new rulers perpetuated the
classical pattern, thereby showing that they and their audi-
ence regarded it not as a Shang emblem but as a tradition
of general validity, a channel of truth. Even if one can show
that the meaning of the tao-tEai changed significantly in the
course of its long history, the persistence of the ancient tem-
plate as a form for the discovery of new meaning is itself a
highly significant fact about Chinese religion and thought,
an example of a certain kind of traditionality.
An important contribution to study of the formation of
traditions has been made by Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Rang-
er, and others who have investigated “the invention of tradi-
tion” in modern times. Careful to distinguish their subject
from tradition in a more comprehensive sense, these critics
focus on the conscious production of new rituals in response
to the social, political, and ecological upheavals created by
modern capitalism. Invented traditions are designed to estab-
lish or symbolize social cohesion in an environment where
traditional communal bonds have been disrupted or revolu-
tionized. Typically modern communities, such as new na-
tion-states, awakened ethnicities, labor unions, voluntary
organizations, environmentalist groups, gender-based associ-
ations, and others, invent traditions as a way of justifying
their novelty. Often this takes the form of embracing “tradi-
tions” that appear to be old but are in fact quite new. The
Romantic movement, with its interest in premodern folk
culture, was an important source of ideas for inventors of tra-
ditions. Archaeology and anthropology also contributed by
stimulating interest in prehistoric civilization.
Efforts to promote the cult of goddesses (or the God-
dess) in Europe and North America are a good example of
the invention of tradition. The critical framework of modern
goddess religiosity is provided by the feminist critique of
patriarchalism and the environmentalist critique of capital-
ism and modern technology. The positive religious content
is drawn from the work of archaeologists, such as Marija
Gimbutas, who seek to reconstruct the goddess-centered
spirituality of a putatively pre-patriarchal period of European
civilization. The limitations of the enterprise derive from the
difficulty of determining the actual significance of goddess
motifs in their original context, given the absence of written
sources.
In addition to political theories, linguistically based the-
ories of the formation of tradition have been influential in
the modern study of religion. Here traditionality is seen not
just as the product of social and political interests but as
something inherent in the very structure of human under-
standing. This view of tradition is connected with the lin-
guistic turn in the human sciences in the twentieth century.
Many twentieth-century thinkers lost confidence in Enlight-
enment rationalism with its search for an unmediated start-
ing point of knowledge and focused instead on the medium
in which human beings actually think and communicate.
The concreteness of language seemed to provide a surer
foundation for a theory of human understanding than meta-
physical notions, such as self, substance, or God. In Anglo-
American thought the linguistic turn generated analytic
philosophy; in continental European thought it produced
philosophical hermeneutics and postmodernism. The contri-
bution of analytic philosophers to the theory of tradition has
been modest. Continental philosophers on the other hand,
especially Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul
Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida, have had an enormous im-
pact. By rejecting “pure” experience and insisting on the rad-
ically historical, interested, necessarily biased character of all
human expression, these thinkers stimulated a new respect
for tradition to the extent that tradition manifests the predic-
ament of human understanding generally. If all human ex-
pression (ideas, values, symbols, and so on) is, in effect, a
commentary on its own temporal situation (including the
other human expressions found in its situation), then one
may say that all human expression functions in and as a tradi-
tion of some kind.Ironically, reverence for tradition played little part in the
rise of philosophical hermeneutics and postmodernism. Hei-
degger viewed his philosophical project as a revolutionary
break with the entire tradition of Western philosophy and
theology since Plato, a view not unconnected with the Euro-
pean fascist project of leaping beyond modernity into a radi-
cally new historical epoch. The “post” in postmodernism en-
codes the same idea of an irrevocable break with the Western
tradition. However, by rejecting the Enlightenment project
of modernity, philosophical hermeneutics and postmodern-
ism stimulated a fresh look at the premodern value systems
the Enlightenment rejected, including historic religious tra-
ditions. Heidegger’s more moderate heirs in the followingTRADITION 9273