Traditions and practices believed to be ancient are often recent, and sometimes deliberately invented.
Hobsbawm and Ranger's collection The Invention of Tradition (1983) documented cases such as Scottish Highland dress, whose system of clan tartans was largely a nineteenth-century creation, and British royal ceremonial, much of it elaborated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. TV Tropes uses the name for the same misdating in culture generally.
In practice
- A university's ancient-seeming graduation ritual turns out to date from the 1950s, when a vice-chancellor designed it.
- A family's traditional holiday dish was first cooked by a grandparent from a magazine recipe.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that practices borrow authority by claiming age, so their inventors present them as old. Another is short memory: within a generation a practice's origin is forgotten and it seems always to have existed.
- In its favour
- Supported by detailed historical case studies, and influential across history and anthropology.
- Against it
- Critics argue that the invented-tradition thesis overstates invention, since new traditions usually recombine older elements, as Highland dress did. What counts as the same tradition is itself a judgement.
- Standing
- Compare older than they think, its mirror image.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- The measured patterns of social life