Week Three - Hobsbawm and White

Hobsbawm cites a distinct shift in the nature of tradition that roughly coincides with the timeframe discussed last week. He talks about the “marked difference between old and invented [traditions]

1. Where the old ways are alive, traditions need be neither revived nor invented.

2. What happens to traditions under the auspices of modernity?

• Yet it may be suggested that where they are invented, it is often not because old ways are no longer available or viable, but because they are deliberately not used or adapted. Thus, in consciously setting itself against tradition and for radical innovation, the nineteenth-century liberal ideology of social change systematically failed to provide for the social and authority ties taken for granted in earlier societies, and created voids which might have to be filled by invented practices. (Hobsbawm, p. 8)

3. Invented traditions

 However Traditions do persist. As Hobsbawm (p. 2) argues:

·      Traditions are responses to novel situations – to the constant change and innovation of the modern world

·      Traditions attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant. 

·      Traditions take the form of reference to old situations (to a historic past), or they establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition. 

·      The peculiarity of 'invented' traditions is that the continuity with the historic past which is referenced is largely factitious. 

4. Main Example of Invented Tradition

Hobsbawm (p. 10-11)

• One marked difference between old and invented practices may be observed. The former were specific and strongly binding social practices, the latter tended to be quite unspecific and vague as to the nature of the values, rights and obligations of the group membership they inculcate: 'patriotism', 'loyalty', 'duty', 'playing the game', 'the school spirit' and the like. But if the content of British patriotism or 'Americanism' was notably ill-defined, though usually specified in commentaries associated with ritual occasions, the practices symbolizing it were virtually compulsory -as in standing up for the singing of the national anthem in Britain, the flag ritual in American schools. The crucial element seems to have been the invention of emotionally and symbolically charged signs of club membership rather than the statutes and objects of the club. Their significance lay precisely in their undefined universality.

White (p. 15)

• Of course, the idea of nation is an enormously powerful one, powerful enough for people to die in its name. Its very imprecision is its power. But it is not the same as the nation-state, which clearly defines its boundaries, its members, its power. The idealised nation is in many ways an invention, an artificial construction, rather than an expression of an underlying essence that all members of a particular  nation share. (15)

4. White (p. 17-18) on the way we can and should understand/analyze "invented traditions".

• My point is that there are realities-social, cultural, geographical-but when it comes to naming even the simplest realities 'Australian' we get into difficulties because we are inevitably touching on questions of power and identity. And this brings us to the concerns of this book: how do questions of nationality and culture touch on the issues of multiple identities and the agency of ordinary Australians? 

• If the idea of 'Australia' is an invention, an active and creative process rather than something that has a prior existence and simply needs to be discovered, then it follows that it will be invented and embroidered in different ways by different people for different reasons. This could be taken to mean that there is no single Australian identity but only multiple identities. Even when Inventing Australia was being written, with multiculturalism being formally adopted as a national cultural policy, this idea was not all that new. Nevertheless, Inventing Australia probably contributed to the process by which the notion of a single monolithic national identity-as portrayed for example in Russel Ward's The Australian Legend-was increasingly discredited through the 1970s and 1980s. It was a battle that still had to be fought in the lead-up to the bicentennial celebrations, and while there was a strong backlash against the Bicentennary, and the Bicentennial Authority's commitment to pluralism might have been as much strategic as heartfelt, multiple identities were recognised in 'Celebration of the Nation' (Spearritt 1988; Cochrane & Goodman 1988). 

• In Inventing Australia my concern with multiple Australian identities was with their multiplicity over time. Despite Melleuish's comment that 'a cursory examination of White's national images demonstrates that they are all quite similar' (1995, p. 9), I would suggest a slightly less cursory examination might show that they changed considerably over time, ranging from hell to paradise (which raises concerns about Melleuish's eschatology), from an Australia based in the bush to one found in suburbia, and, important in Melleuish's own work, from 'free trade' notions of Australia to protectionist ones. In examining that series of conceptions of Australia, I only considered those I judged to be dominant at anyone time. I regret that I was not able to give more attention to alternative conceptions of Australia competing with the dominant ones, nor to the actual processes of dissemination by which some conceptions carne to dominate. However, I did establish that there was a contest for supremacy going on among the different conceptions of Australia, and that contest was part of the wider struggles for dominance within Australian society. One problem with the bicentennial gloss of multiple identities, and of much public commitment to multiculturalism, is its tendency to leave out of the equation the contest for dominance in the public discourse of nation. All multiple identities are seen as equal, when in fact some are more equal than others.