Engler/Tradition, 6. Key Thinkers of Tradition

This chapter looks at some important published views of tradition, noting that each is limited, because it reflects its conceptual work and theoretical agenda. Maurice Halbwachs sees tradition as inherently social, because the past is always a group reconstruction. Hans-Georg Gadamer sees tradition in terms of a hermeneutic circle: we make sense of past and present as part of a dynamic, open-ended mutual interpretational relation. Paul Ricoeur tries to develop Gadamer’s view by building in a viewpoint for ideological critique. Jan and Aleida Assmann distinguish between (i) the living dynamics of communicative memory and(ii) the institutional memory of canon (key texts that many people are aware of) and archives (stored but accessible, like libraries). Pascal Boyer’s cognitive analysis sees tradition as a type of social interaction that structures people’s representations. Olivier Morin offers a different but related cognitive view. He seestradition not as the transmission of content but of cues that allow people to reconstruct something very like that content, using their evolved cognitive abilities.