Tradition

What really is tradition? What is its relationship with culture and how does the transmission process implicit in this idea work? What is the role of tradition in the contemporary world, marked by globalization and the extreme volatility of all references? If tradition is, in fact, as many authors point out, disappearing - or undergoing profound transformation - in the face of the inexorable advance of the modernization process, it seems to us that an effort is needed to define tradition and understand how it works. (Leonardo Castriota -2009).

Paul Oliver, in the entry "Tradition and transmission" in the Encyclopedia of vernacular architecture, "states that those aspects of behavior, customs, ritual or the use of artifacts that have been inherited from previous generations" are considered traditional. Tradition would then have a necessarily conservative dimension: the present would repeat the past through what it inherited.

However, the link that tradition establishes between the past and the present is more complex than it might seem at first glance: if "tradita" are permanences of the past, they exist in the present, where they normally perform the function of lending their stamp of authority to acts of the present. To fulfill this function, tradition will always be, as Raymond Williams points out, selective "an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which becomes powerfully operative in the process of defining and identifying social culture"

Modernity is destroying tradition. However, a collaboration between modernity and calculable risk in relation to external influences can mitigate this threatening process. This phase is provoked and concluded with the emergence of high modernity and tradition, which was crucial to the early phases of modern social development, a period that Beck calls reflexive modernization. From then on, tradition takes on a different character. Even the most advanced of pre-modern civilizations remain firmly traditional. Would Globalization be the gradual distancing and even abandonment of tradition? What links globalization to search processes of monitoring systems looking for contexts of traditional actions?

The connections are the disembodying consequences resulting from abstract systems. In this case, the causal influences are complex and are linked to the multidimensional character of postmodernity. Tradition concerns the organization of time and, therefore, also space: it is what happens equally with globalization, except for the fact that one runs in the opposite direction to the other. While tradition controls space through its time regulator, with globalization something else happens.

Globalization is essentially "action at a distance", absence predominates over presence, not in the sedimentation of time, but thanks to the restructuring of space. In recent decades, particularly influenced by the development of global, instantaneous electronic communication, these circumstances have changed radically through their time frame of reference.

A world in which no one is a stranger anymore is a world in which pre-existing traditions cannot avoid contact, not only with others - but also with many - alternative ways of life precisely because the "other" can no longer be treated as unknown and inert. The question is not only that the other responds, but that mutual questioning is possible.