Tradition does not resist change but lacks markers to give change meaning.

Evidence

In traditional cultures, the past is honoured and symbols are valued because they contain and perpetuate the experience of generations. Tradition is a mode of integrating the reflexive monitoring of action with the time-space organisation of the community. It is a means of handling time and space, which inserts any particular activity or experience within the continuity of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices. Tradition is not wholly static, because it has to be reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it. Tradition does not so much resist change as pertain to a context in which there are few separated temporal and spatial markers in terms of which change can have any meaningful form. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 96

Categorization

• DEFINE: Giddens’s definition of tradition as a time-space integration mechanism, contrasted implicitly with modernity’s reflexive basis.
• XREF: Connects to Stevens’s reverence for ‘dignity’ and the Darlington lineage as tradition; his horror at change stems from lacking reflexive markers to make sense of it. — connects to: Tradition is about how elements are articulated, not about persistence of old forms — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1017; Traditions are mutable and contested rather than fixed and class-bound; Cultural symbols carry no fixed meaning; meaning shifts with the social field — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1012 (+4 more)

Related

• Tradition is about how elements are articulated, not about persistence of old forms (similarity 0.86)
• Cultures represent themselves as fixed but are always changed by history (similarity 0.81)
• Classic forms resist fashion because they lack points of attack for change (similarity 0.81)
• Traditions are re-articulated arrangements, not fixed inheritances carrying stable meaning (similarity 0.80)
• Each cultural form is inevitably replaced by its successor (similarity 0.79)
• Culture as constitutive of practice retains contingency and is never finally determined (similarity 0.79)
• Tradition sustains ontological security by giving routine intrinsic meaning (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural power operates through a constantly shifting boundary of what counts as tradition (similarity 0.79)
• Popular commercial forms must preserve elements of authentic vernacular to succeed (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural elements that appear to persist can secretly shift their social meaning and function (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Tradition is about how elements are articulated, not about persistence of old forms #expands (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1017
• Historical change alters how invariant productive elements combine, not the elements themselves. #expands (0.70)
• Classic forms resist fashion because they lack points of attack for change #qualifies (0.65) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 745
• Culture names the forms, not the content, of social relationships #expands (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 882
• Traditions are mutable and contested rather than fixed and class-bound #corroborates (0.55)
• Cultural symbols carry no fixed meaning; meaning shifts with the social field #corroborates (0.50) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1012