Neotraditionalism

Neotraditionalism is the deliberate revival and revamping of old culture, practices, and institutions for use in new political contexts and strategies. It entails a degree of contestation over culture and memory, can serve as a strategy of political legitimation, and is deployed in different ways by both elites and ordinary people. It is especially salient in contexts of rapid social change or when people question the nature or benefits of that which is presented as “developmental” or “modern.” Neotraditionalism suggests that regime forms, the nature of law, the means for checking the arbitrariness of rulers, and other forms of state-society interaction should take into account or resonate with local definitions of authentic culture and historical memory.

As a concept, neotraditionalism breaks with primordialist notions of deeply rooted cultural essences or characterizations of static, antimodern tradition. An approach focusing on neotraditionalism instead follows historians in the “invention of tradition” school, neo-Marxists concerned with hegemony, and social theorists in the constructivist vein to treat seemingly historic institutions, practices, and values as moldable resources, subject to ongoing social and political contestation. In this sense, one cannot speak of politically salient, extant, and unproblematic “traditions” of, for example, democratic participation (e.g., panchayat village councils in India, pancasila democracy in Indonesia, consensual village decision making under [Page 600]the African “talking tree”), but rather of specific efforts to identify and promulgate particular, often reified, always modified, versions of remembered culture and institutions as neotraditions.

Neotraditions serve political goals and are the subject of political contestation over the definition of historical memory and “authentic” culture. They can be especially useful tools for the consolidation of group identity in circumstances of rapid and confusing social change. Thus, Eric Hobsbawm described the invention and deployment of neotraditions surrounding the mythic hero Ossian, bagpipes, and kilts in constructing a new Scottish national identity at a time of rapid class transformation, urbanization, and the decline of feudal forms of social solidarity. Likewise, in southern Africa, historians have shown how the massive migration of men to mines and factories around the turn of the twentieth century precipitated new understandings of “traditional” culture, emphasizing women's subordination, powerful elder male chieftaincy, and rigid customary land laws. These neotraditional customs and institutions enabled absent men to retain control over key resources (especially their wives and their farms). Neotraditionalism has also been used as a powerful tool of political legitimation in postcolonial settings, whereby authoritarian elites from Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire to Suharto in Indonesia sought to justify single-party authoritarian regimes as “democratic” because one-party rule supposedly revived and updated precolonial traditions of village-level, inclusive, consensus decision making.

Neotraditional analysis does not suggest that the story of Ossian, powerful elder male chieftaincy, or village democracy are fabrications and simple instrumentalist manipulations of an entirely plastic and moldable culture. Rather, it accepts that some forms of these stories, practices, and informal institutions represent ethnographic and historical realities, but that there is a political process in which actors filter and select particular elements of remembered culture as the central and salient definitions of “tradition” in any given moment.

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