382 Quotes About Tradition

The Trinidad Carnival and the calypso are both theatres in and metaphors through which the drama of Trinidad’s social history is encoded and enacted, historically a celebratory mass/mas theatre of contested social space: the domain of the stick fighter, the Wild Indian, the Pierrot Grenade, the Midnight Robber, the chantwel and his descendant, the calypsonian, and the pan man of the emerging steelband movement into the 1960s.

I want to be firm that the idea of the traditional itself is highly constructed and highly ideological. This version is one among many. There is no original, only endless multiple trails that point into the past. We can never grasp that past. These stories are always about the present.

Not agreeing with something that happened in history or with another person’s traditions doesn’t provide license to eradicate or vilify entire aspects of the past.

In general the relative value of the various religions is a very difficult thing to discern; it is almost impossible, perhaps quite impossible. For a religion is known only from inside.

Still, there is something disappearing from the world, something composed of many instances of tradition and skill, or maybe not disappearing, but translating. Maybe culture, like physical matter, doesn’t disappear, but is subject to infinite play, and th e world is a vast workshop for making and remaking everything, including people, and the engine of play is desire…

Tradition, to me, is a poison. And when you start to destroy it, those with that poison in their veins react with hostility. They think their culture has given them something, and are blind to what it has taken away.

Modern man is an island, in a historical sense. Every society born of revolution is an island, and it is an island that floats, like a thin film on the surface of history. He is always moving, disconnected from all that came before him, and never holding still long enough to strike the roots necessary to pass something on to those who will come after.

Being modern is not a question of sacrificing the past in favour of the new, but of maintaining, comparing and remembering values we have created, making them modern, so as to not loose the value of the modern.

Modernity is kind of a tradition and tradition itself is not a rulebook. It's a dialogue and a dialectical process— just as tradition affects us, we too affect tradition and culture, and we change it.