ABSTRACT

In the introduction to the influential volume The Invention of Tradition, co-edited with Terence Ranger (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), Eric Hobsbawm noted how these “responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations” are to be found in any time and place, but especially

when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional carriers and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated: in short, when there are sufficiently large and rapid changes on the demand or the supply side. Such changes have been particularly significant in the past 200 years, and it is therefore reasonable to expect these instant formalizations of new traditions to cluster during this period.

(Hobsbawm 1983: 4–5)