ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses “tradition” as a critical concept of ethnic subjectivity construction, interpreted as the intersection of static knowledge and a dynamic process of transmitting this knowledge. Members of cultural communities create and observe scripts of cultural practices, called traditions, based on their life and environment, that become the static, tangible part once told in stories. Traditions gain cohesive force as a mutually agreed platform of identification that gets transmitted across generations while at the same time they help maintain the communities precisely by this cohesion. Thus, the dynamic aspect captures how traditions emerge from multiple social contexts, encode attitudes and beliefs, and reflect on the changes of that knowledge within the transmission process. The chapter demonstrates how such scripts are told in selected intergenerational and personal memory narratives and reveal the Bakhtinian polyphony and dialogism in narratives about traditions. A set of discursive tools helps identify contexts coded in every tradition as it gets reinterpreted by each generation that receives these scripts of action. Members of the recipient generation make their own contextually informed decisions about the cultural value of the traditions and construct their ethnic subjectivity via the agentive self related to the scripted cultural practices.
