ABSTRACT
Cultural traditions are no longer thought to be static collections of customs and beliefs that are handed down from generation to generation (Handler and Linnekin 1984; Hanson 1989; Hobsbawm 1983). Instead, cultural traditions are viewed as dynamic and flexible, often integrating contemporary values and politics, while simultaneously staking a claim in the past. Anthropologists and historians have become more aware of the role that they themselves play in this interpretive process of delegating certain practices and beliefs to be labeled as “traditional” (Handler and Linnekin 1984). Cultural anthropologists, in particular, have grappled with the question of how our ethnographies represent other cultures and other peoples. Thus, one recurrent theme in the interpretive anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s focuses on the “doing and writing of ethnography,” rather than on the building of general theories of culture (Marcus and Fischer 1986:16).
