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Inventer des mythes, fabriquer des rites?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Alain Babadzan
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European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , November 1984 , pp. 309 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1984

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References

* Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. On trouvera un bon échantillon de thèses contraires dans quelques ouvrages récents: Shils, Edward, Tradition (London, Faber and Faber, 1981)Google Scholar; Markale, Jean, Le Christianisme celtique et ses survivances populaires (Paris, Imago, 1983)Google Scholar; Brown, Peter, [trad. fr.:] Le Culte des saints (Paris, Cerf, 1984)Google Scholar; Weber, Eugen, [trad. fr.:] La Fin des terroirs (Paris, Gallimard, 1984)Google Scholar.

(1) L'examen des modalités de cette tradissolution, en France, fait l'objet de l'ouvrage Weber, d'Eugen, From Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford 1976)Google Scholar, traduction française citée.

(2) Hobsbawm, Introduction, in op. cit., (ma traduction).

(3) Ibid. p. 2.

(4) Mass-producing traditions: Europe 1870–1914, in op. cit., pp. 263–307.

(5) Ibid. p. 287.

(6) Edward Shils, op. cit.

(7) « Plus de trente ans », décrète Shils (op. cit.).

(8) Hugh Trevor-Roper, The invention of tradition: the Highland tradition of Scotland, in Shils, , op. cit. pp. 15–41Google Scholar; Prys Morgan, The hunt for the Welsh past in the romantic period, ibid. pp. 43–100.

(9) Cannadine, David, The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the ‘invention of Tradition’, c. 1820–1977, in op. cit. pp. 101–164Google Scholar.

(10) Ibid. p. 116 (traduit et souligné par moi).

(11) Une situation sans doute particulière à la Grande-Bretagne: « In other countries, such as Germany, Austria and Russia, ritualistic aggrandizement was employed, as of old, to exalt royal influence. In Britain, by contrast, similar ritual was made possible because of growing royal weakness » (ibid. p. 121).

(12) Ranger, Terence, The invention of Tradition in colonial Africa, op. cit. pp. 211–262Google Scholar.

(13) Ranger, , op. cit. p. 247Google Scholar:

European invented traditions were marked by their inflexibility. They involved sets of recorded rules and procedures—like the modern coronation rites They gave reassurance because they represented what was unchanging in a period of flux. Now when Europeans thought of the customary in Africa, they naturally ascribed to it these same characteristics. The assertion by whites that Africlan society was profoundly conservative—living within age-old rules which did not change; living within an ideology based on the absence of change; living within a framework of clearly defined hierarchical statues—was by no means always intended as an indictment of African backwardness or reluctance to modernize. Often it was intended as acompliment to the admirable qualities of tradition, even though it was a quite misconceived compliment. This attitude towards ‘traditional’ Africa became more marked as white came to realize in the 1920s and 1930s that rapid economic transformation was just not going to take place in Africa and that most Africans had to remain members of rural communities, or as some whites came to dislike the consequences the changes which had taken place. The African collaborators, playing their role within one or other of the introduced European traditions, then came to seem less admirable than ‘real’ Africans, still presumed to be inhabiting their own, appropriate universe of tradition.

(14) L'anthropologie co.oniale n'a pasque peu contribué à la justification scientifique de cette démarche projective, quiconstitue un de ses implicites. Sur le culte de l'ordre et de la hiérarchie primitive en anthropologie, voir les remarques de Guidieri, Remo dans le dernier chapitre de L'Abondance des pauvres (Paris, Seuil, 1984)Google Scholar.

(15) ‘Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to beong to’ (Iliffe, John, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge 1979), p. 324,CrossRefGoogle Scholarcité Ranger, par, op. cit. p. 252Google Scholar.

(16) Ranger, , op. cit. p. 254:Google Scholar

Elders tended to appeal to ‘tradition’ in order to defend their dominance of the rural means of production against challenge by the young. Men tended to appeal to ‘tradition’ in order to insure that the incrasing role which women played in production in the rural areas did not result in any diminution of male control over women as economic assets. Paramount chiefs and ruling aristocracies in polities which included numbers of ethnic and social groupings appealed to ‘tradition’ in order to maintain or extend their control over their subjects. Indigenous populations appealed to ‘tradition’ in order to ensure that the migrants who settled amongst them did not achieve political or economic rights.

(17) Mankind [Sydney], XIII (1982), n° 4.

(18) Keesing, , op. cit. pp. 371–372Google Scholar:[…] kastom as political symbol can be used to justify anticolonial and antichristian conservatism or to rationalize parital abandonment of ancestral ways. It cna be used to legitimize customary law in opposition to colonial (or neo-colonial) law. It can be used to establish the authority of local leaders parallel to those of the government, by depicting the traditional order as prior and endogenous and the colonial order as introduced and alien. It can be used to validate land claims. And it can be used to defend the values of kinship, community, and continuity with the past which are being visible eroded by the development process […] An ideology of kastom can serve to deny the contradiction between bisnis/material prosperity by makin bisnis [business] a collective venture of the community, by emphasizing the communalist aspects of custom, the communalist possibiliies of bisnis, and the obligations of the successful entrepreneur to share his rewards […] It can be used to unite or divide, to include or exclude. It can be use by neo-colonial élites committed to Western-style development to assert rhetrorically that the values and life-styles of the past eill endure despite transistors, tourists and Toyotas. In can be use by stubborn traditionalists, scheming separatists, or Messianic cult leaders.

(19) Deux ouvrages récents examinent plusieurs aspects de la question: Brown, Peter, The Cult of the Saints: its rise and function in Latin Christianity (Chicago 1981)Google Scholar, traduction française citée, et Jean Markale, op. cit.

(20) Cette analyse est développée, à propos d'un syncrétisme religieux polynésien, Babadzan, dans Alain, Naissance d'une tradition (Paris, O.R.S.T.O.M., 1982)Google Scholar.

(21) Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Vérité et méthode (Paris, Seuil, 1976), p. 112Google Scholar(éd. orig. Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1960))Google Scholar.

(22) Lyotard, Jean-François, La Condition post-moderne (Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 1979)Google Scholar.

(23) Guidieri, , op. cit. p. 195Google Scholar.

(24) Ibid. p. 192.