Reflexive Traditions and Heritage Production

Abstract

The sociologist Ulrich Beck distinguishes three stages of development of society: pre-industrial or pre-modernity, industrial or modernity, and what he terms the ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992). With regard to Western societies, he identifies their current phase of development as ‘reflexive modernization’. ‘Tradition’ is often cast as the opposite of modernity, and as consequently detrimental to modernization. In this essay, I contend that this is a false opposition; that the juxtaposition of apparent ‘asynchronicities’ (Bausinger 1987) masks political interests; and that, far from being regressive, ‘reflexive tradition’, understood as a process, is potentially a progressive force. However, in the production of heritage, tradition does play a rather ambivalent role, and this, too, is examined below. In the new rhetoric that became fashionable at about the same time as neoliberalist politicians began to dismantle the welfare state across much of Western Europe, local culture and identity have been harnessed to provide foundations for social and economic growth. For most - and not only the peripheral — regions across Europe, that has meant promoting local and regional ‘heritage’ as a resource, especially for tourism. The ensuing reappraisal of local resources has also created conditions for the revival of an ailing primary sector, in particular agriculture and fishing, which may supply raw materials for the production of ‘cultural’ goods, such as culinary specialities. At the same time, a growing emphasis on sustainability has meant that the utilization of culture is increasingly expected to enhance rather than diminish the cultural resource base of a region or sociocultural group. This raises questions about the nature of the heritage ‘product’ and its relation to tradition, questions that point us back to the human being as (not only) cultural actor, and thus to the very heart of anthropology.