Tradition

Catalog description

Centering the category tradition, students theorize ways the concept has been announced and enacted in three overlapping spheres: religious contexts, academic debates, and law. We engage classical theories of continuity and change, recent theorizations of invention, articulation, discursive tradition, and contemporary examples of scholars and activists reclaiming the category. Adjacent conceptual terrain to be covered includes discourses of orthodoxy and authenticity. The course is driven in part by examples from students research areas (e.g., ancestral invocations or the asserted status of sacred texts) in the service of our shared project to theorize claim-making about the standing of the past in the present.