THE COMMUNICATIVE DIMENSION OF TRADITION: PRESERVATION, INHERITING, INSTANTIATION IN USE

Abstract

The condition for the existence of traditional culture is its preservation and inheriting, which is possible only in communication and in a continuous recreation process in dialogue with cultural space, its community and history. Tradition as a framework and a heritage of tradition culture as one of the manifestations of the permanence of tradition is one of the models that may convey the identity of both the individual and the community. Tradition needs cultivation that may be manifest in a number of ways: as awareness of the text, its precise formula and handing down of words: as awareness of meaning, paying special attention to the explication and interpretation of meaning and commentaries; the third cultivation form of tradition is related to its instantiation in use and retranslation in actual cultural processes. This may happen both in formal and informal education, upbringing, enculturation or initiation, where the ritual plays a significant role. Interpretation of every text is also self-interpretation and self-improvement: therefore each tradition functions with its own system of moral beingness of ideals, norms, rules and moral principles; it offers its own image of man and its own techniques of achieving beingness. That is why the functioning of tradition in a dialogically dialectic matrix of the communicative field, that offers various viewpoints and possibilities and interpretation, poses the question about validity of interpretation and the responsibility of the inheritor in the preservation and handing down of tradition. The objective of the paper is to explore various aspects of the understanding of tradition and distinction of notions related to it with an aim to form a modern multi-dimensional understanding of tradition as a social phenomenon in the actual cultural processes.