Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh and Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial rituals in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. It addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historians and anthropologists in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism which poses new questions for the understanding of our history.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Introduction: inventing traditions
• 2 The invention of tradition: the Highland tradition of Scotland
• 3 From a death to a view: the hunt for the Welsh past in the Romantic period
• 4 The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British Monarchy and the Invention of Tradition, c. 1820-1977
• 5 Representing authority of tradition in Victorian India
• 6 The invention of tradition in Colonial Africa
• 7 Mass-producing traditions: Europe, 1870-1914

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

A worthy undertaking, regrettably botched. Sociologist Pinkney (Hunter, CUNY) wishes to show that, contrary to the claims of white and black neoconservatives, blacks have made only minimal, threatened gains since the 1960s, and racism is still rife: two arguments, supported in actuality by observation and statistics, that he weakens by presenting uncorrelated, often out-of-date evidence and making flat, broad, a priori assertions. The introductory chapter does have a certain utility as a review of social-science writings, since the mid-1960s, in some way inimical to blacks; from the Moynihan report on ""The Negro Family,"" to Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross, with its ""benign"" view of slavery, to the discrimination-denial of black economist Thomas Sowell and black sociologist William Wilson. There follows a competent, sometimes incisive discussion--by Walter Stafford (Adelphi School of Social Work)--of ""Economic Decline and the Rise of the New Conservatism,"" which points out the relation between middle-class white security and black gains, and black difficulty in relating race to postindustrial issues: ""the debates""--about morals and values--""were among whites and about how they saw their future."" Meanwhile the burgeoning conservative groups (delineated in detail) went largely unchallenged by black organizations--in part because of the black-leadership crisis spelled out by Pinkney elsewhere. Most of his own material, however, falls far short of this standard. There is a murky, semi-Marxist discussion of class vs. race, to the point that race is more decisive; a grade-school argument that, though prejudice has declined, ""whites still maintain strongly negative attitudes toward blacks""; a particularly unfortunate jumble of income, occupation, and unemployment data (without recent, devastating figures); a tightrope-treatment of the black middle-class--seconding past lifestyle charges, denying current allegations of ""class warfare""; some sympathetic close-ups of the black underclass, with little analysis; and a couple of sections on educational and related issues--open admissions, busing, affirmative action--that do little more than make the standing, correct-past-wrongs case for remediation. Stafford's socioeconomic interweave apart, the disadvantaged situation of blacks is more cogently and compellingly treated by Michael Harrington in his forthcoming The New American Poverty (p. 566). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.