Explaining Traditions

"Simon Bronner's Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture offers a fresh, rich understanding of how tradition shapes our life each day. In his thoughtful essays on Yiddish stories, blues tales, football, vernacular architecture, crafts, the Internet, and children's games, Bronner shows how tradition defines each of these diverse worlds. The book is a landmark study that is distinguished by both its thorough scholarship and its breadth of vision."—William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues

"Explaining Traditions opens our eyes to why we reject some aspects of tradition, why we choose to keep the lore we keep, and the ways in which we are haunted by collective memory even as we seek to slough off its vestiges."—Homestead.org

"Explaining Traditions provides deep insight into the nuances and purposes of living traditions in relation to modernity."—SIEF News

"A thought-provoking book about what constitutes tradition, why we continue to care about traditions, and how we forge new ones."—Bookreporter

"No American folklorist is better qualified than Simon Bronner to review and update our ideas about what 'tradition' means...He pulls off a masterful job in this important new book."—Journal of Folklore Research

"An indefatigable researcher and writer, Bronner exhibits his best skills in this book. Always having sought to define and refine the concept of tradition, the author evocatively recapitulates and expands the thrust of his interests and development over the last 35-plus years with this work."—Choice

"Bronner's book is an important contribution to folklore studies. The book's breadth and depth exemplify Bronner's points as he draws upon such a diversity of instances that will persuade readers that tradition remains a pervasive element in modern American life."—Journal of American Folklore

"Janus-like, contemporary life looks insistently forward, just as it is wedded to the past. How to explain the contradiciton? This is Simon Bronner's conundrum in his new collection of essays, Exlplaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture. The answer is to understand how tradition serves modernity in smoothing the rough edges of change. Tradition becomes a form of practice—praxis—rather than a set of objects or texts. Bronner reaches back to the Roman distinction between traditum (the object itself) and tradition (the process of transmission)."—Folklore 123.2