#31,
Of Mummers and Mimicry
On New Year's day, I think it is only fair to turn to Thomas Hardy:
For mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt. The mummers themselves were not afflicted with any such feeling for their art, though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction.[1]
Here is the invention of tradition in a nutshell, and a message
for all who would proclaim the importance of cultural continuities (particularly
as these relate to immigrant populations). While it would be an overstatement to say that
cultural continuities do not exist, what we can say is that the social landscape
of the revival or the practiced tradition is so radically different that the
particular act in question must have altered its social meaning fundamentally.
It cannot mean the same thing to the same people, simply because they
are not the same people. If we take mummers and mumming as our example,
what may have come over from rural