Tradition and Custom on the pages of the Kenyon Reveille
As the college's now-official yearbook, the Kenyon Reveille serves as both a record of and a way to establish continuity and tradition. Part of our work last week in the archives was to find something that may offer some insight into Kenyon's traditions, and while in some ways minimalist, the Reveille is a good indicator that there may be some traditions at work on the ground. Take, for instance, this page that lists out the fraternities:
Fig.1: The Kenyon Reveille (1859).
While some of these Fraternities are no longer around, the very concept of a fraternity implies that at one point or another these were some form of traditional social organization--with Alpha Delta Phi, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Theta Delta Phi at least appearing to have continuity with their present day versions. These are an excellent example of a traditional institution on paper. And yet, it's quite relevant that they are this "on paper." They appear to have continuity due to their name, which as the membership list attests to, is used to create the perception of community via communicating it publicly.
A useful idea for understanding these traditions is Eric Hobsbawm's distinction between tradition and custom. In Hobsbawm's model, customs are the variable and often-revised technical practices while traditions tend to exist ritualistically, the former being practical in both sense of the word and the latter being primarily symbolic and for the sake of instilling values through repetition (1978: 272-273). Notably, it's the symbolic gestures as part of tradition that attempt to establish a sense of continuity, either by harkening back to previous situations in some real or imagined form or by "establishing their own past" (1978: 271). To paraphrase Hobsbawm's example of the judge, "custom is what the fraternities do, tradition is the emblem" (1978: 272). The practical effects of Fraternities such as housing or favors or networking would be the customary practices, but the regalia, naming conventions, initiation, and other practices would be the traditions. Notably, it is the traditions that tend to change with custom, not the other way around (Hobsbawm 1978: 273).
Read in this light, there's an interesting multifacetedness to the traditional aspects of the fraternities listed here, and yet, from this document alone it's hard to say what the actual customs of each fraternity are. There are clear traditional elements, notably the names are all either in Greek or reference Native Americans, which establish an identity both in relation to other fraternities but notably also as a references to cultures other than those of the then-present day U.S., and their names have remained stable across time even with the total replacement of the members, and no doubt the alterations of their customs in many cases to the point of unrecognizability. In other words, it's a bit like the Ship of Theseus, whose planks have been replaced to the point that they no longer remain. The fraternities membership, customs, and other facets of the organization have no doubt changed to the point of unrecognizably, and yet, the names remain. Much like the Ship of Theseus, all that remains of the originals besides some details and likely some practices are is the names, but it's the names that create their own continuity in interactions with historical documents like the Reveille, whose main purpose is to assist in this creation of continuity. Not only is tradition by necessity invented, it's also continuously re-invented in people's imagination through this repeated, ideological use of symbols which create the sense of a trans-temporal community and shared nature retroactively.
References
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1978. "Introduction: Inventing Traditions." Pp. 271-274 in The Collective Memory Reader. Edited by J. Olick, V. Vinitzky-Seroussi, and D. Levy. New York: Oxford University Press.
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