In traditional cultures, the past is honoured and symbols are valued because they contain and perpetuate the experience of generations. Tradition is a mode of integrating the reflexive monitoring of action with the time-space organisation of the community. It is a means of handling time and space, which inserts any particular activity or experience within the continuity of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices. Tradition is not wholly static, because it has to be reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it. Tradition does not so much resist change as pertain to a context in which there are few separated temporal and spatial markers in terms of which change can have any meaningful form.

DEFINE: Defines tradition as a mode of integrating reflection with time-space organisation, rather than as mere static resistance to change. XREF: Connects to Giddens' broader social theory of time-space distanciation and reflexivity in modernity.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 96