Home of Maltese Ghana - Ghana as 'Tradition'

The Home of Maltese Għana

Exoticizing Discoveries and Extraordinary Experiences:

'Traditional' music, modernity, and nostalgia in Malta
and other Mediterranean societies

Għana as 'Tradition'

As with arabesk in Turkey, flamenco in Spain, and rebetika in Greece, għana has come to represent 'the savage within', a symbol of aboriginality that threaten official presentations of national culture and identity. Paradoxically because it has no formal written history, its potency as index of the possibility of tradition is further enhanced. Għana has come to represent tradition as tradition, rather than a residue or survival of traditional singing in the present, because we know little of what that tradition actually was. Furthermore its 'history of non-history' is shunned by Maltese historians who have long been involved in documenting High Culture (seen in terms of civiltá, urban culture, local representative institutions, and adherence to symbols of identity such as religion) for the process of nationbuilding, and because tradition as tradition is refractive to analysis. Ghana thus became the preserve of folklorists. I explore this below.

Here a brief comparison to what seemed to have occurred in other parts of Europe in the latter 19th century is instructive. Hobsbawm and Ranger in their widely influential book The Invention of Tradition (1983) have suggested that the invention of traditions in Europe was intimately linked to the development of the modern nation state. Yet despite the indubitable attractiveness of this thesis, it suffers from a major problem. This is that it views 'tradition' rather narrowly in 'historicist' terms, as practices, pomp and ceremony, rituals, symbols, etc, which are readily identifiable within the society as 'tradition' with a capital 'T':

'it includes both 'traditions' actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less traceable manner within a brief and dateable period......[ ]...a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past' (ibid; 1)

The examples given by Hobsbawm and his countributors are of traditions or rituals whose identity as such is unproblematical, merely their origins which are camouflaged. By tracing their 'invention' across time the contributors hoped to show how this process was enmeshed in class dynamics within evolving nation state or colonial contexts. Yet nowhere is the concept of 'tradition' scrutinised, nor is it suggested that 'tradition' may well be located in, and embodied by, a way of talking about the past through a practice such as singing, such as għana deemed to represent 'tradition'. Għana, like arabesk and flamenco, rather than being a 'tradition', can well represent tradition. 'Tradition' thus becomes not just something invented in an identifiable (recent) past (as Hobsbawm's contributors suggest), but a way of talking about the past (and the present) through the identification of certain practices such as għana that require preservation. In 'tradition' the politics of preservation is as important as the politics of invention. Furthermore, I suggest that the process of national culture formation involves two processes: (a) Tradition as a-tradition-that-requires-'preservation' (Folklore Mark I). This is related to national state formation. The subsequent process is (b) Tradition that is hidden-and-is-constantly-about-to-be-'rediscovered'/invented by the intellectuals (Folklore Mark II). In the latter case għana oscillates between the rhetorical oppositions of 'concealment' and 'discovery'. It is 'invented' by constantly being 'rediscovered'.