Found among the principal subjects of contemporary discursive practice is the persistent metaconflict between a ‘fossilized' ethnopsychology embodied in tradition, and a universalistic spirit of the informational and electronic era. Tradition's primordial characteristic reduces it to an ethnic-protective mentality, but excessive ethnicization supplants the renewal function of tradition as a spiritual resource. A non-archival meaning of tradition, considered in time and dynamics, suggests, along with household ethnography, the willingness and ability to adapt to modernity. The latter tends to promote breaking with tradition as the best stimulant of reforms.

The conflict-inducing nature of the problem results from tradition needing a creative renewal in order to stay as it is, but from the standpoint of modernity it is mainly summed up as falling from temporality, and, consequently, an etymological family, thus turning into an anachronism out of use. The choice of the two canonical as well as the three recently produced works was directed by their focus on the eternal dilemma of ‘tradition vs. novelty.'