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To elaborate on this point: The accusation of LARPing is most pertinent when it's "LARPing as trad", which is a sort of performative contradiction. The original sense of "tradition" (from Latin traditio) is "that which has been handed down", and not (as in colloquial usage) "the way things were at some point in the past" - but this equivocation is significant. The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP. If the tradition (as in, the organic chain of transmission) was broken, such that you have to learn about it from old books rather than from your elders, then in fact it did not stand the test of time, and so it can't claim the Lindy effect to its credit.
I mean im not sure LARP is always a problem. If a worthy tradition was lost due to force — for example, a culture was forced to give up its language after a conquest, it’s somewhat a LARP to go back to that. It’s also in many cases a worthy effort to do that even if at first it is a LARP. The revival of Hebrew was a LARP at tge time. Now it’s the native language of Israel, and there’s a living culture that grew up alongside it. Irish is taught in schools in Ireland, it is sort of a LARP even now, but it’s an attempt at reviving a piece of that culture.
As usual, it depends on your goals and the details of what is done. In our region, my parents' generation got the local language & culture beaten out of them by the greater german system, which resulted in me and my generation not being able to speak it (despite my parents still talking it among each other; I can understand it, though) and internalizing a more general "cosmopolitan" german culture instead, even if it still has some local flavors to it.
Now some of my old classmates are reviving the old language through "traditional theater" and similar events, but as far as I can see, they don't reject their actual internalized culture at all. I can't help but view it as pointless LARPing, even if they clearly are mostly sincere about wanting to reconnect with their heritage. Then again, I'm not really a traditionalist myself, so you could call my criticism dishonest itself.
I'm holding onto my dialect for dear life. It's a core element of my experience of "home". Somehow I internatlized early on that it was in fact the others, the dialect-rejectors, the ostentatiously high-german who were LARPing, who pretended not to understand and speak the actual natural language of this place and time. And I had the goood fortune to be among others who practiced their dialect shamelessly and naturallly.
But that was long ago.
It's obvious that young people are socialized not primarily with others from the same place, but above all else with rootless cosmopolitans and their media. The number of those who naturally speak the local dialect are dropping precipitously and, outside of a few isolated villages, are already unsustainably low. Maybe a comprehensive, widespread and sustained LARP might save it, but not nearly enough people have the desire, nevermind the ability, to do it. Things are looking dire.
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I think you and @RenOS are using a much finer-grained and overly academic definition of “larp” than what most people are using when they accuse someone of being a “trad-larper”. When they say that they mean the accused larper is more interested in making a fashion statement and isn’t really that committed to the ideology in question. For example, nobody is looking at ISIS and saying “well technically those guys are all just larping because the original chain of tradition between themselves and 7th century Islam was broken by 400 years of Ottoman rule and nobody decided to RETVRN to Sunni traditionalist interpretations until the Wahabbists in the late 18th century”
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Well yeah, nobody calls actually traditional institutions larping even when it technically fits.
Did you know the cardinals who elect the pope are technically appointed as the more minor clerics within the diocese of Rome who have the responsibility to elect its bishop? Of course canon law doesn't actually allow senior archbishops to actually run the parishes they're theoretically pastors of, and it doesn't allow cabinet-level Vatican officials to act as deacons(except, technically, in the Latin mass) either. But none of this is referred to as larping. The word 'cardinal' even comes from a figure of speech for holding clerical responsibilities in a purely notional manner(the bird was named after the cleric due to their red robes). But being a millennium old tradition that is a direct development from previous practices insulates them from such a charge.
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My parents, and their parents, were part of a church. I was raised in this church. I decided in my twenties to leave this church despite my parents and siblings all remaining in it, and in my thirties I decided to, as you have it, RETVRN. Was the tradition broken, given that I left?
If I had stayed away, but instead my children decided to RETVRN, would the tradition be broken?
If there's a community of a hundred people forming a church, and 80% leave the church and 20% stay, and then we fastforward, say, three generations, would descendants of the 80% joining the church be LARPing? Would converts with no connection to the church at all be LARPing?
In short, can you join or adopt a tradition in any meaningful sense? If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?
Traditions start as innovations, then become traditions.
The problem here is the claim that one is not innovating when one RETVRNS.
This specific terminology smuggles its own view of the object. The conservative view, as opposed to the reactionary view.
An alternative understanding, from, say, Julius Evola, is that traditions are perennial truths embedded in the structure of reality, which eternally return. And the point is not being lindy because nothing ever lasts, but to claim the boons of alignment with some transcendental understanding of the universe.
In that sense, innovation can be traditional, and conservatism be anti-traditional, insofar as the behavior can or cannot be embedded in a larger mythic structure. 70 years of materialism did not make the Soviet Union into a traditional institution, however many dedushkas you can find that fondly remember it.
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One is not innovating when one adopts another's innovation either, though.
It's a distinction of Sense versus Reference. The California hippie who travels the world in search of spiritual wisdom and winds up adopting (say) Tibetan Buddhism is not doing the same thing as the Tibetan layman who practices Buddhism because that's just what their people do.
Which is all well and good, since Buddhism has a core that is (purportedly) true regardless of how one arrives at it. But the irony of "trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition, something of the form: "This society has lost its way because there are too many individualists, people who think they know better than they did in the good old days. Therefore it falls to me, the lone heroic seeker, to forsake mainstream society and devote my life to poring through the ancient tomes (the more ancient the better) in search of the one true ideology." This is the same mindset as that of the wandering hippie, a mindset which (I claim) is more persistent and fundamental to one's character than any particular ideology which one may adopt.
I think this is uncharitable. I you look at the examples of tradlarping today, you see people who are specifically unsatisfied with some aspects of modernity (such as the destruction of marriage) and are trying to bring it back by manifesting living in a 50s magazine ad for vaccum cleaners.
It's cargo culting a lot more than it is blindly worshiping the dead.
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