Family traditions

Family tradition, also called Family culture, is defined as an aggregate of attitudes, ideas and ideals, and environment, which a person inherits from his/her parents and ancestors.

The study of Family tradition and personality has attracted attention of social scientists. Ernest W. Burgess, Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, has defined the term in these words:

“Whatever its biological inheritance from its parents and other ancestors, the child receives also from them a heritage of attitudes, sentiments, and ideals which may be termed the family tradition, or the family culture”.

Sometimes, family traditions are associated with practices and beliefs which are handed over from one generation to the next generation, and during this process of transmission such family traditions also acquire an aura of spirituality. Transmission of any set of such family traditions, acquiring spiritual significance, is largely an intuitive phenomenon, and the flow of family traditions continue without any intention, and the same continue to move on from one generation to the next generation. Family traditions for most of the families remain largely confined within the family members, but some times, non-family members may also get associated with particular family's family traditions.

Halbwachs in his book On Collective Memory discusses how memories of the family function. He states that “In addition to regulations that are common to a whole society, there existing customs and modes of thinking with each particular family that equally impose — and even more forcibly — their form on the opinions and feelings of their members... Similarly, in the most traditional societies of today, each family has its proper mentality, its memories which it alone commemorates, and its secrets that are revealed only to its members. But these memories, as in the religious traditions of the family of antiquity, consist not only of a series of individual images of the past. They are at the same time models, examples, and elements of teaching. They express the general attitude of the group; they not only reproduce its history but also define its nature and its qualities and weaknesses” -[1]

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