Biography
Albert Elias Robertson is a Dominican friar based in Cambridge where is assistant Catholic chaplain to the University of Cambridge and a doctoral student in Divinity at Emmanuel College Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Catherine Pickstock. After initial studies in anthropology at the London School of Economics and material anthropology and museum ethnography at the University of Oxford, Albert become a Dominican friar and completed his philosophical and theological formation at Blackfriars, Oxford, the study house of the British Dominicans.
Paper Abstract
Tradition, broadly defined, is body of knowledge accumulated over a long period of time which finds expression in customary behaviours associated with particular locations; in other words, the cultural roots which form a person in a particular location. The post-Enlightenment mentality pitted progress against tradition, seeing tradition as something which holds back, being based on authority rather than on scientific or rational deduction or proof. In order to advance a society, the march of progress strips back the various strata of customary behaviour and traditional knowledge, replacing them with a common uniformity which is, essentially, rootless. This is seen in countless situations around the world, from the centralisation of authority in nation states to the imposition of mechanisms of control in colonial governments, all of which is designed to uproot local forms of life. A view typical of this approach is seen in the writing of Le Corbusier who, speaking of his own architectural vision, described the world as a charnel-house, strewn with the detritus of dead epochs. Such junk — as he himself described it — had to be cleared away for his towers of clear crystal glass. Somehow we reach for the skies, but which out the roots we need to keep the structures from falling. Our modern utopias collapse into dystopias, suggesting that we need what Kenneth Olwig described as a “topian” concept of progress, which allows us to return and regenerate the places that give us sustenance. Tradition is a contested concept: sometimes oppressive, sometimes liberating. Offering a theological engagement with the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold, my paper asks how tradition, rooted in a particular place, and that the disposition of wayfaring and practices of narrative at the heart of tradition, might prove a fruitful place of liberation and encounter in a world of increasing isolation.