This cluster focuses on integrating courses, research, and policies related to issues of tradition and cultural development.

This cluster understands tradition as a set of practices specifically aimed at symbolic and moral purposes, associated with ideal practices of the past that are continuously carried out by a community, whether these practices are historical facts or what is believed by their practitioners in relation to power or interactions with different communities.

This cluster responds to how tradition is managed by the state, commercialized in the market economy, and debated within cultural politics. The cluster will review these matters by critically researching and deeply engaging with related policy concepts such as cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible), indigeneity, authenticity, and the regulation of the relationship between religion and tradition as implemented by the state, transnational organizations, and communities.

Issues regarding politics and agency in the process of inheriting tradition, ownership and authenticity, and the involvement of local communities—including conflicts that arise as an extension of these debates—are among the subjects to be explored. The cluster’s position is to serve as a hub for productive debates regarding inclusive tradition from cross-perspectives, and to mainstream the contributions and perspectives of communities marginalized by various parties in reshaping, developing, and modifying tradition.

• Religion and Local Beliefs.
• Intangible Cultural Heritage
• Tangible Cultural Heritage
• Indigenous Peoples (Indigeneity, Identity, Movements)
• Traditional Medicine.
• Folklore.
• Traditional Games.
• Social life of material culture.
• Cultural Policy.
• Education (enculturation, cultural transmission)
• Ritual.
• Cultural Dynamics (Invented tradition, history)
• Colonial Influence on Tradition.
• Written Traditions.
• Ethnicity (identity, ethnogenesis, inter-ethnic relations)
• Traditional Arts.
• Tradition, Modernization, and Globalization.
• Social and Cultural Disruption.