Re-thinking ‘tradition’ and community development practice: integrating Derrida's ‘trace’ and Peile's ‘creative synthesis’ into a reconceptualising of ‘traditions’ and community development practice

Abstract

This paper examines and critiques the notion of ‘tradition’ within community development literature. Appreciatively, the paper presents a typology of how the community development literature uses the notion of tradition—as geographically-defined, methodologically-oriented and intellectually-rooted practice; and also discusses the functions of tradition as ‘inspiration’ for community work practice. Critically, the paper discusses the limits of the concept, offering a cautionary note to the potential pitfalls of a focus on tradition. It proposes Derrida's ‘trace’ to moderate tradition as ‘stagnation of practice’. Furthermore, Peile's ‘creative synthesis’ is discussed to show how ‘parts’ of, or traces of different traditions can be appraised, modified and synthesised, through a creative process, into a new ‘whole’ which appears different to the sources of its constituent parts. Finally, the paper discusses the findings of a small research project that investigates the multiple ways ‘tradition’ is used or made sense of, by a small cohort of experienced community development workers within Brisbane, Australia.