Describing cooperative participation in small-scale, semi-intimate networks of relations among people, eludes the objective gaze. Tradition, imagined as some knowledge or skill that flows freely through generations, becomes suspect when it becomes self-aware. Both are concepts that served without question for many years; now both are recognized for their potential to conceal as much information as they convey. Who compose the collective termed a and what does membership in this kind of group entail? How does the label community inform and frame the activities of a group and its members? defines a tradition, and can these criteria even be observed and evaluated? If we call something traditional, does that in effect make it so? These crucially important questions will never be simply answered, and this article makes no attempt to do so. My aim here is to explore the very mechanisms by which and tradition come to exist and have meaning for people who participate in activities that they themselves deem community-based and traditional. In this article, I will explore the ways these two concepts are linked through discourse and practice and how they function, in this context, as interdependent components in the articulation of an alternative social model. CONTESTED TRADITION Among the dance groups competing in the championship for clog at the 1975 annual Fiddlers' Grove Ole Time Fiddlers and Bluegrass Festival in Union Grove, North Carolina, were three clogging teams from area college towns: the Green Grass Cloggers from Greenville, North Carolina, the Apple Chill Cloggers from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the Hoorah Cloggers from Blacksburg, Virginia. These three groups, made up of free-spirited, college-aged young people, danced in a style completely unlike either of the two most prevalent competition styles: precision clogging and freestyle clogging. The originators of this new style, the Green Grass Cloggers, had formed four years earlier and had competed at Fiddlers' Grove several times before. In two of the previous four contests, the Green Grass Cloggers had won first place for their eye-catching and energetic performance, which at that time earned them the title World Champions of Clogging. This year, however, the criteria for judging the competition had been changed, and the Green Grass style was not favored by the new rules. When the winners were announced, the Green Grass Cloggers were no longer at the top of the list, and the Hoorah Cloggers were dismayed to find out that their group was in last place. Thinking they had performed well, several members of the Blacksburg group asked a contest official why they had scored so poorly. What you're doing, they were told, is not Southern Appalachian traditional-style clogging.1 Phil Loner recalls that the group was unsatisfied by this explanation: I wasn't there for that conversation, actually... it was two other dancers, they had the conversation directly, and then they came back and reported to us, and then we all got ruffled, you know. What do you mean, we're not Southern Appalachian cloggers? Here we are in the South, in the Appalachians, dancing clogging, what's not to be about it? (Loner, interview) Today, twenty-five years later, the Hoorahs are still active in Blacksburg, continuing to perform in the same style, and even perform some of the same routines that they brought with them to Fiddlers' Grove that year. Their performances are frequently billed as Appalachian dance, and while they no longer participate in clogging competitions, there appears to be a lot less controversy in applying the label traditional to this dance than there was at Fiddlers Grove in 1975. is tradition, and where does it come from? In the past, scholars have understood tradition as a body of material, the process by which this material changes hands, or, more broadly, as a term that encompasses the entire system of people, practice, and process-perhaps a synonym for culture. …