[8] Traditional societies have been seen as characterised by powerful collective memories sanctioned by ritual, and with social guardians ensuring continuity of communal practices.
[13] The invention of farming some 10,000 years ago led to the development of agrarian societies, whether nomadic or peasant, the latter in particular almost always dominated by a strong sense of traditionalism.
Homeric Greece was a society marked by powerful kinship bonds, fixed status and rigidly defined social expectations;[15] with the classical polis, however, though festivals, in M. I. Finley's words, still "recreated for their audiences the unbroken web of all life, stretching back over generations of men to the gods",[16] new and more complex voluntary forms of social and public life balanced traditional society in a new equilibrium.
[17] Medieval Europe was an intensely local society of self-perpetuating peasant households,[18] living within a slow moving culture dominated by customary law and by respect for ancient authority[19] and pervaded with an ahistorical political mentality focused upon the concepts of experience, usage, and law-as-custom.
[21] Jameson, however, has seen as a defining feature of postmodernism the global elimination of residual, 'traditional' enclaves, giving it its one-dimensional, temporal nature that is no longer offset by living examples of the past alongside the new.