As the twentieth century draws to a close, we are learning to see the extent to which accounts and definitions of cultures are influenced by human biases and purposes, benevolent in what they include, incorporate, and validate, less so in what they exclude and demote. A number of recent studies have argued openly acknowledged their culture's hybrid past, nineteenth-century European commentators habitually passed over these acknowledgments without comment.
Another example is the use of "tradition" to determine national identity. Images of European authority over other cultures were shaped and reinforced during the nineteenth century, through the manufacture and reinterpretation of "rituals, ceremonies, and traditions". At a time when many of the institutions that had helped maintain imperial societies were beginning as if her rule were not mainly a matter of recent edict but of age-old custom.
Similar constructions have also been made by native cultures about their precolonial past, as in the case of Algeria during its war of independence from France, when decolonization encouraged Algerians to create idealized images of what they believed their culture to have been prior to French occupation. This strategy is at work of independence elsewhere, giving their adherents something to revive and admire.
Though for the most part colonized societies have won their independence, in many cultures the imperial attitudes of uniqueness and superiority underlying colonial conquest remain. There is in all nationally defined cultures an aspiration to sovereignty and dominance that expresses itself in definitions of cultural identity. At the same time, paradoxically, we from being unitary, monolithic, or autonomous, cultures actually include more "foreign" elements than they consciously exclude.
What this question is testing
Anticipate
This is a Meaning in Context question. Pay attention to the quotation marks around "traditional." Why are they there? The author is using them to flag that the word doesn't really apply.
The surrounding sentences make this clear: the European elites needed to project their power backward in time to make it seem legitimate. Victoria's rule was a recent edict, but they dressed it up "as if" it were age-old custom. So calling the jamborees "traditional" is sarcastic — the whole point of the word in scare quotes is to mark that this is a manufactured legitimacy, not a real one.
Goal
Find the answer that captures the fake-legitimacy meaning. Common traps:
Answers that take "traditional" at face value — revival of real custom, real native culture
Answers that say it shows imperial dominance — getting close, but missing the legitimacy point
Answers that treat it as a real cultural blend
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