On the problem of continuity: a theory of culture beyond invention

Anthropologists, in common with social theorists more generally, have often understood social life as an emergent phenomenon grounded in practices of creativity and improvisation. Where stasis and continuity feature, these are often presented as illusory manifestations of underlying processes of ‘invention’, or as external impositions upon otherwise creative and innovative actors. These approaches have helped to challenge the essentialisms that underlie the seeming self‐evidence of ideas such as ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. They foreground the hidden work that is needed to make things endure and the political stakes of presenting things as if they had always been that way. While building on this work, we argue that the tendency to see social practice as a fundamentally emergent and creative process has resulted in theoretical inattention to forms of action that are aimed at the achievement of stasis and continuity. Relatedly, we suggest that framing such actions as invention or creativity can fail to capture what is ethnographically at stake in practices oriented to the celebration of the pre‐existent and towards the preservation of what is already in place. While highlighting the paradoxically invisible work required to sustain what ‘already exists’, we seek to draw out a range of social practices characterized by the linked logics of non‐inventive agency and thoughtful inaction.