Vernacular Culture Research Articles

A Pathological Diagnostic Method for Traditional Brick-Masonry Dwellings: A Case Study in Guangfu Ancient City

Many regions of the world have traditional dwellings, which not only represent the main form of residential architecture, but also carry the local vernacular culture, display the region’s unique architectural style, materials and technology, and have important historical and cultural value. Due to environmental factors, traditional dwellings often suffer from architectural damage that threatens the stability of their structure and affects their esthetics value, resulting in a significant number of abandoned and demolished houses. In order to scientifically and effectively solve the damage problems of traditional dwellings, based on the theory of architectural pathology, the following diagnostic method for damage manifestation and the characteristics of traditional houses is proposed: “Architectural Pathology Appraisal–Pathological Environment Analysis–Mechanical Properties Testings”. The traditional dwellings in the ancient city of Guangfu were used as a case study for the practical application of the methodology for analyzing the main types and causes of the damage of the dwellings by examining the damage information of the dwellings, collecting the environmental data of the damaged walls, and testing the mechanical properties of the damaged walls. The results show that the main damage type in the ancient city dwellings of Guangfu is dampness damage, with corrosion deterioration, wall alkali flooding, and the moisture infiltration phenomenon as the manifested symptoms, and the damage is mainly concentrated in the lower part of the wall. In addition, the humidity and moisture content in the lower part of the wall is higher than that in the upper part of the wall, and the compressive strength of the damaged part of the wall is lower than that of the undamaged part. The humid environment of the old town contributed significantly to the destruction of the dwellings, and water intrusion led to a reduction in the strength of the dwellings’ bricks. Through the diagnostic method of building pathology, the causes of Guangfu dwellings’ damage are identified, and scientific and targeted damage intervention suggestions are made. This is expected to provide guidance for the treatment and prevention of building pathology in the ancient city of Guangfu and serve as a reference for the diagnosis and treatment of pathology in traditional dwellings in other areas.

Moving From Vernacular Culture to Urban Culture: Evolution of Batik Culture in Indonesia

Batik has initially been a practice among the ordinary people, having been introduced to Jakarta during the Dutch rule. It has evolved from a vernacular product to a symbol of urban culture and national identity, pursuant to independence of Indonesia. It has acquired an association with the political and cultural activities linked to Jakarta's role as the national government center and has reached a position of national signficance. This study examines the significant elements and the effects of batik in the development of the urban culture of Indonesia. It employed interviews as primary data sources to gather information from batik owners and craftsmen, museums, collectors, institutions, and decision-makers regarding local culture and its contemporary significance. Secondary data was compiled from reference sources using an interdisciplinary historical approach in order to reconstruct the historical development of Batik in Indonesia. It is concluded that the roots of the batik tradition in Jakarta have arisen from the immigrant vernacular communities. Numerous political, economic and cultural events have produced the setting for its growth to form the current urban cultural identity having become a fashionable cloth of national significance even symbolizing the national identity of Indonesia.

Engaging Vernacularity and Identity Politics of Public Spaces to Promote Cultural Tourism: Art Festivals in Bandung, Indonesia

Public space has a vital role in defining the politics of identity. Art festivals in public spaces can increase the function of public spaces to negotiate cultural identity, characterized by vernacularity, and simultaneously use various local symbols and tourist attractions. This research discusses how art festivals in public spaces become a means for reconstructing cultural identity and promoting cultural tourism in Bandung City, Indonesia. This research employs qualitative research methods. Data collection is carried out through a literature study and field research using various approaches, including observations, interviews, and Focus Group Discussions with relevant stakeholders during JulyAugust 2023. Findings show that art festivals become a space where the politics of culture and cultural tourism meet different interests. At the same time, government policies appear to promote the preservation of vernacular culture and local traditions in order to improve tourism attractions. The paper concludes that the festivals serve as a significant place for cultural commodification, even if their primary goals are to celebrate cultural identity.

Ralph Ellison, Democracy, and American Vernacular Culture

ABSTRACT This review essay examines In the Shadow of Invisibility: Ralph Ellison and the Promise of American Democracy (2022), by Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr. Eschewing the more expressly political approaches taken by recent Ellison scholars, Bland shows how Ellison mines the resources of vernacular traditions—far more than those of politics or ideology—to explore the formation of national culture. This was true, according to Bland’s first chapter, even during Ellison’s leftist years of literary apprenticeship. Subsequent chapters take up Ellison’s continued engagements with democracy and vernacular culture in his writings on jazz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Black Arts movement, as well as in his never-completed second novel.

War Travels: The Logistics of Vietnam War Militourism

This article explores the everyday entanglements of militarism and tourism that helped sustain soldiering life during the Vietnam War. Free world soldiers in Vietnam were entitled to take between five and seven days of leave in rest and recuperation (R&R) sites located within the war zone and across the Pacific more generally. This article places the literature on militourism in conversation with close readings of archival sources to show how imperial soldier-tourists used trans-Pacific infrastructures of military R&R in a diversity of ways. Militourists in colonized cities such as Manila and Hong Kong often enacted heteronormative fantasies of leisure, seeking out intimate and predatory relationships with local women. The U.S. military also valued R&R as a mechanism for reuniting soldiers with their families, however, and transformed Honolulu into a site for hosting such forms of leave. When considered together, these different forms of militourism emphasize how trans-Pacific R&R infrastructures served simultaneously as conduits of gendered violence, terrains of racial management, and objects of political struggle. What this article offers, then, is a more complex understanding of militourism, one that reclaims vernacular cultures of travel from militaries, markets, and empires, and repurposes them to further the urgent work of abolition, decolonization, and demilitarization.

Li Ziqi's Chinese Idyllic Dream—Analysis of the Symbolic Characteristics of Vernacular Culture from Semiotic Theory

Li Ziqi's Chinese Idyllic Dream—Analysis of the Symbolic Characteristics of Vernacular Culture from Semiotic Theory

Coincidental values of responding to climate in contemporary Chinese architectural design

ABSTRACT Relying solely on equipment and uncritical adoptions of technological strategies to control climate conditions can result in problems of the detachment of climate from the architectural design process, monotonous forms and lack of regional characteristics. To address these problems that may arise in contemporary China, research on the coincidental values generated with the climate-responsive operations including expressions of aesthetics, culture, emotions, regional characteristic is of great significance. The paper examines coincidental values of responding to climate by analyzing architects’ text descriptions of 263 design works from the year 2000 to 2021. The results provide a framework of 27 types of coincidental values as references for climate-responsive architectural designs. Mechanisms of creating coincidental values and subtle regional characteristics are revealed through analyses of these 27 types. Based on these findings, the paper proposes suggestions for contemporary Chinese climate-responsive designs, calling for more various cultural expressions beyond traditional or vernacular cultures, more interactions with positive aspects of climate, and broader range of the compromise between human behaviors and climate conditions.

Tone Kralj’s religious art in the Littoral

In the period between the interwar years and several decades after the Second World War, Tone Kralj’s religious artworks greatly transformed the interiors of churches in the Littoral, as it was delineated during the Second World War, including four churches in the Ilirska Bistrica area, specifically, in Prem, Ilirska Bistrica, and Podgraje. While continuously imbuing his works for the said churches with notes of Slovenian vernacular culture, in a few scenes the painter also expressed his direct criticism of the occupier’s violence against the Slovenian people. Kralj’s postwar paintings that addressed the same topic played an important role in preserving the memory of wartime events that unfolded on Slovenian soil.

Who Is They?

At the heart of this project is an intergenerational dialogue, an elliptical tracing of languages and communities in their acts of reclaiming and renaming. In this dialogue the authors ask how does a linguistic archive of Black queer/trans culture, in particular the grammars of they, kiki/Ky-Ky, and fem and stud travel within and shape language and expressive culture? If the Black queer and Black vernacular overlap, how do we look to the creative influences of Black queer and Black trans historical symmetries and exchanges? Reexamining historical continuities and shared socialities of Black gender genealogies, the authors refuse the scholarly impetus to discover “new” nonbinary and transgender frontiers when Black working-class vernacular culture has always structured and enabled radical linguistic expression and gendered possibilities. Writing together, the authors transfigure intergenerational knowledges into a critical theory repositioning the terms of the debate and enabling possibilities for connections where there have only been closures. Talking Black to talk back to this current moment of ever-expanding gender narratives, the authors look toward Black epistemologies conveniently forgotten in current discourses of pluralized gender subjectivities.

TURKMEN VERNACULAR MUSIC CULTURE AS A SUBJECT MATTER OF THE ALMANAC “AYDING-GYUNLER”

The paper considers the representation of Turkmen music culture in the Soviet almanac “Ayding-Gyunler” (1934) and aims to recognize the patterns of including vernacular culture into the Soviet literary field. The analysis of the texts’ content and the archival sources, including unpublished ones, sheds a light on the processes of incorporation of the so-called “national” culture into the Soviet context, such as declared decolonization and an attempt to “understand the new Turkmenistan”. The analysis is put into historical and cultural perspective of recognizing the typical Turkmen traits of the music culture in the texts of the almanac. Th e archival sources include unpublished notes on the Turkmen folklore, which is considered as one of the sources of the writers’ work. Th e texts of the almanac represent the view of the Europeans –members of the writers’ brigade who provided materials for the almanac. The poem by Turkmen author Durdy Klych is strongly connected with vernacular culture, but being put into the context of the almanac, it gains a new use for the aims of the Soviet literature. The view of the Turkmen culture in the almanac remains oriental, which dissonates with the proclaimed “deexotization” of the Soviet policy. However, further investigation into the next almanac “Turkmenistan” should be made. It is probable that the integration continued and the view of the writers changed according to the contemporary Soviet policy.

Assessing the Impact of Rural Short Videos on the Transmission of Vernacular Culture in the Age of We-Media

The short video industry has overgrown due to the digital transformation of media communication. The dissemination of short videos has led to the "two-way communication" of rural regional culture in the state and abroad. Many scholars have conducted in-depth studies on short video dissemination and discourse expression. On the basis of these studies, this paper takes Xi Jinping's important statement on the development of media integration and the construction of regional culture as the core point. This paper mainly adopts the literature analysis method. The study shows that rural short videos, as the leading force in the era of We-Media, connect local culture and local specialties through the Internet and contribute to the revitalization of the countryside in the fields of culture and economy. At the same time, media reality interacts with social reality through short rural videos, which perpetuates the rural memory of the public. The research suggests that short video creators should improve their own quality and optimize short video content. Creators should also pay attention to the use of expressions in line with the norms of public discourse in short videos, so as to achieve a positive interaction between media reality and social reality.

Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making

Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making

Native Craft Study at University Level as a Tool for Maintaining Craft Heritage: The Example of the University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy, Estonia

AbstractThe present paper describes the native craft education and research carried out at the University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy in Estonia. ‘Native crafts’ are understood as creative technical and cultural practices, applications, and developments that are based on traditional local crafting techniques, materials, design principles, and skills. The mission of the academy is to represent the values that reinforce and re-establish local and national traditions and identities through active participation in the cultural process. Its courses, which were launched in 1994, have been developed to cover the majority of the traditional crafting techniques, skills, and materials that are used throughout Estonia. By means of these courses, the academy has assumed responsibility for teaching, preserving, and integrating Estonian vernacular culture and skills. It is the only institution in Estonia advancing the practice-based research and popularization of Estonian traditional costumes, jewelry, and construction, for example, at the level of higher education. The present paper provides an overview of the BA and MA program in native crafts and their main developmental trends. It also offers a more detailed overview of costume studies as part of the textile program. It covers the history, techniques, and regional peculiarities of traditional costumes, as well as the innovative ways in which traditional materials, patterns, and ornaments can be used in modern fashion.

Toward a Vernacular Globalectics: “Minor” Illustrations from South India

The protean concept of the Global South, now gaining traction in both academic and political imaginaries, is inflected by multiple significations. Key among those significations is the insight that the Global South is a radical epistemological reorientation, a multilocal context or location to speak from or look at and into the world. Subsequently, this essay mobilizes the concept of the Global South in order to look at the world from the standpoint of vernacular literary cultures produced by Muslims in the South Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's idea of the “globalectical imagination,” I argue that vernacular literary cultures from the Global South allow us to imagine and think about the world in refreshing and powerful ways that usually get muted or short-changed within the paradigms set by the Euro-American normativity. Focusing, by way of illustration, on the greatly underexplored multilingual Tamil and Arabi Malayalam literary texts venerating the Prophet Muhammad, my essay will shed light on how the vernacular presents us with a “glocal” perspective: even as the vernacular culture grounds itself firmly in the local, it invariably transcends the local specificities in order to forge translocal, transregional, transnational and global connections and affiliations. The essay thus ventures a “vernacular globalectics” in the Global South with which to see the world and its various literatures contextually and relationally rather than unilocally and exclusively as is often the case in the regnant models for literary study in our times, including the meta-category of “world literature.”

Review: The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa

Review: <i>The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa</i>

Sciorra, Joseph, ed. Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives. Fordham UP: New York, 2011.

Sciorra, Joseph, ed. Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives. Fordham UP: New York, 2011.

NEW SINCERITY IN POST-POSTMODERN ART

This article explores an issue of New Sincerity in post-postmodern context, in post-postmodern culture uppermost and in literature in the first instance. The research considers post-postmodern New Sincerity in comparison with postmodern apathy, redundant intellectualization and quotation, etc. In such a case New Sincerity is closely related to post-postmodern genuineness, authenticity, honesty, veracity, earnest and seriousness. Postmodern ironical eclecticism as a kind of deconstruction develops in reconstructive post-postmodern non- and metafiction sincerity. Therefore, New Sincerity as a sensitivity appears both as a general cultural atmosphere and a certain kind of philosophy with its peculiar aesthetics, ethics, ontology, etc. For example, the category of beauty realizes in post-postmodern aesthetics in a connection with a more sincere perception and feeling of art and nature. The article investigates the differences between New Sincerity and postirony and New Sincerity turns out to be not so much ironic as humorous. The exploration of New Sincerity takes place in its main part on the material of post-postmodern literature, which in the best way combines conceptualizing and perceptualizing. However, in its most actual manifestations, New Sincerity in connection with postirony appears at the intersection of theory, literature, movie, rock, network and mem-art, etc. In all cases, an appeal to vernacular culture allows for conveying a private experience. In such a context post-postmodern art become more sincere than postmodern one. Rude jokes or mundane activity, traumatic or banal contribute to the achievement of a greater degree of intimacy and love than overly straightforward tolerance. The reason for this is postironical supposition, that irony ironizes itself and became self-referential and hence therapeutical and joyful. Thus, New Sincerity appeals to the interconnection of seriousness and postironic humor, depth and superficies. In conclusion, the article stresses the significance of New Sincerity for post-postmodern aesthetics and ethics. With its help a possibility of sappy personal utterance and access to the Real, lost in the postmodern condition, appears again, renewed and enriched.

GRANICA DWÓCH TYPÓW KULTURY LUDOWEJ I DOMÓW WIEJSKICH W POBLIŻU SZCZECINA PRZED POŁOWĄ XIX WIEKU

This paper presents research findings on historical vernacular half-timbered architecture. The study covered the general area of Szczecin and extended to older-generation buildings constructed before the mid-nineteenth century. Ethnological maps from the first half of the twentieth century that depicted the border of two large areas with differing vernacular culture characteristics served as a basis for discussion. This difference concerned not only the forms of houses, but most importantly manifestations of folk culture. A description of the historical fishing village of Mścięcino, located between Szczecin and Police, proved crucial to the investigation. The research showed that there had been attempts to create recreational villages in the vicinity of Szczecin at the turn of the twentieth century.

Aljamiado retellings of the Hebrew Bible

Stories from the Hebrew Bible were popular among the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Beginning in the fourteenth century, Muslims and Moriscos retold these stories in Aljamiado texts in Spanish or Aragonese written in Arabic characters. These fictionalised retellings drew on vernacular language and literary forms common to Christians and Muslims, and are a lens through which to study the cultural life of late Spanish Islam in its negotiation with the dominant Christian culture. The vernacular language and culture shared by Moriscos and Christians was a powerful medium for creating fictional Biblical storyworlds, mental models of the reality represented by the Biblical narratives. These retellings both exalt Islamic beliefs, traditions, rituals, and doctrines in the face of social marginalization and persecution, while at the same time validating their experience as speakers of Spanish and Aragonese and as participants in a vernacular culture shared between Moriscos and Christians.

From Folk Art to Abstraction: Ukrainian Embroidery as a Medium of Avant-Garde Experimentation

The article examines the correlation between the stylistic iconography of traditional Ukrainian embroideries and the experiments in modernist painting that led to the emergence of abstraction, Suprematism in particular. The focus is made on the artistic output of the embroidery workshops in the villages of Verbivka and Skoptsi, both located on the territory of present-day Ukraine, in the early 1910s. These studios, led by Natalia Davydova and Alexandra Exter, and Yevheniia Prybylska, respectively, engaged ‘leftist’ artists and local artisans to produce a new type of embroidery, relinquishing the mere stylization characteristic of other kustar studios in the Russian Empire. While scholars in Ukraine have undertaken extensive research to highlight the centrality of the Ukrainian context in progressive artists’ engagement with folk embroidery on the territory of the Russian Empire, internationally this phenomenon is still largely viewed under the generalized imperialist term of the ‘Russian avant-garde’. Using existing scholarship as the foundation, the present article seeks to redress this misconception. It also recognizes the long overdue need to situate the handicrafts revival movement in Ukraine within the broader framework of the engagement with vernacular culture by the nationally minded intelligentsia in East-Central Europe, while contrasting it with similar undertakings in Russia proper.