Vernacular Life Research Articles

Rings of power: a legal history of the engagement ring in early twentieth-century Australia

This article explores the gendered regulation of courtship by providing a legal history of the engagement ring across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing the relationship between love, law, material culture and gender into dialogue, I use actions for breach of promise of marriage to trace the life path of the ring from the private world of romance to the moral theatre of law, examining how the ring functioned as tangible proof of contract, as a constraint on women’s sexuality, as a legitimation of their sexual identities, and as compensation for economic losses suffered in consequences of a broken engagement. Rather than a top-down analysis of how the state orders intimate life, this is a study of the vernacular life of law: of why people began imbuing rings with legal significance and how courts came to accept their reasoning.

Mapping Utopia as an Enclosed Renaissance Garden

ABSTRACT This article presents previous attempts to map Utopia, a fictional island in the book Utopia by Thomas More, and proposes another possibility, based on the assumption that Utopia is an enclosed garden on an artificial island that is not flat, but has piedmont slopes of 2.5:1. Our mapping experiment is founded on the Renaissance analogy between the domestication of wild nature, and the civilization of the human beings in More’s enclosed garden; and on the anecdotal similarities between the Inca Empire and Utopia. This approach is not only consistent with the island’s dimensional specifications, which have hampered previous mapping attempts due to their mathematical incompatibility, but it also addresses the educative capacity of utopian life not considered by previous mapping efforts. Utopia, as a result, is to be understood as a series of performative spatial arrangements where the physical and geographical specifications would inform the vernacular life of its inhabitants in the direction of self-enhancement.

Korsakow Film Workshop

Based on the premise that Korsakow configurations are not merely another form of interactive film, we will explore the entanglement of the epistemological and ontological dimension of this unorthodox manifestation of digital media practices based on database logic and opaque algorithmic editing. This workshop explores non-linear thinking, co-creative, polyphonic filmmaking and pluri-perspective self-reflection to those interested in pushing further the boundaries of linear filmmaking. The goal of this workshop is to re-think processes of interactive filmmaking as well as notions of interactive tools in their ‘toolness,’ and methods concerning their applicability as lenses through which we reflect on the work of others and our work. Though we will collaboratively create an interactive Korsakow film, the focus of this workshop primarily lies in the process rather than a product. No prior knowledge nor specific technical skills are required as one of the core realizations will be that these practices can be integrated into vernacular life. The only digital device participants will need is their smartphone for shooting the clips.

See finish! Scunnered!! A vernacular critique of hierarchies of knowledge in marketing

Our paper presents a critique of how a totalising consumer voice predominates, as does a globalised marketing knowledge. We argue that it is time to release ideas from the marginalised, the unhinged and the peripheral. We feature a fictional dialogue between two characters using vernacular language: Ọmọ Naija, a Pidgin-speaking Yorùbá woman from Nigeria, and Rab, a Glasgow Patter-speaking man from Scotland. The conversation traverses two important areas of critique regarding hierarchies of knowledge in marketing: (1) decolonisation and (2) marginalisation of the vernacular. Our characters draw upon ancient and contemporary thinkers, writers and cultural icons to substantiate their critiques. Our analysis foregrounds how hierarchies of knowledge in marketing serve academic imperialism, an untranslatability of vernacular life and ignore the terroir of everyday existences.

Vernacular design as visual practice of urban space organization

Article discusses specific status of the vernacular design in the visual style of the modern Ukrainian city, where indigenous dwellers coexist with those who came recently from the country. The vernacular regions in Ukrainian cities are analyzed as complex, eclectic and grass-roots. The vernacular design is understood within the complex cultural environment, where different traditions and cultural identities coexist. The terms "vernacular life", "vernacular landscape" are explicated. The vernacular landscape is interpreted in the context of the everyday human activities brought into the public urban spaces. The crucial characteristic (amateur, brutal, trying to be visible and being invisible, economical, tactical, irrational, anachronistic) and the main principles (constraint, thrift, durability, commonness) of the vernacular design are studied within the interpretive context of urban culture collective identity.

High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture

High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture

“A silence that only they understand”: Amiri Baraka and the Silent Vernacular of The Dead Lecturer

The present essay grows out of an engagement with a single line from Amiri Baraka’s 1964 book, The Dead Lecturer. In the poem “Rhythm and Blues,” Baraka writes, “The people of my life / caressed with a silence that only they understand.” The line appears amid a long improvisation on the iconography of black vernacular life. In the middle of this cacophony of frantic chant and scream, Baraka posits silence, and not speech, as the condition of black cultural distinctiveness. In doing so, he presents a vision of black vernacular culture that does not privilege orality and expression but instead deems silence to be essential in the construction of a black commonplace. Baraka posits three interrelated forms of black silence: the silence of oppression, the silence of resistance, and the silence of social optimism. In the perceived absence of expression, the poems from The Dead Lecturer communicate a history of systematic violence, of fugitive withholding, and of communal goodwill. To borrow a phrase from poet and critic Fred Moten, they articulate “an intimacy given most emphatically, and erotically, in a moment of something that, for lack of a better word, we call ‘silence.’”

The Passion in English: Meditations on the Life of Christ in Michigan State University Library MS 1

This article examines English pre-reformation literary representations of the life and Passion of Christ. Central to this genre of writing is the Pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition of meditative writing; a pan-European literary phenomenon, whose influence extended into preaching, decorative arts, dramatic performance, and other areas. My focus is on a text much overlooked by modern commentators, the Middle English meditation on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ preserved uniquely in Michigan State University Library MS 1. Dating probably to the mid-fifteenth century, this text translates and adapts selected chapters from the key pseudo-Bonaventuran text, the Meditationes vitae Christi. I examine processes of textual translation and adaptation in this vernacular life of Christ, providing extensive comparison between the English adaptation and its Latin source. The picture that emerges from such analysis is of an English adaptation that provides substantial addition to the Latin in its attempt to enflame and guide pious sensibilities. Particularly notable is a sequence of sustained alliterative compositions, which have no parallel elsewhere in the pseudo-Bonaventuran corpus, and which show the original approach of an English writer to the late-medieval religious imperative towards compassion and profound empathy with Christ and his mother. I conclude by examining the close textual links between the text in the Michigan SU manuscript and another Middle English Passion treatise better known to scholarship, the Privity of the Passion of c. 1400.

Folklore, Survivals, and the Neo-Archaic

This article explores three terms of reference connected to late-nineteenthcentury ethnographies of British vernacular life—folklore, survivals in culture, and the neo-archaic. These descriptive vocabularies came to characterize homeland material culture and each expression became entrenched in museumbased discourse. The Folklore Society (FLS) made an abortive attempt to found an independent Museum of Folklore, in anticipation of which they deposited objects in the Museum of General and Local Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge. Similar artifacts were acquired by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford where, under the auspices of Edward Burnett Tylor, they were characterized as survivals from an earlier age. Similarly, Arthur Mitchell donated neo-archaic finds to the collections of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, arguing that such items exemplified the material resonance of the past in the present. This paper examines the emergence, impact, and agency of these interlinking terminologies, addressing their formative role in museological practice.

The Political Instrumentality of Heritage: The Swedish Welfare State and the National Heritage Board

The rapid development of Sweden's heritage institutions at the start of the twentieth century—particularly the establishment of the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieambetet) in 1938—is often described as a success story, especially in relation to the expansion of the organization. This article discusses that claim and qualifies it, noting the complex social relationships and political tensions that shaped Swedish preservation institutions. Socially, the Swedish notion of heritage emerged out of a combination of two strands: a folk preservation movement and an academically institutionalized antiquarian tradition led by scientifically trained scholars. The former had emerged as a reaction against the loss of traditional vernacular life and values caused by modernization, while the latter was a continuation of the historicism that had dominated nationalist institutions since the nineteenth century. The new National Heritage Board brought together these two strands by incorporating provincial museums originally developed by the folk movement into a broad, nationally administered network controlled by scholars. The article traces the development of the National Heritage Board and the subsequent challenges to it during the Folkhem period (from the 1930s to the 1970s), the formative decades of the Social Democratic Party's welfare s tate.

The Vernacular Life of the Street: Ratsitatanina and Indian Ocean Créolité1

The record of an alleged conspiracy of Madagascar-born slaves and apprentices in Mauritius during 1822 offers a useful vantage onto the vernacular life of the street in the colonial Mascarene islands of the western Indian Ocean. This article examines details of the alleged conspiracy to propose that Ratsitatanina, the accused ringleader, neither planned nor participated in a servile revolt. A close reading of the trial record, however, suggests that the Malagasy language was widely spoken in Mauritius in 1822 and that Malagasy speakers maintained communities in Mascarene diaspora through frequent encounters and vernacular exchanges along urban byways. Together with colonial censuses, these documents challenge scholars to rethink the timing and nature of creolisation in the French slave islands of the western Indian Ocean. Multilingualism and cultural heterogeneity were more salient features of colonial human landscapes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than commonly admitted in prevalent models of Indian Ocean créolité. This article proposes a dynamic model of creolisation for the Indian Ocean islands that emphasises the cultural and linguistic agility of subaltern colonial populations.

The Necessary Angel Thomas Moore .Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship. New York, HarperCollins, 1994.

(1994). The Necessary Angel. The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 71-78.