Vernacular Responses Research Articles

Everyday immigration ethics: Colombia, Venezuela and the case for vernacular response

ABSTRACT In the last decade, Venezuelans have faced a range of challenges such that by 2023, nearly 7.2 million have fled, the vast majority hosted within the region. One country particularly stands out: Colombia has accepted over 2.5 million. Colombia’s behaviour does not appear motivated by legal obligations or universal ethical principles; it is hard to make sense of in terms of international ethical and political theory. Rather, Colombian state and society make reference to mundane, localised concepts of friendship, fraternity and the reciprocity of a shared history. Such everyday ethics is generally ignored in existing debates. I argue that immigration ethics could helpfully begin from concrete, everyday ethical behaviour rather than idealisation and abstraction. Instead of initially asking what states and societies should do regarding immigration, we could ask what do they already do, why and how? This article therefore explores how Colombian politicians and civil society actors understood their welcoming actions through an awareness of entangled histories, reciprocity, friendship and solidarity: everyday, vernacular ways in which responsibility-taking is rationalised and practiced. My argument is not that Colombia’s actions are normatively right, or an enactment of immigration justice. Rather, these actions were ambivalent: the messy, pragmatic result of negotiating different, competing responsibilities, principles and emotions. The results were imperfect, heavily gendered, but also unprecedented. Those advocating greater societal responsibility for immigrants would perhaps do best to look beyond the global north, shun the universal and start from local activities founded in vernacular, everyday ethics.

Khadi Marigolds for the Martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh (India)

Folklorists have long studied the nature of ephemeralities in a range of vernacular responses to tragic events. This paper extends the scope of ephemeralities by arguing that the tangible representations, such as buildings and objects, are important anchors for socially reconstructing historical events. Focusing on the site of a cold-blooded genocide in India—Jallianwala Bagh—the present analysis transcends a predominant western frame of reference to highlight the imperativeness of preserving the trauma site, as it happened. The analysis reveals that a critical esthetic aspect of the site is the tangible absence of bodily ephemerality—an aspect that is intricately tied to martyrdom as opposed to victimhood. With the rise of transgressions that potentially rupture esthetics of memorial sites, it becomes essential to look for alternate tangible representations that transcend the spatial confines of the trauma sites. The quest ends with Khadi Marigolds that embody the essence of Jallianwala Bagh massacre and holds the key for perpetuating the memories of the martyrs for years to come in the service of “never again”.

Uncommemorated Sites of Genocide: Mass Graves, Pits, or Garbage Dumps? Vernacular Responses to the Holocaust in Poland

Abstract: Understanding the unique status of uncommemorated trauma sites requires questioning the practice of referring to such sites solely as "mass graves." Indeed, it is the fact that the people once thrown into the pits have never been buried that generates today's ambivalent memory of the past associated with a given place. The unburied—in grassroots perception—threaten social homeostasis. I compare the findings of anthropologists regarding burial practices with the knowledge provided today by forensic/conflict archaeologists and ethnographers, indicating the special status of sites containing unritualized bodies of victims. This more nuanced approach, differentiating "mass graves" from "burial pits" will allow for more complex readings of contemporary interactions with a site, exhibited by local "implicated" bystander communities. Eastern European Holocaust landscapes especially, may thus be open to renewed scrutiny.

A Warning/A Call: The Spectacle of (In)Visibility in the Vernacular Response to DEI-A Work

This short piece was originally conceptualized as a response and support of a young tenure-track faculty-of-color who was experiencing academic bullying and threat of recrimination for her unwavering work in DEI-A (diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism) in an academic unit that claims to support the work of decolonizing its curriculum. But also, a unit in which some seemingly resist personal challenge and the necessary self-work that differentially inconveniences majority students and faculty. The response of resistance becomes the vernacular of dis-ease that interrupts DEI-A work in a liberal economy. This commentary, which extends beyond the place and space of this encounter, speaks to what might be national tensions between the cultural sustainability of privilege and cultural transformation for social justice. This piece also evidences the importance of academic administrators being able to articulate and strengthen their own commitments to DEI-A, to support faculty in the collective struggle of our academic and political defensive labor for social justice. This recognizing that none of us are immune to the sting of critique in defense of our convictions and that of our university values.

Locating pro‐environmental vernacular practices of tourism

AbstractPro‐environmental vernacular practices are embodied, place‐specific, ordinary actions that are part of people's daily lives. They result in lower levels of resource consumption without necessarily being grounded in an explicit pro‐environmental agenda. A growing body of cultural geographical scholarship has explored a range of vernacular practices, predominantly among households in Western countries. This paper argues such capacities can be found in a more diverse array of cultural contexts, namely tourism. This is demonstrated by evaluating the literature on tourist practices and entering it into a dialog with the literature on pro‐environmental vernacular practices. The paper shows how tourism is an important site through which such pro‐environmental practices can emerge. Backpacking, nature tourism, foraging tourism, camping, and craft tourism can provide the knowledge and skills for living enjoyable low resource intensive lifestyles, and indicate how relations of hospitality may persist despite scarcity. The paper advances geographical knowledge in three areas. First, it expands and clarifies what the ‘vernacular’ actually constitutes. Second, it shows how a greater understanding of the vernacular beyond the household can advance cultural geographical scholarship on the environment. Third, it argues that a deeper engagement with practice theory would boost research in this area by connecting vernacular responses performed at the individual level with broader postcapitalist social movements.

"Everyone is becoming a forester": From state monopoly to participatory forest management in Sao Hill Forest, Tanzania, c.1990-2015

In 2000, Sao Hill Forest, the biggest state-owned plantation in Tanzania, was forced to adopt "community forest management" - a paradigm usually adopted in protecting only natural forests. We hope to contribute to the scholarship on forest management by using this unusual case study - taken from plantation forests. Research on community or participatory forest management has focused on natural forests - but plantations offer different issues to consider. We argue that the state was compelled to adopt, but also adapt to the model of community management in order to fit a neo-liberal donor context while, on a practical level, protecting it from local environmental hazards. To contextualise this historical case-study, we explain why Sao Hill stagnated and then examine the survival strategies adopted by the managers at the plantation. We then explore the relationship of the forest project with the surrounding communities, highlighting different local and vernacular responses to what came to be understood as "community forest management". We use this case study to examine this idiographic application of community resource management, in order to demonstrate the real-world use of environmental history in informing current policy decisions.

Editors’ Introduction to the Folklorica Special Issue “Vernacular Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic”

Editors’ Introduction to the Folklorica Special Issue “Vernacular Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic”

Heralds at the Bells: Messages of Hope from West Balkan Bards During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Between March and May of 2020, a number of guslars (bards) and other traditional singers from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia flooded YouTube with songs about the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the musicians chose divergent vantage points from which to approach the topic of the pandemic, all settled on a similar goal. They sought to deliver a message of solidarity and hope to those struggling with the realities of life under lockdown measures and to allay the fears and uncertainties that spread with the virus. This article provides a critical overview of the guslars’ songs to explore their shared and divergent tropes, themes, and tones, and to highlight the goals of their singers in disseminating their messages in traditional form. Here I comment on what the high degree of convergence in the songs’ final messages reveals about vernacular responses to the pandemic and folk views on the measures taken to halt the virus’s spread. Finally, the article places these songs into a wider historical context of contemporary singing to the gusle, remarking on the vagaries of navigating authority when one sings subjective opinion in the name of a collective.

Passive cooling techniques

Passive cooling techniques

The geolinguistics of the Ibero-Romance comitative

AbstractThe comitative represents a particular case in the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula. Except for Catalan, the rest of varieties possess a redundant form inherited from the evolution of the Latin postposition plus the prepositioncon(‘with’). However, some authors point out a tendency that favours subject forms or even stressed object forms in persons in which the norm prohibits them. With the aim of finding the vernacular responses to this respect, this paper attempts to account for all the possibilities in the comitative in the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula as well as the factors upon which the selection of either strategy depends.

“Our Answer for Obama”: The Logic of Symbolic Aggression

The article analyzes forms of vernacular response to the economic sanctions against Russia introduced in 2014. Reactions, expressed in verbal and visual texts, differ by the degree to which participants are involved—from a clichéd individual expression to a collective event—and by the level of symbolic aggression embedded in them. In the course of 2014–15, a shift is observed from speech clichés not addressed to the opponent directly to more aggressive texts and practices. This shift is connected with the loss of popularity of earlier forms of vernacular reaction to the sanctions and the situation stemming from them.

Public memory and political street names in Košice: Slovakia's multiethnic second city

Many studies have demonstrated how street names have been utilized by political elites as a tool for communicating national histories and hegemonic state ideologies with the end goal of affecting public memory in a way that legitimizes the political order. Recent scholarship in the realm of public memory has shown that it is a negotiated, dialectic process by which elites attempt to gain acceptance for the sociopolitical order of the day through various means like street naming and in which everyday people react to such coercion in complex ways. However, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that nationalist movements have qualitatively different ideological goals and geographic scales in mind when reorienting city texts compared with those of communist regimes, whose task is much more difficult. This paper uses the city of Košice, Slovakia to examine political street renaming and vernacular responses to nationalist and communist periods of odonymic change and their unique results.

Never Remember: Fake News Turning Points and Vernacular Critiques of Bad Faith Communication

Abstract The February 2, 2017, false assertion by one of American President Donald Trump’s advisors of a terrorist tragedy in Bowling Green, Kentucky, has been characterized as a moment of significance that constituted a break in the “fake news clouds.” This article uses the vernacular response to the “Bowling Green Massacre” to understand the quick and decisive identification of bad faith communication and the strategic nature of resistance to hegemonic control over “fact” and “reality” in the wake of the Trump presidency. I explore the role of intertextuality, localization, and incongruity in the vernacular response to both a massacre that never happened and the overall phenomenon of fake news.

Beneath the city’s grid: vernacular and (post-)colonial planning interactions in Dakar, Senegal

Research on the urban grid plan in colonial contexts tends to analyse the grid as an occidental top-down phenomenon that was inscribed on a spatial tabula rasa of indigenous environments overseas. Moreover, after the implementation of the grid plan, urban planning historiography treats the colonial city a Western creation almost exclusively, and is quiet about the variegated vernacular responses to this urban form. This article contributes to the shifting of this historiographic balance. Rich in visual evidence, primary sources and observations in situ, it brings to the fore a dynamic tapestry of challenging interactions between endogamous and exogamous planning cultures in an African city – interactions that are all but unidirectional in character. Against the background of the French colonial grid plan design of Dakar, the vernacular Lebou traditions of settlement configuration are discussed. The article demonstrates that the indigenous and colonial planning cultures became intimately entangled and hybridised, changing their character across time, moving from attempts of erasure to competition and creative cohabitation. It reveals that ancient spatial practices have remarkably still survived in Dakar's very city centre – a gridded area that since its creation has been considered in both academic and popular discourses as the most Western site in West Africa.

Shanghai Cosmopolis: Negotiating the Branded City

ABSTRACTThis article explores city branding and the contested domains of cosmopolitanism in Shanghai in the early 21st century. It argues that the state-led refashioning of Shanghai as China's global gateway city has been a process less concerned with articulating an ethical stance of hospitality than with re-affirming the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and attracting inward foreign investment. Shanghai cosmopolitanism becomes associated with a certain style—fashionable, civilised, and international—and anything seen as contrary to this may be repudiated as an affront to the city's cosmopolitan image. An analysis of Kevin Kai Huang's 2008 film Park Shanghai explores the experience of the cosmopolitan subject within the modern city, suggesting that the promotion of Shanghai as a touristic playground may engender feelings of rootlessness and defamiliarisation. The 2013 protests surrounding the development of the Yongkang Lu bar strip are examined as a contestation of such defamiliarisation. As a performative call to renegotiate the terms of hospitality offered by the cosmopolitan city, the protests appropriated the symbolic language of the hegemonic cosmopolitan brand. Such sites of contestation reveal the everyday lived strategies, and vernacular responses to the dominant branding of the city, that may constitute a new Shanghai cosmopolitanism.

When homelessness becomes a “luxury”: Neutrality as an obstacle to counterpublic rights claims

ABSTRACTRhetorical scholars have consistently demonstrated the value of engaging with difference in processes of public deliberation, yet publics still regularly make arguments on the basis of neutrality. Using a case study of advocacy for homeless bills of rights, I employ rhetorical field methods to assess vernacular responses to counterpublic rights claims. By attending to neutrality’s rhetorical force in practice, I examine how it enables publics to deny counterpublic assertions of inequality and obstruct counterpublic rights claims. I argue that neutrality allows publics to deny counterpublics’ needs, define counterpublics’ identities, and disguise their own self-interest. The theory of neutrality I offer here pushes rhetoricians beyond questions of its (un)desirability and (im)possibility to an understanding of how it operates.

The Place of Anzac in Australian Historical Consciousness

There is an ever-greater popular attachment to the commemoration of Anzac Day in Australia, with growing commercial, popular and institutional support around the country. This resurgence has also generated significant disagreement among historians, shaping the historiography of Anzac in recent years and raising important questions about Australia’s current obsession with Anzac: is it a reflection of increasing popular historical engagement, or an ideologically driven ‘mobilisation’ of the past? While various scholars have sought to unpack and understand this potent phenomenon of national sentiment, this article, based on a series of oral interviews with ordinary Australians in selected communities, reveals an uncertainty and complexity in many vernacular responses to Anzac that need to be included if that commemorative sentiment is to be properly understood.

Counter-hegemony in today's Belarus: dissident symbols and the mythological figure of Miron Vitebskii

Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,” whose identity remained concealed and served as a simulacrum of a national superhero in non-conformist discourse. The image of Miron immediately acquired multiple functions: condemning the Soviet colonial past, struggling for the European future, and creating a nation-state rather than the Russian-speaking civil-state of Belarus. Yet, first and foremost, Miron became a means for contesting the authority of the president who has been in power since 1994. Concentrating on the methods employed for the construction of the counter-hegemonic fakelore project of Miron and its aims, this article explores the vernacular response to its creation.

The Maoist Enemy: China’s Challenge in 1960s East Germany

This article examines the challenge of Chinese communism in East Germany in the 1960s. It shows how the Sino–Soviet Split and the Chinese Cultural Revolution endangered the public transcripts of East German state socialism by undermining its organizing metaphors and principles. Chinese cadres used their East Berlin embassy as a stage, showcase and megaphone for their dissenting vision of communism throughout the decade, winning some support from elderly communists, young anti-authoritarians and students from the Global South. Studying the East German campaign against what was known as ‘Mao Zedong Thought' sheds light on the transnational traffic of actors and ideas within the Second World in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. The official and vernacular response to the Maoist challenge suggests that East German ideology was constituted by a double demarcation in the 1960s, against Western social democracy and capitalism to its right and Chinese communism to its left.

Vernacular resistance to data collection and analysis: A political theory of obfuscation

Computer-enabled data collection, aggregation, and mining dramatically change the nature of contemporary surveillance. Refusal is not a practical option, as data collection is an inherent condition of many essential societal transactions. We present one vernacular response to this regime of everyday surveillance, a tactic we call obfuscation. With a variety of possible motivations, actors engage in obfuscation by producing misleading, false, or ambiguous data with the intention of confusing an adversary or simply adding to the time or cost of separating bad data from good. Our paper develops a political theory of obfuscation, linking contemporary and historical cases to develop a descriptive account of obfuscation that is able to capture key commonalities in systems from radar chaff to BitTorrent.