Tag vernacular [21 articles]

Abstract

Vernacular place names are names that are commonly in use to refer to geographical places. For purposes of effective information retrieval, the spatial extent associated with these names should be able to reflect people's perception of the place, even though this may differ sometimes from the administrative definition of the same place name. Due to their informal nature, vernacular place names are hard to capture, but methods to acquire and define vernacular place names are of great benefit to search engines ...

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In this study, I examine four web memorials to explore the material construction of memory on the internet. Using Blair's arguments about the rhetorical materiality of memorials, I seek to understand the vernacular responses to 9/11 in the form of individually crafted web memorials. I argue that vernacular web memorials contain dual rhetorical functions of being memorials themselves as well as the tributary markers found at other national monuments. Additionally, webmastered memorials highlight the vernacular strategies of narrative ...

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The complex epistemological and methodological problems of data-quality control or ethnographer bias in anthropological research as they relate to the use of the native languages and/or the use of native-interpreter informants are critically reexamined. Summarizing the 1939-1940 Mead-Lowie debate, the paper suggests, on the basis of a close review of selected classic ethnographies of Africa, various ways by which the quality of comparative cross-cultural data could be meaningfully improved. ...

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Ideas of embodiment and performance have been crucial in destabilizing the visual hegemony of images, cameras, and gazes in tourist studies. This article discusses how a practice-inspired performance perspective potentially allows a more satisfying account of tourist photography's "nature" than conventional "representational" ones in which tourist photography is dismissed as "all eyes and no bodies and sometimes no brain." The author writes a new account, seeing tourist photography as performed rather than preformed and tourist photographers as framing as much as ...

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<div>Ever since its emergence in colonial-era Cuba, Afro-Cuban Santería (or Lucumí) has displayed a complex dynamic of continuity and change in its institutions, rituals, and iconography. In <i>Santería Enthroned</i>, David H. Brown combines art history, cultural anthropology, and ethnohistory to show how Africans and their descendants have developed novel forms of religious practice in the face of relentless oppression.<br><br>Focusing on the royal throne as a potent metaphor in Santería belief and practice, Brown shows how negotiation among ideologically competing interests have ...

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Karen McCarthy Brown's classic book shatters stereotypes of Vodou by offering an intimate portrait of African-based religion in everyday life. She explores the importance of women's religious practices along with related themes of family and of social change. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her subjects in alternate chapters of traditional ethnography and ethnographic fiction, Brown presents herself as a character in Mama Lola's world and allows the reader to evaluate her interactions there. Startlingly ...

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Now available for the first time in paperback, Discovering American Folklife is a classic sampling of Don Yoder's massive body of work in Folklife studies. The essays cover folk religion, folk medicine, sectarian costume, traditional cookery, and the Folklife of the Pennsylvania Dutch, specifically Harvest Home, witch tales, Fraktur, and sauerkraut for New Year's. ...

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These essays explore belief and supernatural experience within an array of cultures and challenge the idea that supernatural experience is extraordinary. ...

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This abundantly illustrated anthology brings together 16 essays by scholars, artists, and ritual experts who examine the sacred arts of Haitian Vodou from multiple perspectives. Among the many topics covered are the 10 major Vodou divinities, the paintings of Hector Hyppolite, the multimedia pieces of Pierrot Barra, sequined bottles and sequined flags, and the work of the Brooklyn Priestess Mama Lola. ...

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Taking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with ...

Abstract

At a Marian apparition site in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, New York, Catholic pilgrims use photography to document miraculous phenomena, produce signs of the supernatural, and create sacred images. As an emergent folk religious practice, "miraculous photography" constitutes a creative, technological innovation on traditional Catholic beliefs about miraculous images. This essay explores the meaning of miraculous photography for believers, discusses the compatibility of photographic image-making with previous miraculous image traditions, and examines the appeal of photography as a means of affirming the ...