Detailed drawings of traditional houses among 34 ethnic populations in India's northeast illustrate that each house-type is different. These houses are changing but nevertheless remain an important ...marker of cultural identity.
This paper presents findings from a study of Instagram use and funerary practices that analysed photographs shared on public profiles tagged with '#funeral'. We found that the majority of images ...uploaded with the hashtag #funeral often communicated a person's emotional circumstances and affective context, and allowed them to reposition their funeral experience amongst wider networks of acquaintances, friends, and family. We argue that photo-sharing through Instagram echoes broader shifts in commemorative and memorialization practices, moving away from formal and institutionalized rituals to informal and personalized, vernacular practices. Finally, we consider how Instagram's 'platform vernacular' unfolds in relation to traditions and contexts of death, mourning, and memorialization. This research contributes to a broader understanding of how platform vernaculars are shaped through the logics of architecture and use. This research also directly contributes to the understanding of death and digital media by examining how social media is being mobilized in relation to death, the differences that different media platforms make, and the ways social media are increasingly entwined with the places, events, and rituals of mourning.
In the extreme northwest of the Algerian territory the Traras Mountain the vernacular architecture of the houses is facing natural and human threats. with its loss, a synthesis of traditional rural ...life, imminent. This article is aimed at identifying and recording the characteristics of traditional vernacular architecture in housing to safeguard the knowledge and promote community awareness with respect to this architectural resource, thereby providing a context for future conservation work. The study involved an architectural survey to identify and document the architectural resources of the Traras mountains vernacular rural buildings. The survey included collection of relevant historical and geographic information, building description and analysis together with other data relating to spatial and functional organisation, construction methods and materials. The final product of this study is a conservation-support plan detailing all the characteristic features of the Traras mountains rural vernacular buildings.
Since the 2011 uprising in Egypt, the Egyptian state has increasingly used the charge of contempt of religion (izdira’ al-din) to regulate speech. This charge, though sometimes assumed to be a ...medieval holdover, is part of a modern genealogy of the politics of religious freedom. This article examines how religious freedom accumulated meaning in Egypt after World War I, when it became an international legal standard. Protestant missionaries in Egypt advocated religious freedom as the right to proselytize and the right of Egyptians to convert. For many Egyptians, by contrast, it came to mean the right to protect one's religion from perceived missionary attacks (ta‘n). Using British state archival records, missionary sources, and Egyptian parliamentary transcripts and periodicals, this article traces the formation of this paradox in public discourse and law. Drawing on theorizations of seduction and moral injury, I show how Egyptians articulated notions of religious freedom centered around feelings of moral injury and through a local ethical vernacular that, though embedded within the Islamic tradition, was broadly shared. The Egyptian state gradually incorporated these sensibilities into its expanding modern legal system as part of maintaining a majority-defined public order, transforming offense to religion from a moral issue into a punishable crime. Forged through a contingent process involving missionaries, local communities, and the Egyptian state under the shadow of colonial rule, religious freedom has exacerbated rather than resolved religious divides in Egypt, and has helped to define and delimit the country's political, moral, and religious imaginaries.
Vernacular architecture can be regarded as heritage places. Recently, the need to protect vernacular heritage in China has been reflected through government policy changes, for example the 'beautiful ...countryside' program which aims to develop rural villages since 2005. However, a conflict between conserving the tangible fabric and the intangible heritage of the vernacular place can become pronounced, as villagers have desires for a modern lifestyle, and maintaining the physical building fabric. Vernacular villages require sustainable development alongside conservation of both tangible and intangible heritage significance. A key factor in keeping a village alive is continuing its utilization by a local community. This paper introduces the terms 'neo-vernacular' (buildings with a vernacular appearance with contemporary methods and materials) and 'semi-vernacular' (reusing or renovating vernacular buildings in combination with modern and traditional building techniques) to distinguish two approaches to vernacular villages conservation. We analyse the distinctions between the works of Amateur Architecture Studio (AAS) and Atelier Zhang Lei (AZL) to demonstrate the neo-vernacular and semi-vernacular approaches respectively through photo-comparison diagrams, and reviewing comments from local villagers, architectural students, and scholars. In the discussion, we propose that the semi-vernacular adaptation offers a new approach worth pursuing in China's rapidly changing rural landscapes.
Old Rauma is a Finnish medieval town. It was founded in the 15th century and although it went through several modifications, it maintained significative features of medieval Nordic urbanism and ...vernacular architecture. Buildings mostly consist of logs-timber structures, even if there are also few cases of stone constructions; dwellings are usually simple volumes composed of a stone cellar, a first main floor and an attic, that is used for ventilation and secondary domestic activities. The wood is the most used material and slabs, floors, doors, windows, finishing and decorations are made of it. People still live in traditional dwellings or use them with other functions. Some significant changes were necessary to adapt the buildings to the modern lifestyle: although some of them were quite modifying, the upgrades are often operated by using traditional techniques, materials and by maintaining the most relevant architectural features. Thank to this habit, Old Rauma is one of the largest and most important examples of Nordic traditional architecture. This text will present the results of 2 months of direct field research, by explaining the work methodology, its results and some considerations about them. The analysis has been conducted during a traineeship at Tammela Centre (Rauma) and it has been carried out by visual surveys, bibliographical researches, active participation to seminars and activities, photographical cataloguing and through interviews with local professionals, experts and inhabitants.
Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies, and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritized do ...not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus-group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate (1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct and narrate ‘security threats’, and (2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalizations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes and stories reproduce the police order, in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticize the grounds on which national security agendas are authorized, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease.
Abstract
There has been an increase of anthropological interest in small-scale humanitarianisms that make situated claims to universality. The articles in this collection demonstrate that some ...genealogies of such situated universalisms have been explored more than others. Focusing on vernacular humanitarianisms, the goal is not to celebrate the standpoint of ‘radical alterity’ but rather to acknowledge that imagining and recognising similarities of people's experiences is not reserved for the Western European epistemology. Anthropological research of small-scale humanitarianisms points to situated, alternative and sometimes even decolonising visions and practices of ‘the humanity’ understood as a framework for imagining and recognising broadly shared experiences. This collection asks how vernacular humanitarianisms are performed in everyday life, enabling particular forms of ethics, power and inequality. Thus, it keeps possibilities of social critique in sight and moves a conversation towards an ethnographically attuned perspective that explores the role of vernacular humanitarianisms in various projects of governance.
Depuis cinq ans, les anthropologues s'intéressent de plus en plus aux formes de l'humanitarisme à petite échelle qui, compte tenu du contexte socio-historique, visent un caractère d'universalité. Les articles publiés dans ce numéro de la revue montrent que quelques généalogies ont été explorées plus que d'autres. Les nouvelles expressions de la vie humanitaire émergent aujourd'hui remettent en question les divisions entre les pays du Nord, les pays du Sud, et les pays de l'Est. En mettant l'accent sur les idées et pratiques de l'humanitarisme vernaculaire, notre objectif n'est pas de célébrer le point de vue d'une ‘altérité radicale’. Il s'agit plutôt d'admettre que la capacité d'imaginer et de reconnaître les similitudes dans l'expérience humaine n'est pas limitée à l’épistémologie de l'Europe occidentale. La recherche anthropologique sur les humanitarismes à petite échelle révèle des visions et des pratiques de ‘l'humanité’ alternatives et sans connotations coloniales, qui sont conçues comme un cadre moral permettant d'envisager et d'identifier des expériences communes. Cet ensemble d'articles offre une approche critique pour étudier comment les humanitarismes vernaculaires sont manifestes dans la vie de tous les jours, et donnent lieu à des différents types d’éthique, pouvoir et inégalité. Nous proposons de concentrer sur les possibilités de critique sociale et d'avancer vers un point de vue ethnologique pour étudier le rôle d'humanitarismes vernaculaires en rapport avec des projets de gouvernance.
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