The annual Day of the Dead song contest: musical‐linguistic ideology and practice,piratability, and the challenge of scale

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to ‘stranger collectives’ like nations, ethnicities, and global religious ‘communities’. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of ‘customizing’ modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People ‘re‐imagine’ locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical‐linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become ‘unpiratable’, and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale.     

The limitations of vernacular names in an inventory study, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

One hectare of primary forest in Central Kalimantan was enumerated and all trees 10 cm dbh tagged and identified to species as far as possible. Two informants, regarded as the most knowledgeable on forest trees by the local community, supplied the vernacular names for the trees. The study found that only 12% of vernacular names given by one informant and 22% by the second could be equated consistently to taxa. Of these taxa 77% were given the same vernacular name by both informants and the remaining 23% had an obvious common origin (cognate). Many of these taxa were distinctive or had a use to the informants. The results have important implications for the conversion of vernacular names to scientific names by anyone carrying out inventory work in Kalimantan.     

Naming Moroccan fish: when diversity faces standardisation imperatives

The Moroccan national fisheries information system aims at adopting a standard list of common names for fishery products. Thus, the goal of this study is to provide a means structuring vernacular names, which, although in wide use, are highly variable and do not necessarily meet trade requisites. The 138 species considered in this study have 691 vernacular names – an average of five names per species. Large disparities in the number of vernacular names were found between species and among the 16 study sites. Much of this variability is due to pronunciation and syllable adjunction, which do not affect the root name structure. Pronunciation aside, for the most part the analysed variability in vernacular names of fishes is of linguistic origin stemming from four geographic – and thus cultural – groups. The Iberian names, preponderant in the eastern Moroccan Mediterranean, decreased southward in favour of Arabic, Amazigh and French. According to these results, the adoption of a unique standard, if even possible, might encounter resistance to dissemination by the fishermen and local populations. The adoption of two names lists, one for the Moroccan Mediterranean and one for the Moroccan Atlantic, may be a good compromise. Most efforts at standardisation should then be invested at fish markets in order to integrate fish identification and labelling processes prior to selling.     

Dissin' "the Standard": Ebonics as Guerrilla Warfare at Capital High

This article analyzes the discourse styles, including the linguistic practices, of a group of African American high school students and offers a twofold conclusion: (1) Ebonics or Black English is the norm against which all other speech practices are evaluated by the students at the research site and (2) "the standard"—that is, the standard English dialect—is constructed as a vernacular. As a vernacular, this discourse is not privileged; indeed, it is "dissed" (disrespected) and is only "leased" by the students on a daily basis from nine to three. This linguistic practice is centrally implicated in the postulated guerrilla warfare at the school. With data from a predominantly African American high school in Washington, D.C., the effects of this practice on African American academic achievement are documented. Several policy implications are also noted.     

Towards the microbial home: An overview of developments in next-generation sustainable architecture

Disruptive innovation is needed to raise the threshold of sustainable building performance, so that our buildings improve on net zero impacts and have a life-promoting impact on the natural world. This article outlines a new approach to next-generation sustainable architecture, which draws on the versatile metabolisms of microbes as a platform by incorporating microbial technologies and microbially produced materials into the practice of the built environment. The regenerative architecture arising from these interventions includes a broad range of advances from using new materials, to creating bioreceptive surfaces that promote life, and providing green, bio-remediating energy from waste. Such innovations are presently reaching the marketplace as novel materials like Biocement® with lower embodied carbon than conventional materials that adopt microbially facilitated processes, and as novel utilities like PeePower® that transforms urine into electrical energy and bioreactor-based building systems such as the pioneering BIQ building in Hamburg. While the field is still young, some of these products (e.g. mycelium biocomposites) are poised for uptake by the public–private economic axis to become mainstream within the building industry. Other developments are creating new economic opportunities for local maker communities that empower citizens and catalyse novel vernacular building practices. In particular, the activation of the microbial commons by the uptake of microbial technologies and materials through daily acts of living, ‘democratises’ resource harvesting (materials and energy) in ways that sustain life, and returns important decisions about how to run a home back to citizens. This disruptive move re-centres the domestic-commons economic axis to the heart of society, setting the stage for new vernacular architectures that support increasingly robust and resilient communities.     

The Rumor of Globalization: Globalism,Counterworks and the Location of Commodity

This article seeks to document the vernacular perceptions of ‘globalization’ in rural Bengal (India) and, in that connection, seeks to rethink some long-held western notions concerning commodity, consumption, representation, the nature of sociality and the politics of democratic empowerment in the third-world. In the subaltern imaginary, images seem to play a crucial role conductive to empowerment. Also, far from resisting globalization and consumption, the rural poor seems to have assimilated these into their vernacular cosmology. In memoriam: Gourkishore Ghosh (1923–2001) Vernacular intellectual, publicist, crusader for free speech and democracy     

Translating Christianity: Some keywords,events and sites in Western Arrernte conversion

This article considers a range of Western Arrernte terms employed by missionaries at Hermannsburg to translate the Bible and the Lutheran liturgy and hymns. My argument is that initially words were employed as metaphors in order to convey a Christian transcendental and ritual order quite different from the Arrernte one the terms had named previously. I examine the events and the Western Arrernte response that, over time, redefined some terms and shaped an Arrernte Christian vernacular.     

Medical knowledge and the improvement of vernacular languages in the Habsburg Monarchy: A case study from Transylvania (1770-1830)

In all European countries, the eighteenth century was characterised by efforts to improve the vernaculars. The Transylvanian case study shows how both codified medical language and ordinary language were constructed and enriched by a large number of medical books and brochures. The publication of medical literature in Central European vernacular languages in order to popularise new medical knowledge was a comprehensive programme, designed on the one hand by intellectual, political and religious elites who urged the improvement of the fatherland and the promotion of the common good by perfecting the arts and sciences. On the other hand, the imperial administration's initiatives affected local forms of medical knowledge and the construction of vernacular languages. In the eighteenth century, the construction of vernacular languages in the Habsburg Monarchy took on a significant political character. However, in the process of building of the scientific and medical vocabulary, the main preoccupation was precision, clarity and accessibility of the neologisms being invented to encompass the medical phenomena being described. In spite of political conflicts among the 'nations' living in Transylvania, physicians borrowed words from German, Hungarian and Romanian. Thus they elevated several words used in everyday language to the upper social stratum of language use, leading to the invention of new terms to describe particular medical practices or phenomena.     

Local names for vascular plants in the John Crow mountains,Jamaica

Local names of vascular plants, accompanied by botanical specimens, were collected in the John Crow Mountains, Portland Parish, Jamaica. Each of the names was volunteered by one local informant; many were independently corroborated by others. We recorded 91 names of forest trees and shrubs, 20 names of climbers, and 33 names of other plants. The uneven distribution of local names among different categories of plants is discussed. The names are mostly of English origin, with a scattering from Spanish, Amerindian and West African languages. Many names are not listed in the standard floras; 20 names are apparently hitherto unrecorded in print. The same name was often found to be applied to a different species from the usage given in the floras, showing the variation in vernacular names from one part of the island to another.     

Negotiating belonging: plants,people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.     

浦阳江中上游河谷盆地乡土景观研究

由流域水系冲击作用形成的河谷盆地往往具有较为封闭的地域环境,人与环境的相互作用将其转化为独特的乡土景观。以浙江省浦阳江中上游河谷盆地乡土景观为研究对象,依据人与自然的互动关系,将研究区分为湖区和畈区2种景观类型,同时基于风景园林学的视角,分别从自然基底、农田水利体系、聚落体系层面阐述2种景观类型的构成要素和空间格局特征,并通过典型的聚落样本进一步揭示了各系统层之间的相互关系以及乡土景观格局与乡土景观过程的耦合关系机制。     

Internet scientific name frequency as an indicator of cultural salience of biodiversity

Public interest in nature is an important driver of the success of conservation actions, such that increasing public awareness of biodiversity has become a major conservation goal (i.e. Aichi Target 1). Macro-scale monitoring of public interest towards nature has thus far been difficult, but the enormous quantity of information generated by the internet allows for new approaches using culturomic techniques. For example, other things being equal, we would expect that the vernacular (common) names of charismatic species with high levels of public interest (e.g. tiger, elephant) to appear on more web-pages than less ‘cultural’ species. Nevertheless, deriving metrics from such data is challenging because vernacular names often have multiple meanings (e.g. teal, jaguar) that could significantly bias culturomic metrics of cultural visibility. Scientific binomial names of species potentially avoid this problem because Latin is a ‘dead’ language and the scientific name typically applies only to the biological organism. Here, we investigate whether standard scientific names: i) are a robust proxy of web salience of vernacular species names, and; ii) have the same statistical relationship with vernacular species names across different cultural and language groups. Automated internet searches were carried out for scientific and vernacular names from a global bird species list and six national bird species lists (Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, Tanzania and USA). For national searches the results were restricted to country web domains. We found strong and consistent correlations between vernacular and scientific species names at both global and country level, independent of language and cultural differences. The universality of this relationship suggests that the web salience of scientific species names is a robust, cross-cultural indicator of species ‘culturalness’. Potential applications of this indicator include: i) the development of new indicators to assess public perceptions of biodiversity; ii) systematic identification of species with high cultural visibility; iii) empirical identification of the biogeographic, ecological, morphological and cultural characteristics of species that influence cultural visibility, globally and in different cultural settings, and; iv) near real-time monitoring of changes in species ‘culturalness’. The capture and processing of internet data is technically non-trivial, but can be replicated at low cost and has enormous potential for the creation of new macro-scale metrics of human-nature interactions.     

The “Dragon of Kovachitsa”: Local perceptions of radioactive pollution near the Kozlodui Nuclear Power Station (Bulgaria)

There is continuing uncertainty surrounding the safety of nuclear power stations in Eastern Europe, among them the one at Kozlodui, Bulgaria. It is argued in this paper that attempts on the part of the state to assert the safety of nuclear power stations are expressed in terms of an official nuclear-safe discourse, while the local inhabitants near the Kozlodui nuclear power station employ a vernacular mode of expression to explain possible radioactive pollution.     

Jamaican Creole: In the process of becoming

Questions of attitudes and identity are foregrounded in this discussion of Jamaican Creole [JC] as a language of the diaspora. It is presented as a language that challenges the standardizing impulses of modernity, resisting homogeneity in a variable and multi-layered process of change. The article follows the evolutionary path of the language through Africa and the Caribbean to London and America and shows how its speakers see, use and connect through a vernacular that mirrors and embodies the social forces, experienced. The key sites are Jamaica, largely, and urban London. Through a review of the literature, documentary analysis, interviews and classroom observations this essay examines the ways in which Jamaican Creole could be said to exemplify the diasporic predicament and the ways in which it has managed to gain dominance in a) Caribbean society, b) the wider movement of the Caribbean diaspora.     

Towards understanding: antisemitism and the contested uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in English football

This article addresses an omission in the currently brief body of work on antisemitism in football and contributes to and advances wider sociological debates in the sub-disciplines of race and ethnicity, religion, linguistics and sport. The article examines antisemitic discourse in English football and in doing so, explains the different uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in the vernacular culture of fans. While many conceive of ‘Yid’ as an ethnic epithet, fans of Tottenham Hotspur – Gentiles and Jews – have appropriated and embraced the term, using it to deflect the antisemitic abuse they are targeted with due to their ‘Jewish identity’. The study maps the contested uses of ‘Yid’ on a continuum to explain and demarcate between the nuanced forms of antisemitism in football. It makes central the cultural context in which ‘Yid’ is used, together with the intent underpinning its use, since epithets and slurs are not simply determined by their lexical form.     

"Taming tradition": medicalized female genital practices in western Kenya

This article considers the question of female genital practices at the hands of health workers in western Kenya. Recent articles in Medical Anthropology Quarterly have critically engaged with the biomedical arguments condemning such practices. This article studies the case of medicalized circumcision in which biomedical concerns over health risks have become incorporated in their vernacular practice. Although some suggest that medicalization may provide a harm-reduction strategy to the abandonment of the practice, research in one region challenges this suggestion. It argues that changing and conflicting ideologies of gender and sexuality have led young women to seek their own meaning through medicalized practice. Moreover, attributing this practice to financial motivations of health workers overlooks the way in which these "moral agents" must be situated within their social and cultural universe. Together, these insights challenge the view that medicine can remain neutral in the mediation of tradition.     

The multiple meanings of moongo: on the conceptual character of doorways and backbones in Kilimanjaro

By means of ‘connective analysis’, this article explores the multiple meanings of moongo among the Chagga‐speaking people of Rombo district, Kilimanjaro region, which resemble neglected meanings of the vernacular terms translated as ‘lineage’ elsewhere. These meanings were eclipsed by an analytical move that privileged ‘the political’ at the expense of other relations. By suspending the question of politics, it is shown how moongo is central to bridewealth exchanges and reproductive relationships, which provides new impetus to classic anthropological discussions of the house‐property complex. The result is to treat moongo as a concept in its own right, which enunciates and concerns how persons and houses are transformations of each other and effects of particular relationships.     

Domestication, cultivation and utilization of two small millets, brachiaria ramosa and Setaria glauca (Poaceae), in South India

Brachiaria ramosa is cultivated in pure stands. Its grains are used in preparing at least nine traditional foods in South India. Setaria glauca is cultivated in mixed stands along with little millet (Panicum sumatrense). In Orissa state and in Southern India the grains are used to make at least six traditional foods as a supplementary ingredient. The weedy forms of these were found growing with upland rice and some millets in diverse agro-ecological niches, and are identified by various vernacular names by local farmers. Explorations were conducted to gather information on the evolutionary trends, domestication and ethnobotany of these minor food crops. These findings substantiate the belief that domestication process may have passed through three distinct phases: (i) an associated mimic weed with upland rice and some millets; (ii) a secondary crop mixed with little millet or kodo millet; and (iii) as an independent crop. Also, this process has been promoted as a means of imparting adaptation to an arid climate and in turn related to the diversification of the agriculture basic complex.     

Cultural implications of attitudes and evaluative reactions toward dialect variation in Croatian youth

As a consequence of political changes and war, during the last decade the migration processes have been intensified and in comers from other parts of Croatia and neighbouring countries have moved to the town of Zagreb and have changed it considerably. These demographic changes have also had an influence on the language used in the area and on language attitudes towards the Standard Croatian, local vernacular and other dialectal varieties. The aim of this study is to explore the awareness that speakers, Croatian adolescents resident in Zagreb, have of their own language variety and their attitudes toward different other dialect varieties. The data were collected using the speech guise method and a questionnaire in order to assess both conscious and unconscious components of these linguistic evaluations. The results obtained once again confirmed the expected prestige of the Standard variety in terms of its speaker's alleged highest competence, but also its low standing as far as social attractiveness is concerned. Non-standard local varieties showed the exactly opposite trend, although the evaluation of native and immigrant adolescents differed considerably.     

Review

Book reviewed in this article:
Scripta Botanica Belgica volume 1, 199 pages, ed. E. Robberecht. 1992. - Anderson, L., A Provisional Checklist of Neotropical Rubiaceae
Ibid. vol. 2, 153 pages, ed. E. Robberecht. 1992. -Ghanzafar, S. A., An annotated catalogue of the vascular plants of Oman and their vernacular names
Ibid. vol. 3, 376 pages, ed. C. Puff. 1991. - The genus Paederia L. (Rubiaceae-Paedeneae): a multidisciplinary study