The Stigmatized Vernacular: Political Asylum and the Politics of Visibility/Recognition

Building on Erving Goffman's discussion of stigma, this essay explores how stigma and normalcy produce each other. Stigmatizing includes processes of recognition, misrecognition, estrangement, and othering. We consider how the stigmatized vernacular produces and deploys visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility of cultural practices. Examining the experiences of political asylum seekers, we suggest that routinized violence produces a new kind of ordinary for victims of persecution; when these stigmatized individuals seek refuge in a new country, officials sometimes further stigmatize them by insisting on their own categories of 'normal.' We argue that any assessment of cultural context that depends on cultural norms is insufficient for understanding stigmatizing situations: conceptualizing 'the normal' is itself a means for enacting exclusions, and the stigmatized vernacular can be a pervasive mechanism for concealing discrimination under the guise of what is 'normal.' We propose that studying the stigmatized vernacular can serve as a critique of the veneration of the folk in folkloristic research.