Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices (review)

This welcome gathering of ideas from one of our discipline's most fluent thinkers views vernacular culture as a pervasive site for "doing things with style," a locus of creative energy holding unique promise to connect us to ourselves and to our pasts. "The vernacular seldom lets us down," says Abrahams, who places little stock in "terms of art newly-minted from classical stem words" (p. 15). This is a book about the vernacular in the vernacular, supplemented by a short list of terms originating in academese: identity, ethnicity, creolization, and diaspora. Much of the book's freshest material appears in the final section dedicated to unraveling curiosities associated with these concepts.

Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Culture belongs to a scholarly subgenre we might call "retrospectives," where authors cull, refurbish, and compile their previous work into a new composite, in this instance complemented by much new writing. The husks of vintage articles are recognizable here, composing perhaps a third of the total pages, though much remade to incorporate current notions and concerns. Another third or so of this book's content stems from less familiar work, including write-ups of previously unpublished conference papers. The last third of the book is, we are told, entirely new writing.

Abrahams initially set out to create a "comprehensive survey of the folklore genres" but saw his project evolve into something else: "a series of forays into the field" and "a systematic approach by which vernacular practices may be understood as clues to culture" (p. 284). The word "systematic" is surely an overstatement, though the outlines of a cohesive vision can be assembled from the book's varied musings. This vision is based on the radiance of a goodwill principle that achieves different levels of expression in human interactions depending on the qualities of specific social environments. In familiar settings where people "keep company" with one another, Abrahams detects "a commonsense system operating beneath the surface of everyday conviviality" (p. 12). The book's first unit, titled "The Many Forms of Goodwill," contains chapters that explore this impulse through sets of conversational and play genres. This arena is formative, in Abrahams' view, since "conversation conducted under the sign of friendliness provides a baseline against which other ways of speaking may be judged" (p. 3).

As one moves outwards from hearth and home, the ground becomes increasingly less trustworthy, and contest and conflict enter the picture, diminishing the scope of the goodwill principle and bringing other vernacular styles into play. The second and third units of the book, titled "Goodwill Tested" and "Social Imaginaries," contain chapters dealing with forms of expressivity arising in these more public and heterogeneous social environments. What Abrahams terms "the more public modes of display" appear in social environments marked by a sense of solidarity as well as in those marked by its absence. These public settings exhibit, Abrahams tells us, more formally structured communication events manifesting intensified forms of performance. Ceremonies and commemorations "celebrate whatever system is in place, as they elevate individuals who are being honored" (p. 120). Here the vernacular helps synthesize experience, harmonize emotion, and contribute an air of authenticity to the proceedings. As we move into contested regions such as marketplaces, fairs, festivals, and carnival, portrayed by Abrahams as zones of contact and conflict, the vernacular is employed initially to negotiate and to display, eventually to aggress and at last to antagonize.

In the book's final unit, titled "Terms for Finding Ourselves," Abrahams zeroes in on the many ironies surrounding the formation of group identity in this age marked by the global circulation of culture, the rupture of traditional ties between land, language, and culture, and the triumph of the politics of identity. Drawing on his experience with Caribbean vernacular culture and with ethnic displays as a feature of public folklore practice, and touching on his own background as a secular Jewish American, Abrahams mounts a thoughtful discussion of the role played by vernacular culture in...