Vernacular Knowledge
Contesting Authority, Expressing Beliefs
Ülo Valk [+–]
University of Tartu
Marion Bowman [+–]
Open University
She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, Past and Present (2014–2018), and a visiting Professor at the University of Oslo (2016–2018) and the University of Tartu (2014). She is currently External Scientific Expert on Re-storied Sites and Routes as Inclusive Spaces and Places: Shared Imaginations and Multi-layered Heritage – a collaborative project involving researchers in Estonia, Norway, Lithuania and Latvia.
She co-edited Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief (Equinox, 2012) with Ülo Valk; a Thematic Issue on Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Place, Heritage, and the Politics of Replication with Simon Coleman (Religion 49 (1), 2019); and a Special Issue on Reframing Pilgrimage in Northern Europe (NUMEN 67 (5–6), 2020) with Dirk Johannsen and Ane Ohrvik.
This volume presents vernacular knowledge as a realm of discourses and beliefs that challenge institutional authorities and official truths. It draws attention to various genres as expressions of alternative knowledge in relation to authority, including traditional and personal experience narratives, life stories, ditties, and jokes. These are transmitted through a wide range of vehicles of expression including online, face to face, social media, forums, networks, and conferences, which are shared and shaped communally but individually articulated and actualised. Vernacular knowledge and vernacular authority also underpin a variety of material culture, rituals and other practices.
The volume covers various realms of the supernatural, such as ghosts, saints, spirits, magic, energy lines, and divinations. However, it also discusses beliefs that do not involve the supernatural such as conspiracy theories, politically and ideologically determined creeds, stereotypes and other cases where beliefs appear as socially compelling ideas and challenge prevailing received wisdom. Vernacular religion is examined not only in relation to institutional religion but also to secularism, state sponsored atheism, scientific rationalism and official medicine. Vernacular Knowledge proceeds from the premise that in contrast to institutionally established discourses with monological voicing, the expressive field of vernacular is always heteroglot; it eludes regulation and supervision.
This volume is dedicated to our dear friend and extraordinary scholar Leonard Norman Primiano (1957–2021).
Table of Contents
Introduction
Politics and Vernacular Strategies of Resistance
Narrating and Creating the Past
Renegotiating Tradition and Authority
Vernacular Knowledge and Catholicism
She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, Past and Present (2014–2018), and a visiting Professor at the University of Oslo (2016–2018) and the University of Tartu (2014). She is currently External Scientific Expert on Re-storied Sites and Routes as Inclusive Spaces and Places: Shared Imaginations and Multi-layered Heritage – a collaborative project involving researchers in Estonia, Norway, Lithuania and Latvia.
She co-edited Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief (Equinox, 2012) with Ülo Valk; a Thematic Issue on Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Place, Heritage, and the Politics of Replication with Simon Coleman (Religion 49 (1), 2019); and a Special Issue on Reframing Pilgrimage in Northern Europe (NUMEN 67 (5–6), 2020) with Dirk Johannsen and Ane Ohrvik.
Afterlife and Afterdeath
She has studied oriental studies, historical anthropology and folkloristics at the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow), the National University of Mongolia (Ulaanbaatar), the University of Bonn and the University of Tartu. In 2007 she started annual fieldwork in Mongolia and China, focusing on mythology, rural and urban folk traditions, and vernacular religion.
Afterword
She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, Past and Present (2014–2018), and a visiting Professor at the University of Oslo (2016–2018) and the University of Tartu (2014). She is currently External Scientific Expert on Re-storied Sites and Routes as Inclusive Spaces and Places: Shared Imaginations and Multi-layered Heritage – a collaborative project involving researchers in Estonia, Norway, Lithuania and Latvia.
She co-edited Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief (Equinox, 2012) with Ülo Valk; a Thematic Issue on Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Place, Heritage, and the Politics of Replication with Simon Coleman (Religion 49 (1), 2019); and a Special Issue on Reframing Pilgrimage in Northern Europe (NUMEN 67 (5–6), 2020) with Dirk Johannsen and Ane Ohrvik.

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