Reviewed Work: Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices by Roger Abrahams

Abstract

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.