Understanding the “Vernacular”: Between “Native Chickens”, Architectural “Peculiarity”, and “Living Religiosity”

Abstract

The article explores the development of ideas about the ‘vernacular’ in Linguis­tics, Urban Planning, and Philosophy of Religion. It focuses on ‘living religios­ity’ reflected in personal and group perceptions and practices embedded in lan­guage. This understanding has shown continuity since ancient times, with its first written records as ‘vernaculum’ used by Plautus, Cicero, and Varro to denote ‘home’, ‘native’, and ‘domestic’ as compared to ‘universal’ meaning ‘Roman’. In the Renaissance, the term acquires new connotations. These result from the then-emerging nation-states and the consequent need to translate the Bible into ‘vernacular’ (i.e., common, local) languages, on the one hand, and the ideal­ization of Cicero’s Rome scented with an ‘inexplicable metropolitan aroma’ symbolically inherited by the new centers of influence across the globe – on the other. In the 19th century, researchers introduce the subculture of na­tional ‘folklore’ (or ‘popular wisdom’) identified with a ‘folk religion’ (typical of grass-roots) colliding with an official lofty ‘theological religion’. To over­come the misrepresentation of such ‘folk’ religious manifestations in ethnogra­phy and folklore, scholars formulate the concept of ‘vernacular religion’ aimed to correctly reflect the dynamism of actual religious life, including both ‘ecclesi­astical’ and ‘extra-church’ forms of religiosity. Accordingly, in a bid to avoid the stereotypical juxtaposition of the official vs. popular, or ‘pure’ vs. ‘spoiled’, which is still relevant for such terms as ‘sect’, ‘paganism’, ‘superstition’, ‘rene­gades’, enemies of the ‘dominant religion’, and alike as retaining negative inter­pretations, the authors point out the prospects of using the term ‘private religion’ coined by Alexander Panchenko.