500彩票网

The term “vernacular” came to be widely used as a keyword in various fields of study in the latter half of the 20th century. It is used strategically in contemporary cultural studies as a technical term that focuses on the energy, positivity, and dynamism of cultures that are positioned as peripheral, non-mainstream, or of a lower status in the cultural hierarchy. It tends to be especially favored by researchers who hope to leverage the peripherality of the marginal to challenge a more dominant “center” or “mainstream.”
 
The word can be interpreted in many ways, but I take “vernacular” as a conceptual schema whereby its use as an adjective qualifies a subject as “at a distance from a given center,” and its use as a noun identifies “the quality or state of being at a distance from a given center.” If we adopt this conceptual schema of the vernacular, it follows that the expression “vernacular art”—art characterized by this vernacular quality, which constitutes the subject of this book—could be used to describe “art that is at a distance from a given center,” or “art of the marginal.” The concept of the vernacular is extremely useful, first and foremost, in examining art that does not carry the sense of authority or centrality that comes from being created within a formal, official, legitimate, mainstream, or elite context, but instead emerges at a distance from these centers.
 
This book focuses on the rich creativity of ordinary, non-specialist people—in other words, of more “marginal” people at a more “grassroots” level, as it were—and the positive significance of ordinary people “doing art” as part of their lives, from the perspective of vernacular art. The first objective of this project was to examine the significance of research on “the art of the marginal,” understood in terms of the common creative activities of the “marginal”; to define art as a research genre within Japanese folklore studies, an area that has been inadequately addressed in the field to date; and to construct an appropriate research perspective on that basis. The second objective was to use the concept of folk art, as informed by the idea of the vernacular, to illuminate the nature and significance of the creation of art by ordinary people in their normal, everyday world as a way to shed light onto the center of the art world from the periphery—an area that has not been emphasized in conventional art research. The third objective was to take vernacular art as a starting point in charting a “map” of part of the fertile landscape of vernacular culture, which has not been sufficiently researched and which offers inexhaustible material for future exploration. Of course, it is impossible for a single volume to fully map the vast and diverse terrain of vernacular culture. However, I hope that by showing some fascinating aspects of this artistic practice and the significance of research in the area, this book will inspire others to take their first steps into this rich field of study.
 

(Written by SUGA Yutaka, Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia / 2024)