Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano

It is fitting for my review to begin by quoting the book's author and authoritative source. Leonard Norman Primiano's review of The Marrow of Human Experience: Essays on Folklore by William A. Wilson for the Journal of American Folklore was, Primiano claimed, “one of those challenging assignments that sounds good at the time of agreement, but which turns into a certain chore.” Primiano asked, “How exactly does a reviewer ‘criticize’ the work of one of the leading, and admired, figures of American folkloristics?” (Journal of American Folklore 125:254, 2012). I feel the same. Primiano was one of a handful of North American folklorists writing reflectively, theoretically, ethnographically, knowledgeably, and empathically about religious folklife, and arguably the luminary of this field in the early twenty-first century.This collection of Primiano's most influential published essays opens and closes with theoretical and methodological expositions. His well-known essay “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife” (Western Folklore 54:37–56, 1995) stands appropriately, essentially, as the introduction to Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano. Here, he lays out his clear rationale for leaving behind the old familiar dualities of religious scholarship as artificial and demeaning to the practices and beliefs of people as they express and live their faith. “Vernacular religion,” the term Primiano coined and that has become widely acknowledged and accepted, is simply and intricately religion as it is lived and enacted in everyday life by believers of every stripe. All religious expression, when approached through the hands, hearts, minds, and behaviors of people as they “express their personal relation to the sacred” (p. 122), is vernacular religion.The ethnographic essays in the book are in three sections. Part I, “Religious Material Culture,” includes papers on ex votos and other objects and images both in original and commercialized contexts, holy cards and other ephemera, religious goods stores, home altars as enactments and representations of vows, and the religious-themed, artfully hand-hooked rugs of Sister Ann Ameen of Newfoundland.Part II, “Dignity in Philadelphia,” comprises three papers on the gay Catholic movement known as Dignity. These derive from fieldwork in the “vernacular Catholicism” (p. 32) of the “ethnic parish” (p. 105) of gay and lesbian Catholics who collectively enacted their stated belief that one could be actively homosexual and actively Catholic, in spite of, or perhaps in defiance of, the institutional Church's refusal to accept this claim.Taken together, Parts I and II function as a wide-ranging portrait of some of the many and varied “senses of American Catholicism” (p. 55). Primiano's ethnographic writing on this subject is anchored in an encyclopedic historical knowledge of institutional Catholicism, as well as in the expressive material culture of popular and personal Catholic piety.The four essays of Part III, “Father and Mother Divine,” combine to create a thorough ethnography of Father Divine's Peace Mission movement recognized by followers and scholars alike as the best published work to date on the Peace Mission. This unique religion arose in the early twentieth century through the efforts of its leader Father Divine, understood and accepted by his followers as the incarnation of God in the modern United States. Twenty-five years of fieldwork with the Peace Mission in and around Primiano's native Philadelphia gave rise to a profound and empathic study of a religion as it is lived and made manifest: through its followers’ daily conduct, its music, its welcome of the public, its specified moral code, its foodways and theology of abundance, its communitarianism, its “vernacular architecture of intention,” its social and political philosophy, and its emphatic Americanism (p. 159).Closing the collection is a second theoretical and methodological statement (“Coda”) in which Primiano addresses with his customary clarity the ethical importance of “‘collaborative’ or ‘reciprocal’ ethnography” (p. 246). He cites anthropologist Luke Lassiter's 2000 description of this approach to ethnographic research and writing as one that deliberately and overtly relocates authority and control from a single academic authorial voice to an open dialogue between the ethnographer and the people studied (p. 246). In this final commentary, Primiano provides a field guide for conducting respectful and inclusive ethnography by demonstrating, through his own example, precisely what return-of-findings to one's community of study is really all about.This volume, which Primiano laid out and worked on in his last years, was lovingly brought to fruition after his untimely death, by members of his long-standing collective/collaborative mentorship group “The Creoles,” a group of scholars of religion. Each chapter is preceded by an informative précis of what is to come. These are concise blocks of Primiano's own text, selected and extracted by editor Deborah Dash Moore. This insightful editorial move makes using the volume as a reference work extremely convenient and also whets the appetite for the feast of material that lies just ahead. Every chapter is a feast: deep and serious scholarship well-seasoned with Primiano's utter delight in his subject matter, garnished with sprinklings of open humor.Don't skip Primiano's detailed acknowledgments, for the extent and seriousness of his collaborative approach and his active solicitation of peer review at every step. Also included are some useful bibliographic tidbits about the origins of many of the papers or their crucial concepts. Make sure to read the extensive notes, with their astounding multidisciplinary bibliography, making this a valuable reference in itself. There is also a list of further reading, consisting mostly of more recent pieces from 1997 to 2017.This collected volume is an immense contribution to scholars of religion and folklife, irrespective of their disciplinary backgrounds. Anyone with more than a passing interest in religion and spirituality and their myriad expressions in the everyday lives of believers will find this book indispensable, both as a reference work and as a superb tool for honing thoughts and theories.This book is also a work of relevance to anyone interested in conducting ethnographic research and publication in any inquiry. Speaking as a folklorist and ethnographer, I can attest that Primiano's ethnographic writing is exemplary, both for focused articles and for much broader and more encyclopedic studies, providing impeccable models for long-term trustworthy fieldwork and collaboratively created, nuanced, thick description. Iterative without being merely repetitive, these pieces illustrate the development and maturation of an ever-deepening comprehension gleaned over the course of more than two decades of annotation, interviewing, filming, photographing, participant observation, and direct discussion of findings with community members.It is wonderful to have these excellent papers bound together in a single volume. Students and scholars of folklore and religious studies owe a debt of gratitude to the editor and colleagues who brought this volume to press, and to the author who originated it.

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