Opening up to the vernacular

Take some time to wander around and study a Wal-Mart or a Target. Tune into the daytime talk shows. It is hard to come away from this more casual field research without a disquieting sense of the global reach of consumer culture—that just about anything can become a commodity with a price tag.

As further evidence, it is difficult, for most of us, to imagine a way to make ends meet outside of the market or cash economy. If you don’t have a job, you don’t have the money to buy basic necessities. And the best way to create jobs, we are told, is through growth. The central roles of the free marketplace and development have become so pervasive that this contemporary economic culture often serves the purposes of a secular religion (what Ivan Illich has called an “industrial certitude” because of its unchallenged “taken for granted” status). This uniquely modern world view has unfolded in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) the coercive effects that greed and envy have had on the securities and satisfactions of everyday social life.

As Trent Schroyer has written in Beyond Western Economics, there are alternative economic cultures that fortify, not undermine, community bonds, mutual aid, and the natural order of bioregions. One of these cultures can be called the vernacular.

In describing a style of language, Illich writes ”vernacular speech is made up of the words and patterns grown on the speaker’s own ground, asopposed to what is grown elsewhere and then transported.” And much like vernacular speech, vernacular architecture connotes a way of dwelling that is built by hand, arising out of the necessities of daily life, in a distinct landscape, that has its own inherent limitations (in contrast to the world of development, where the expectation is always of something more).

As Illich proposes, vernacular is “a simple straightforward word to designate the activities of people when they are not motivated by thoughts of exchange, a word that denotes autonomous non-market-related actions through which people satisfy everyday needs—the actions that by their own true nature escape bureaucratic control, satisfying needs to which, in the very process, they give specific shape.”

It is no accident that, in Totem Salmon, Freeman House has chosen vernacular to describe the work of those who have consciously chosen to become immersed, interactive parts of their natural surround. This is especially so for community-based watershed groups that are restoring damaged
ecosystems. For House, the vernacular provides us with the knowledge in which we might hope to achieve the goal of self-regulation by place-based communities.

The vernacular is often expressed through local custom and taboo in response to the opportunities and constraints offered by native ecosystems. This sense of the vernacular can strengthen adaptive livelihoods which encourage reciprocity and balance especially when addressing the necessities of everyday life. Contrast this to the prevailing belief that human wants are unlimited and the resources to attain these desires are scarce rationalizing the most extreme acts of self interest.
We can shrink the cash economy by surrounding it with non-market vernacular activities for meeting our basic needs (for example, community-supported agriculture and local cooperatives for home building). Learning as we go, we can discover what really works, while keeping one foot in the modern world and one outside of it, until we have reversed contexts: natural provision has been re-embedded in bioregions. On the following page, we offer a glimpse as to how Native Americans in the Hudson Valley traded for necessities during the Colonial era.

This itemization of the value of trade goods can jar the imagination to possibilities outside of industrial certitudes: we can ask how to replace the language of free-market economics and individualism with a language of a common place-based culture. There are realistic choices to be made, outside of the marketplace, for assuring ourselves that our needs can be cared for while both the human and earth communities flourish.
– George Tukel

The Value of Trade Goods in the Hudson Valley During the Colonial Period

During the 1600s,
for one beaver you could get 28 knives,
or 8 lbs. of gunpowder,
or 6 pairs of socks,
or 4 hatchets;
for two beavers you could get 5 ells of duffle cloth;
for three beavers you could get 2 blankets—
but for a single pig, 5 blankets.
You could swap two 14-lb. kettles for 7 hatchets;
or 4 hatchets for 6 pairs of socks,
or 1 hatchet for 2 lbs. of gunpowder.
For one fathom of wampum,
you could obtain 25 hatchets,
or 15 ells of duffle cloth.
In the early 1700s,
for one day of farm labor
a woman could earn 6 lbs. of sugar,
or 6 cans of beer or cider,
or 6 lbs. of lead.
or 2 bottles of rum,
For ten days of farm labor
she could expect in return 1 pig.
For men, a day’s farm labor
was worth 7 lbs. of sugar,
or 7 cans of beer or cider.
Five day’s farm labor was worth 1 kettle,
and that kettle could then be traded for 4 gallons of rum
or 4 hats.
A day’s labor “shooting fire”
(Native American practice of burning fields)
earned the laborer 9 lbs. of sugar.
For 30 days of farm labor,
a man could obtain a gun,
or earn 6 kettles,
or 80 otter, mink, or muskrat hides.
One small bear hide
could be exchanged for 5 lbs. of sugar,
or 1 fox;
for two small bear hides,
the bearer could obtain 1 gallon of rum.
Ten raccoon hides would fetch 1 kettle;
15 raccoon hides, 1 pig.
If you needed a pair of shoes,
they were yours for 15 lbs. of lead,
or 5 otter, mink, or muskrat hides,
or 3 small bear hides,
or 3 fox hides.
A cap would cost you 6 lbs. of sugar,
or 2 bottles of rum,
or a medium bear hide,
or 2 hides of either mink, otter, or muskrat.
A hat could be acquired for 9-14 lbs. of sugar,
or 1 gallon of rum,
or 1 elk hide
(which in itself was worth
3 otter, mink, or muskrat hides).
Based on King James’s 1673 proclamation,
the exchange rate for wampum beads was as follows:
One ell (about 27 inches cloth)
could be obtained for 384 white wampum beads
or 142 purple wampum beads.
For 1 kettle, the going rate was 720 white or 360 purple beads;
for 1 hatchet, 240 white or 120 purple beads;
for 1 beaver skin, 960 white or 480 purple beads.
The price of one passage on the Brooklyn Ferry in 1693
was 48 white beads or 24 purple beads.
And, as American mythology has it,
for the early-17th-century equivalent of $24,
you could purchase the island of Manhattan,
also known as Menatay (“island”)
to the Unami Delaware;
Mahatuouh (“place for gathering bow wood”)
or Manahatta (“rocky island”)
to the Munsee Delaware;
and Mahahachtanienk (“place of general inebriation”)
after the Dutch colonists convinced the native people
to accept rum in exchange for furs
This list was assembled by Evan Pritchard from:
The Mohicans and Their Land, 1609-1730. Shirley Dunn.
The Delaware Indians, a History. C.A. Weslager.
Munsee Indian Trade in Ulster County, New York 1712-1732. Edited by Kees-Jan Waterman and J. Michael Smith
Copyright © 2015 by Evan Pritchard / Linocut: Carol Zaloom