VERNACULAR CULTURE REGIONS

A vernacular culture region is the product of the spatial perception of the population at large—a composite of the mental maps of the people. Such regions vary greatly in size, from small districts covering only part of a city or town to huge, multistate areas. Like most other geographical regions, they often overlap and usually have poorly defined borders.

Even though cadastral surveys (surveys that define the boundaries and subdivisions of public lands) and official atlases with official place names are the basis for modern governments and businesses, people all over the world still use vernacular references to navigate everyday life. In conversation, people will often say, “She lives over in the Valley” or “He opened a business near the Old West End” rather than reciting a city name or street address (Figure 2.28). Such terms are embedded in the thick cultural and historical knowledge of local daily life, which we take for granted until we move to a new city or country and have to learn our way around.

Official maps and GPS instruments are not much help, because vernacular regional boundaries are fuzzy and indefinite and often their vernacular names are not even included. Great Britain’s Ordnance Survey acknowledges that people navigate on a daily basis using a geography related to but distinct from the official maps. The Ordnance Survey is the government agency charged with surveying and mapping every aspect of the country. In the late 2000s it created the Vernacular Geography initiative. One project is to create an alternative name gazetteer whereby one could learn that “Spaghetti Junction” refers to the M6 Motorway Junction 6 in Birmingham (Figure 2.29). Another project links with geographers at the universities of Cardiff and Sheffield to gather geotagged data from the web, both by automatic means and online public surveys. The ultimate goal is to make vernacular regions and places more widely accessible so that, for instance, dispatchers for emergency responders can understand local descriptions of locations.

Not only are the boundaries of vernacular regions fuzzy, they are dynamic, changing as everyday perceptions of geography and identity transform. Geographer Shrinidhi Ambinakudige’s 2009 study revisited vernacular understandings of the U.S. “South” and “Dixie” first mapped in the 1970s and 1980s. Dixie is distinguished from the South because the terms convey different cultural meanings. Dixie is associated with the antebellum rural, plantation culture and the South with the more recent urbanizing and industrializing “new” South. Ambinakudige mapped the frequency of occurrence of business names that use one of these terms in the Yellow Pages. He found that over the past few decades, the boundaries of both regions are eroding, though Dixie is doing so at a much faster rate (Figure 2.30). Moreover, the strongest associations with Dixie and the South occur in rural areas, with metropolitan areas showing weakening associations. One explanation for the decline in Dixie and Southern identities, particularly in cities, is the large numbers of new residents migrating into the region from elsewhere. From this study we might generalize that vernacular regions are in flux, with established regions shrinking or expanding and new regions constantly coming into being.