Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Key Questions
For Chapter 4
1.
What are local and popular cultures?
2.
How are local cultures sustained?
3.
How is popular culture diffused?
4.
How can local and popular cultures be seen in the cultural
landscape?
The variety of ways people choose to accept, reject,
or alter the diffusion of popular cultural practices is
remarkable. Some local cultures rely primarily on religion
to maintain their belief systems, others rely on commu-
nity celebrations or on family structures, and still others
on a lack of interaction with other cultures.
Local cultures are constantly redefi ning or refi ning
themselves based on interactions with other cultures (local
and popular) and diffusion of cultural practices (local and
popular). Local cultures also affect places by establishing
neighborhoods, building churches or community centers
to celebrate important days, and expressing their material
and nonmaterial cultures in certain places.
The
material culture
of a group of people includes
things they construct, such as art, houses, clothing, sports,
dance, and foods.
Nonmaterial culture
includes beliefs,
practices, aesthetics (what they see as attractive), and val-
ues of a group of people. What members of a local culture
produce in their material culture refl ects the beliefs and
values of their nonmaterial culture.
Unlike local cultures, which are found in relatively
small areas, popular culture is ubiquitous and can change in a
matter of days or hours. Popular culture is practiced by a het-
erogeneous group of people: people across identities and
across the world. Like local culture, popular culture encom-
passes music, dance, clothing, food preferences, religious
practices, and aesthetic values. The main paths of diffusion of
popular culture are the transportation, marketing, and com-
munication networks that interlink vast parts of the world
(see Chapter 14 for further discussion of these networks).
Fashions diffuse incredibly quickly today. When Kate
Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, graced Westminster
Abbey in a lace wedding gown designed by Sarah Burton
for the House of Alexander McQueen at an estimated cost
of $65,000, dress designers around the world interpreted or
copied the gown within hours (Fig. 4.2). Fewer than ten
hours after the wedding aired at 5:30
WHAT ARE LOCAL AND POPULAR
CULTURES?
A
culture
is a group of belief systems, norms, and val-
ues practiced by a people. Although this defi nition of cul-
ture sounds simple, the concept of culture is actually quite
complex. A group of people who share common beliefs can
be recognized as a culture in one of two ways: (1) the people
call themselves a culture or (2) other people (including aca-
demics) can label a certain group of people as a culture.
Traditionally, academics label cultural groups as folk cul-
tures or as part of popular culture. The idea is that the
folk
culture
is small, incorporates a homogeneous population,
is typically rural, and is cohesive in cultural traits, whereas
popular culture
is large, incorporates heterogeneous pop-
ulations, is typically urban, and experiences quickly chang-
ing cultural traits. Instead of using this polarity of folk and
popular cultures, some academics now see folk and popular
cultures as ends of a continuum, defi ning most cultures as
fi tting somewhere between folk and popular.
We fi nd folk culture to be a limiting concept because
it requires us to create a list of characteristics and look for
cultures that meet the list. This methodology of defi ning
folk cultures leaves much to be desired. Once we have our
list of characteristics, we must ask ourselves, are the Amish
a folk culture? Are the Navajo a folk culture? And it is in
this very process that we get frustrated with the concept of
folk culture. It is not how we academics defi ne a culture
that matters, it is
how the people defi ne themselves
that counts.
We are interested in questions such as: do the Amish
have a group identity, and what cultural practices do they
share? How do the Amish navigate through popular culture
and defend their local customs? Why do a group of Americans
in a small town identify themselves as Swedish Americans and
hold festivals to commemorate important Swedish holidays,
while other Swedish Americans in other parts of the country
function completely unaware of the Swedish holidays? Why
do certain ethnic holidays such as St. Patrick's Day transcend
ethnicity to be celebrated as a part of popular culture?
In this chapter, we chose to use the concept of
local cul-
ture
rather than folk culture. A local culture is a group of peo-
ple in a particular place who see themselves as a collective or a
community, who share experiences, customs, and traits, and
who work to preserve those traits and customs in order to
claim uniqueness and to distinguish themselves from others.
. Eastern Time,
dress designers at Kleinfeld Bridal Salon in New York had
replicated Middleton's dress, and they started selling it for
$3500 within 48 hours.
In popular culture, fashion trends spread quite quickly
through the interconnected world; it is a classic case of
hierarchical diffusion
. Hierarchical diffusion can occur
through a hierarchy of places. The hierarchy in the fashion
world typically begins with the runways of major fashion
houses in world cities, including London, Milan, Paris, and
a
.
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