Folk vs. Pop Culture

1
Folk vs. Pop Culture
2
Folk Culture

• Cultural traits such as dress modes, dwellings,
  traditions, and institutions of usually small,
  traditional communities
• Examples?
• Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites
• Select areas of LDCs

3
aka Local Culture

• Local culture group of people in a particular
  place who see themselves as a collective or
  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

4
Popular Culture

• Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and music
  that identify and are part of todays changeable,
  urban-based, media-influenced western societies.
• Examples?
• Blue jeans
• Hip Hop

5

• How did you become a knower of your favorite
  kind of music?
• Where is its hearth?
• How did it reach you?
• What type of diffusion?

6

• Assimilation the minority population reduces or
  loses completely its identifying cultural
  characteristics and blends into the host society
• Acculturation - cultural modification or change
  that results when one culture group adopts traits
  of a dominant society cultural development or
  change through borrowing
• In The Kite Runner, how well did the Afghans
  adapt to America?

7

• Neolocalism seeking out regional culture and
  reinvigorating it (ex. Little Sweden in Kansas)
• Commodification of a culture can compromise
  authenticity becoming a stereotype examples?
• Cherokee
• Branson, Mo
• Guinness and the Irish Pub Co.

8
Rural Local Cultures

• Hutterites
• Branch of Anabaptists
• absolute pacifism
• Live in rural, self-sufficient colonies
• Forbid use tv, radio
• Usually only 1
• telephone for the
• community
• Avoid pictures

9
(No Transcript)
10
Urban Local Cultures

• Ethnic Neighborhoods Hasidic Jews
• Pious
• Distinctive clothes
• Speak Yiddish
• Do not watch tv, but will listen to radio
• Other Urban Local Culture examples
• Italian neighborhoods, Chinatowns, Mexican,
  Russian, Polish

11
(No Transcript)
12
Makah American Indians

• Early culture included whale hunting
• However, whale hunting in the 17th 19th century
  became increasingly commercial and detrimental to
  the whale population
• 1946 International Whaling Commission
  instituted regulations
• 1990s Makah American Indians, Washington
  reinstated whale hunting facing much protest
• 1999 whale killed but not in traditional way
  with canoes and harpoons, but according to IWC
  regulations a .50 caliber rifle

13
Material folk culture regions

• Each region possesses many distinctive items of
  material culture
• Quebec French folk region-grist windmills with
  stone towers, and a bowling game played with
  small metal balls
• Mormon folk culture distinctive hay derricks
  and gridiron farm villages
• Western plains ranching folk culture the beef
  wheel, a windlass used during butchering

14
Quebec

• Petanque, a bowling game played with metal balls,
  diffused to Canada with French immigrants in the
  16th century. It has persisted as one aspect of
  Quebec French folk region.

15
FOLK LIFE

• Material Culture - Artifacts
• Physical, Visible Things
• Musical Instruments, Furniture, Tools, Buildings
• The Built Environment the landscape created
• The Contents of Houses Shops

16

• Nonmaterial Culture
• Mentifacts Sociofacts
• Oral Traditions, Folk Songs, Stories,
  Philosophies
• Includes beliefs, practices, aesthetics, and
  values of a group of people
• Mentifacts represent the ideas and beliefs of a
  culture, for example religion, language or law
• Sociofacts represent the social structures of a
  culture, such as tribes or families.
• artifact is a human-made object which gives
  information about the culture of its creator and
  users

17
Music

• American folk music began as transplants of Old
  World songs
• Northern song
• Featured unaccompanied solo signing in clear hard
  tones
• Featured Fiddle or fife-and-drum
• Southern, Backwoods, and Appalachian song
• Featured unaccompanied high pitch and nasal solo
  singing
• Marked by moral and emotional conflict
• Roots of country music
• Western song
• Factual, narrative songs
• Themes of natural beauty, personal valor, and
  feminine purity
• Some songs reworked as lumberjack ballads

18
(No Transcript)
19
Country and Western music

• Impact of migration of Upland Southern folk on
  bluegrass music
• Migrated to Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and
  Oklahoma plus the Depression era movement of
  Okies and Arkies to the Central Valley of
  California
• Provided natural areas for bluegrass expansion in
  the mid-twentieth century

20
Food and drink

• Local cuisine based on what is available
• Also is based on local customs
• Ex. Geophagy eating dirt,
• common in Africa southern United States,
• may counteract digestive issues,
• common among pregnant women

21
(No Transcript)
22
Folk food regions

• Mexicoabundant use of chili peppers in cooking
  and maize for tortillas
• Caribbean areas combined rice-bean dishes and
  various rum drinks
• Amazonian region monkey and caiman
• Brazil cuscuz (cooked grain) and sugarcane
  brandy
• Pampas style carne asada (roasted beef), wine
  and yerba mate (herbal tea)
• Pacific-coastal Creole manjar blanco (a pudding)

23
Folk food regions

• Latin American foods derive from Amerindians,
  Africans, Spaniards, and Portuguese
• Pattern of Latin American is not simple and
  culinary regions are not as homogeneous as the
  map we saw suggests

24
(No Transcript)
25
Folklore regions

• Displays regional contrasts in much the same way
  as material folk culture
• Folk geographers consider diverse nonmaterial
  phenomena as folktales, dance, music, myths,
  legends, and proverbs
• Most thoroughly studied in Europe
• First research appeared early in the nineteenth
  century
• We know more about vanished folk cultures than
  surviving ones
• Example of Switzerland

26
(No Transcript)
27
Local Culture