Folk vs. Pop Culture
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
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
Popular Culture
• Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and
music that identify and are part of today’s
changeable, urban-based, mediainfluenced western societies.
• Examples?
• Blue jeans
• Hip Hop
• 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?
• 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?
• 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.
Rural Local Cultures
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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
Urban Local Cultures
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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
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
• 1990’s – 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
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
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.
FOLK LIFE
• Material Culture - Artifacts
– Physical, Visible Things
• Musical Instruments, Furniture, Tools, Buildings
– The Built Environment – the landscape
created
– The Contents of Houses & Shops
• 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
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
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
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
Folk food regions
• Mexico—abundant 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)
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
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
Local Culture