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 today’s 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
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

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

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
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

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

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

22. 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)

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

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

27. Local Culture