1. LOCAL CULTURE, POPULAR CULTURE, AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES Chapter 4

2. What Are Local and Popular Cultures?  culture: group of belief systems, norms, and values practiced by people - group of people who share common beliefs are recognized as a culture in 2 ways 1- people call themselves a culture 2- others label them as a culture  Folk Culture : small, incorporates a homogenous population, typically rural, cohesive in cultural traits: labeled by academics or others – not labeled by members of the group themselves

3. What Are Local and Popular Cultures?  Local culture: A group in a particular place that sees itself as a community, shares experiences, customs, and traits, and works to preserve those traits and customs to distinguish the group from others – focuses more on how people define themselves: matters more than how others define them (folk culture)  Popular culture : A large, heterogeneous population, typically urban, with rapidly changing culture: ubiquitous & can change quickly

4. Local Cultures  Acceptance vs. rejection of popular culture traits  Impact on the landscape  Nonmaterial culture : Beliefs, practices, aesthetics, values  Material culture : Constructed items, frequently expressing nonmaterial culture: art, housing, clothing, sports, dance, food  Establishment of neighborhoods, construction of places of worship and community centers

5. Popular Cultures  Practiced by large, heterogeneous group  Rapid spread of new traits, often by hierarchical diffusion from a hearth, through transportation, communication, and marketing networks  Interaction between local and popular cultures  Patronage by local cultures of popular culture services  Adoption by popular culture of local culture traits

6. Popular Cultures  De Blij and co-authors don’t view pop culture and local culture as the two extremes of a continuum  they see them as being on the same plane, affecting people and places in different ways across different scales  Local and popular culture are constantly navigating through barrage of customs diffused from each other across scales  Ex: century old customs of local cultures to popular culture ……. Dream catchers

7. Popular Cultures  Hearths of hierarchical diffusion  Paris, NY (fashion)  2nd tier major fashion houses  by people  designers are the hearth  models next tier  Celebrities  Editors and writers of magazines  Subscribers to magazines  Shoppers in retail stores and malls

8. Popular Cultures & Local Cultures  Both are constantly navigating through a barrage of customs diffused from each other across scales  Through global communications they link certain parts of the world and distance others -Frontline: Merchants of Cool -How popular culture is influenced by media conglomerates in order to sell your generation products -To view the entire video search for “PBS Frontline merchants of cool”PBS Frontline merchants of cool

9. How Are Local Cultures Sustained?  Assimilation policies : To force people of indigenous cultures to adopt dominant cultures  Forcing tribes to adopt agriculture and renounce traditional ways of life  No formal apology offered to Amer. Indian people for destruction of culture, treaty violations, genocide  Preservation of customs : Practices that people routinely follow  Local culture is sustained through custom  often define themselves as unique, creating boundaries around their culture and distinguishing themselves from other local cultures  Two goals: keeping other cultures out while keeping their own  Has become more difficult as modern communications expose the youth to popular culture

10. How Are Local Cultures Sustained?  Avoiding cultural appropriation to keep control over their own culture  Process by which other cultures adopt customs and knowledge and use them for their own benefit  this has become a major concern of Loc. Cult. - cultural knowledge like musical expression, natural pharmaceuticals are being privatized by people outside the local culture and used to accumulate wealth or prestige  Importance of place  Geographers recognize that local cultures want to maintain control over customs and knowledge.  Places represent the local culture’s values  N.O. Louisiana

11. Rural Local Cultures  Isolation  Common economic activity among members  Anabaptists  Mennonites  Amish  Hutterites  Makah Indians, Neah Bay, Washington  Little Sweden, U.S.A.— Lindsborg, Kansas

12. Rural Local Cultures  Anabaptists (baptized again)  b/c of they often live I rural areas they have an easier time maintaining their cultures b/c of their isolation  Mennonites  Amish  Hutterites  Major diff. between Hutt. And Men/Amish is that they live communally  Live in colonies of about 100 People  425 colonies in Minnesota, SD. ND, Sask., Mon., & Alberta  Religion is the lynchpin in every colony  Ministers top of society, speak in archaic German  Separate tasks for men and women (patriarchal society)  Marriages happen across colonies, women move to husband’s colony  Women expected to rear many children but society is responsible for raising and disciplining the child  Specialize in diversified agriculture, don’t shy away from modern technology  Towns reflect their values and allow unfettered practice of culture

13. Rural Local Cultures  Makah American Indians  Neah Bay, Washington state  1999 reinstated the whale hunt after the grey whale was taken off endanger species list  Makah sought refuge in the cultural traditions of their past  Hunted under the eye of the International Whaling Commission  Wanted to hunt traditionally: harpoons in canoes  Forced to use rifles : more humane way of killing  Soon after it began the hunt was called off and the case made its way through the courts  Summary of Makah attempts to reinstate the hunt Summary of Makah attempts to reinstate the hunt

15. Little Sweden, Kansas Town of 3300 - few decades ago had little or no sign of Swedishness transformed itself into a place where Swedish culture is celebrated - cynics argue it was purely economic - festival days the town dresses in peasant clothes from the 1800s -neolocalism: seeing out regional culture and reinvigoration it in response to the uncertainty of the modern world -Makah, Hutterites, Lindsborg : all share the choice to maintain or reconnect with their local culture in response to being inundated by popular culture

16. Urban Local Cultures  Ethnic neighborhoods within cities: built a world apart from macro culture  Creates a space to practice customs  Can cluster businesses, houses of worship, schools to support local culture  Migration into ethnic neighborhoods can quickly change an ethnic neighborhood

17. Commodification  Process of making something that was not previously bought and sold a commodity in the marketplace  Material culture objects for sale to outsiders  Jewelry, clothing, food, games  Tourist value of culture as a whole, “observing traditional culture” Amish communities, Katrina Bus tours  Question of authenticity of places  In order to experience authenticity people need to experience the complexity of a place directly rather than the stereotype of the place  Mystical images  Creation of identity from cultural traits  Guinness: response to decline in sales at home of their beer they commodified it by marketing 5 Irish pub prototypes and franchising them around the world  Made to provide and “authentic” experience of a traditional Irish pub

18. Irish Pub Company Pubs Irish Pub Company and Guinness Brewing Company created 5 models of pubs and export them around the world.

19. How Is Popular Culture Diffused?  Distance-decay : More interaction between closer places than between more distant places  Transportation and communication technologies have altered distance decay  Time-space compression : Interaction dependent on connectedness among places  How quickly things diffused refers to how interlinked they are…. Facebook, Internet communication, TV  Places that lack modern tech., comm., transpo., are now more removed from interconnected places  Rather than diffusing at constant rates across similar distances technology links some areas more rapidly than others

20. Hearths of Popular Culture Traits  Typically begin with an idea or good and contagious diffusion  Individuals (for example, Dave Matthews)  Start out on college campuses  Spread by word of mouth – contagious  Then became hierarchical as it spread through college towns in the country  Worked hard to establish audiences  Rely on fan base for support and diffusion of music Manufacturing Hearth  Creation or manufacture of popular culture by  Companies (for example, MTV) Viacom manufactures pop culture

21. Hearths of Popular Culture Traits

22. Stemming the Tide of Popular Culture  Rapid diffusion of popular culture from major hearths  United States  Europe  Japan  Resistance  Government subsidies: Media in local languages  Dominant cultures of wealthy countries: Fundamentalism  Minorities in wealthy countries: Cultural preservation  Political elites in poorer countries: Nationalist ideologies  Social and ethnic minorities in poorer countries: Greater autonomy

23. Replacing Old Hearths with New  Big three sports  1800-1900s became nationally popular due to transportation changes – railroads  Telegraph : enabled reporters to publish scores  Contracts increased as more attention garnered  Eventually advert. contracts $ surpasses salaries of players  X Games - skateboarding, snowboarding, moto x - expansion of “extreme” sports has been driven by advertisers who court the 12-34 age demographic -have become more popular, mainstream, and commodified by sponsors who seek opportunities to tap into their fan base

24. How Can Local and Popular Cultures Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?  Visible human imprint on the land  Placelessness : Similarity of places of popular cultures everywhere

25. How Can Local and Popular Cultures Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?  Placelessness: loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape to the point that one place looks like the next  Architectural forms and planning ideas have diffused around the world  Business and products have become widespread … leave a distinctive landscape stamp on far flung places  Borrowing of idealized landscape images, blurs distinctiveness of place  Skyscrapers  Led to the clearing of wide areas around the structures  Wide streets to promote access  Airports, college food courts, town centers, all look the same - Las Vegas: extreme version of Global-local continuum : what happens at one scale is not independent of what happens at other scales. Cultural borrowing and mixing is happening all around the world Glocalization: people and places mediate and alter their regional, national, and global processes - place comes out of a multitude of dynamic interactions among local distinctiveness and wider scaled events

26.  Syncretism -a fusion of old and new to create a new cultural trait-this concept is similar to re-territorialization. The examples below are foreign foods that have been modified to fit American tastes.

27. Convergence of Cultural Landscapes  Diffusion of skyscrapers as a mark of a city

28. Convergence of Cultural Landscapes  The widespread distribution of businesses and products

29. Convergence of Cultural Landscapes  Borrowing of idealized landscape images

30. Cultural Landscapes of Local Cultures  Persistence of local cultural landscapes  Presence along “back roads” of wealthy countries  “Mormon landscape” symmetrical brick houses, look like E. Coast, unpainted fences, poplar trees for shade, bishops storehouses, wide streets, farmers clustered together rather than establ. a single farmstead  Clustering of houses together for protection and to join together for services in the village chapel