1. Folk and Popular Culture
Insanely Rad Scot, with Kilt and Three-Fin Thruster
Woman with Oxcart, Myanmar

2. The Forbidden City
Beijing, China 2004

4. Beijing, China 2004

5. Important Terms
Custom – frequent repetition of an act until it becomes characteristic of a group of people..
Habit – repetitive act performed by an individual.
Folk Culture – traditionally practiced by a small, homogeneous, rural group living in relative isolation.
Popular Culture – found in a large, heterogeneous society that shares certain habits despite differences in personal characteristics.
Material Culture – the physical objects produced by a culture in order to meet its material needs: food, clothing, shelter, arts, and recreation. Carl Sauer (Berkeley, 1930s – 1970s).

6. Folk Culture – rapidly changing and/or disappearing throughout much of the world.
Guatemalan Market
Portuguese Fishing Boat
Turkish Camel Market

7. Folk Culture Stable and close knit Usually a rural community
Tradition controls
Resistance to change
Buildings erected without architect or blueprint using locally available building materials
anonymous origins, diffuses slowly through migration. Develops over time.
Clustered distributions: isolation/lack of interaction breed uniqueness and ties to physical environment.

8. FOLK ARCHITECTURE
Effects on Landscape: usually of limited scale and scope.
Agricultural: fields, terraces, grain storage
Dwellings: historically created from local materials: wood, brick, stone, skins; often uniquely and traditionally arranged; always functionally tied to physical environment.

9. FOLK ARCHITECTURE

10. FOLK FOOD
How did such differences develop?

11. U.S. House Types by Region
Fig : Small towns in different regions of the eastern U.S. have different combinations of five main house types.

13. North American Folk Culture Regions

14. Cohokia Mounds, Illinois
Folk Culture and the Land
Terraced Rice Fields, Thailand
Hogan, Monument Valley, AZ
Cohokia Mounds, Illinois

15. Hog Production and Food Cultures
Fig. 4-6: Annual hog production is influenced by religious taboos against pork consumption in Islam and other religions. The highest production is in China, which is largely Buddhist.

16. Taboo – a restriction on behavior imposed by social custom
Taboo – a restriction on behavior imposed by social custom. Food Taboos: Jews – can’t eat animals that chew cud, that have cloven feet; can’t mix meat and milk, or eat fish lacking fins or scales; Muslims – no pork; Hindus – no cows (used for oxen during monsoon)
Washing Cow in Ganges

17. Popular Culture
Wide Distribution: differences from place to place uncommon, more likely differences at one place over time.
Housing: only small regional variations, more generally there are trends over time
Food: franchises, cargo planes, superhighways and freezer trucks have eliminated much local variation. Limited variations in choice regionally, esp. with alcohol and snacks. Substantial variations by ethnicity.

18. Popular Culture
Clothing: Jeans and have become valuable status symbols in many regions including Asia and Russia despite longstanding folk traditions.

19. Diffusion of TV, 1954–1999
Fig. 4-14: Television has diffused widely since the 1950s, but some areas still have low numbers of TVs per population.

20. A Mental Map of Hip Hop
Fig. 4-3: This mental map places major hip hop performers near other similar performers and in the portion of the country where they performed.

21. Popular Culture
Effects on Landscape: breeds homogenous, “placeless” (Relph, 1976), landscape
Complex network of roads and highways
Commercial Structures tend towards ‘boxes’
Dwellings may be aesthetically suggestive of older folk traditions
Planned and Gated Communities more and more common
Disconnect with landscape: indoor swimming pools, desert surfing.

22. Surfing in Tempe, Arizona Are places still tied to local landscapes?

23. McDonald’s, Tokyo, Japan
Swimming Pool, West Edmonton Mall, Canada
McDonald’s, Jerusalem

24. Problems with the Globalization of Culture
Often Destroys Folk Culture – or preserves traditions as museum pieces or tourism gimmicks.
Mexican Mariachis; Polynesian Navigators; Cruise Line Simulations
Change in Traditional Roles and Values; Polynesian weight problems
Satellite Television, Baja California

25. Problems with the Globalization of Popular Culture
Western Media Imperialism?
U.S., Britain, and Japan dominate worldwide media.
Glorified consumerism, violence, sexuality, and militarism?
U.S. (Networks and CNN) and British (BBC) news media provide/control the dissemination of information worldwide.
These networks are unlikely to focus or provide third world perspective on issues important in the LDCs.

26. Environmental Problems with Cultural Globalization
Accelerated Resource Use through Accelerated Consumption
Furs: minx, lynx, jaguar, kangaroo, whale, sea otters (18th Century Russians) fed early fashion trends
Inefficient over-consumption of Meats (10:1), Poultry (3:1), even Fish (fed other fish and chicken) by meat-eating pop cultures
Mineral Extraction for Machines, Plastics and Fuel
New Housing and associated energy and water use.
Golf courses use valuable water and destroy habitat worldwide.
Pollution: waste from fuel generation and discarded products, plastics, marketing and packaging materials

28. “Progress?”

29. “They’re growing houses in the fields between the towns
“They’re growing houses in the fields between the towns.” - John Gorka, Folk Singer

30. Beijing, China
Palm Springs, CA

31. Fiji

32. Marboloro Man in Egypt

33. Cultural Identity: Race and Ethnicity
Culture groups
Few or many characteristics (language, religion, race, food, etc.)
Subculture
Races
Single species
Secondary biological characteristics
Ethnic groups
Ethnocentrism

34. What race are these guys?

35. Race
Does not exist on a scientific level, despite influence of the idea.
Biological variation is real; the order we impose on this variation by using the concept of race is not. Race is a product of the human mind, not of nature.
Based on a three category system developed in Europe in the 18th century: caucasians, mongoloids, and blacks.
The truth is that there is very little fundamental genetic variety between humans and no way to tell where one category stops and another begins. Race is literally skin deep. There has not been enough time for much genetic variation. We do not have distinct “races” or “subspecies.”

36. Japan Town, San Francisco, 1910
Race in the U.S.
Genetic mixing is so common and complete that most geographers dismiss race as a category since it can not be clearly tied to place.
Rosa Parks
Japan Town, San Francisco, 1910
Dogs Used to Control Protestors, 1957

37. What is ethnicity? How is it different than race?
1. identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth. Thus: customs, cultural characteristics, language, common history, homeland, etc...
2. a socially created system of rules about who belongs and who does not belong to a particular group based on actual or perceived commonality of origin, race, culture. This notion is clearly tied to place.
Turkish
Armenian
Puerto Rican
Mongolian
Japanese
Kazakh
Thai
Chinese

38. Nationalities and States
Nationality - legally it is a term encompassing all the citizens of a state, but most definitions refer now to an identity with a group of people who generally occupy a specific territory and bound together by a sense of unity arising from shared ethnicity, customs, belief, or legal status. Such unity rarely exists today within a state.
State - a politically organized territory that is administered by a sovereign government

39. Nationalism Helps create national unity Can be very dangerous
Can breed intolerance of difference and Others