1. LOCAL CULTURE, POPULAR CULTURE, AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

2. 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
Popular culture: A large, heterogeneous population, typically urban, with rapidly changing culture
innovation/when-the-diversity-of-types-of- beauty-inspires-science/expert-in-skin-and-hair- types-around-the-world

3. 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
Establishment of neighborhoods, construction of places of worship and community centers

4. Popular Cultures Practiced by large, heterogeneous groups
The product of more developed countries (in North America, Western Europe, Japan) from advances in industrialized technology and increased leisure time
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

5. How Are Local Cultures Sustained?
Preservation of customs: Practices that people routinely follow
Preserving boundaries to keep other cultures out
Avoiding cultural appropriation to keep control over their own culture
Importance of place

6. Rural Local Cultures Isolation Common economic activity among members
Anabaptists
Mennonites
Amish
Hutterites
First Nations

7. Urban Local Cultures Ethnic neighborhoods within cities
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

8. Commodification
Process of making something that was not previously bought and sold a commodity in the marketplace
Material culture objects for sale to outsiders
Tourist value of culture as a whole
Question of authenticity of places
Mystical images
Creation of identity from cultural traits

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

10. How Is Popular Culture Diffused?
Distance-decay: More interaction between closer places than between more distant places
Time-space compression: Interaction dependent on connectedness among places

11. Hearths of Popular Culture Traits
Typically begin with an idea or good and contagious diffusion
Creation or manufacture of popular culture by
Companies (for example, Netflix)
Individuals (for example, Beyonce)
Groups (for example, Coldplay – see below)

12. 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

13. 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

14. Convergence of Cultural Landscapes
Diffusion of skyscrapers as a mark of a city

15. Convergence of Cultural Landscapes
The widespread distribution of businesses and products

16. Convergence of Cultural Landscapes
Borrowing of idealized
landscape images

17. Cultural Landscapes of Local Cultures
Persistence of local cultural landscapes
Presence along “back roads” of wealthy countries

18. Examples Folk or local culture Masai; Amish; Roma; Tuareg; Chinatown
Popular culture
Trekkies; Bollywood; rap; social media ‘challenges’