1. Folk and Popular Culture
Chapter 4

2. Folk and Popular Culture
Key Issues:
Where do Folk and Popular Cultures Originate and Diffuse?
Why is Folk Culture Clustered?
Why is Popular Culture Widely Distributed?
Why Does Globalization of Popular Culture Cause Problems?

3. Where do Folk and Popular Cultures Originate and Diffuse?
What do we mean by ‘culture’?
The Origin of Folk and Popular Cultures
Origin of folk music
Origin of popular music
Diffusion of Folk and Popular Cultures
Diffusion of Amish Folk Culture
Diffusion of Popular Culture Through Sports

4. What is Culture? Culture
The body of material traits, customary beliefs, and social forms that together constitute the distinct tradition of a group of people
Each cultural activity has a distinctive spatial distribution.
Geographers study the relations between material culture and the physical environment.

5. What is Culture? Daily necessities and leisure
Material culture deriving from the necessities of daily life
Culture involving leisure activities
Habit: A repetitive act that a particular individual performs
Custom: A repetitive act of a group
Material culture: A collection of social customs
Folk culture: Varies from place to place at a given time
Popular culture: Varies from time to time at a given place

6. Characteristics of folk culture
Anonymous hearth(s)
Anonymous sources (originators)
Unknown dates
Diffuses slowly and on a small scale
Chiefly through migration
Little change

7. Characteristics of popular culture
Found in large heterogeneous societies
Large territory as compared to folk culture
Usually product of developed countries
Rapid diffusion facilitated by technology
Changes rapidly and frequently

8. Folk Music Composed anonymously and transmitted orally
Contents derived from daily life
Travels via relocation diffusion

9. Popular Music Composed by specific individuals Commercial purposes
Originated ~1800
Tin Pan Alley
Rise of recorded music

10. Differences between popular and folk culture
Popular culture
Consists of large masses of people who conform to and prescribe to ever-changing norms
Large heterogeneous groups
Often highly individualistic and groups are constantly changing
Pronounced division of labor leading to establishment of specialized professions

11. Differences between popular and folk culture
Popular culture
Money based economy prevails
Replacing folk culture in industrialized countries and many developing nations
Folk-made objects give way to their popular equivalent
Item is more quickly or cheaply produced
Easier or time-saving to use
Lends prestige to owner

12. Differences between popular and folk culture
Made up of people who maintain the traditional
Describes people who live in an old-fashioned way-simpler life-style
Rural, cohesive, conservative, largely self-sufficient group, homogeneous in custom
Strong family or clan structure and highly developed rituals
Tradition is paramount — change comes infrequently and slowly

13. Differences between popular and folk culture
Little specialization in labor though duties may vary between genders
Subsistence economy prevails
Individualism and social classes are weakly developed
In parts of the less-developed world, folk cultures remain common
Industrialized countries no longer have unaltered folk cultures

14. Differences between popular and folk culture
Folk culture: The Amish in the United States
Perhaps the nearest modem equivalent in Anglo-America
German-American farming sect
Largely renounces products and labor-saving devices of the industrial age
Horse-drawn buggies still used, and faithful own no autos or appliances
Central religion concept of demut, ”humility,” reflects weakness of individualism and social class
Rarely marry outside their sect

15. FOLK CULTURE : DISTRIBUTION OF THE AMISH

16. Differences between popular and folk culture
Typically, bearers of folk culture combine folk and nonfolk elements in their lives
Includes both material and nonmaterial elements
Material culture includes all objects or “things” made and used by members of a cultural group—material elements are visible
Nomnaterial culture, including folklore, can be defined as oral, including the wide range of tales, songs, lore, beliefs, superstitions, and customs
Other aspects of nonmaterial culture include dialects, religions, and worldviews
Folk geography—defined as the study of the spatial patterns and ecology of folklife

17. Soccer’s folk culture origins
Eleventh-century England
Denmark ~1018–1042
“Kick the Dane’s Head”
Football Association, 1863

18. Soccer as popular culture
Late 1800s diffused to continental Europe
Holland, 1870s
Spain, 1893
Diffused via British imperial expansion
Russia, 1887

19. Surviving folk sports Cricket Ice hockey Wushu Baseball Football
Lacrosse