LOCAL CULTURE POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES Chapter

LOCAL CULTURE, POPULAR CULTURE, AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES Chapter 4

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 (Amish) • Popular culture: A large, heterogeneous population, typically urban, with rapidly changing culture

Local Cultures • Acceptance vs. rejection of popular culture traits (Hutterites-Agr. Technology) • 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

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 (Wal-Mart) – Adoption by popular culture of local culture traits (Henna or Kabbalah art going mainstream)

How Are Local Cultures Sustained? • Assimilation policies: To force people of indigenous cultures to adopt dominant cultures or can happen naturally • Preservation of customs: Practices that people routinely follow • Preserving boundaries to keep other cultures out to avoid extinction/contamination • Avoiding cultural appropriation to keep control over their own culture-Medicines • Importance of place

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

Rural Local Cultures Case Studies The Makah Indians • Hunted whales for 1, 500 years, but the U. S. government stopped them in the 1920 s; the gray whale had become endangered. • 1994, NOAA removed the eastern North Pacific gray whale from the endangered list. Little Sweden • Lindsborg, Kansas • In the 1950 s, the townspeople began celebrating their Swedish heritage, the local culture of the Swedish immigrants. • Neolocalism seeking out the regional culture and reinvigorating it in response to the uncertainty of the modern world.

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

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 – Creation of identity from cultural traits

How are local cultures sustained? Irish Pub Company and Guinness Brewing Company created 5 models of pubs and exports them around the world.

How are local cultures sustained? The lost city • Sun City, South Africa. The Lost City resort in Sun City evokes the mystical images of Africa described in a legend.

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

How Is Popular Culture Diffused?

Hearths of Popular Culture Traits • Typically begin with an idea or good and contagious diffusion or hierarchical diffusion • Creation or manufacture of popular culture by – Companies (for example, MTV) – Individuals (for example, Dave Matthews)

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 – Minorities in wealthy countries: Cultural preservation – Political elites in poorer countries: Nationalist ideologies – Social and ethnic minorities in poorer countries: Greater autonomy from regimes

Manufacturing a Hearth • Reterritorialization of popular culture: a term referring to a process in which people start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and place, and making it their own. • Ex. : reterritorialization of hip hop

Replacing Old Hearths with New: Beating out the Big Three Sports • The Big 3: Football, Basketball, Baseball Surfing (1960 s) Skateboarding (1970 s) Snowboarding (1980 s) Ultimate Fighting (1990 s) • Corporations must create the “new” so that they have something to sell that is “socially desirable. ”

How Can Local and Popular Cultures Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape? • Visible human imprint of human activity on the land • Placelessness: Similarity of places of popular cultures everywhere or the loss of uniqueness

Convergence of Cultural Landscapes 1. Diffusion of particular architectural forms

Convergence of Cultural Landscapes 2. The widespread distribution of businesses and products

Convergence of Cultural Landscapes 3. Borrowing of idealized landscape images Which one is the real Venice?

Cultural Landscapes of Local Cultures • Persistence of local cultural landscapes • Presence along “back roads” of wealthy countries • Clustering of farmhouses on Mormon land