Tata: A family name, they are
members of the Parsi religion, and
they own many businesses
throughout India and the world.
Parsi: An
ethnic
group and
religion.
Came to India from Persia
(Iran) sometime between the
eighth and tenth centuries.
The main cultural
practice that is leading to
a dwindling number of
Parsi is that only children
born of two Parsi parents.
That means that you can
not be recognized if you
have one parent that is
not part of the Parsi
community.
What Are Local and Popular Cultures?
Culture: A group of belief systems, norms, and values practiced by a people.
A group of people who share common beliefs can be recognized as a culture by one of two ways.
1. The people call
themselves a
culture.
2. Other people
(including
academics) can
label a certain
group of people as
a culture.
Folk Culture: Is small,
incorporates a
homogeneous
population, is
typically rural, and is
cohesive in cultural
traits.
Popular Culture: Is
large, incorporates
heterogeneous
populations, is
typically urban, and
experiences quickly
changing cultural
traits.
Authors of this book tend to use local culture
rather than folk culture. Local culture is defined
as a group of people in a particular place who see
themselves as a community, who share
experiences, customs, and traits, and who work
to preserve those in order to claim uniqueness
and to distinguish themselves form others.
Material culture: Things that a group
of people constructs, such as art,
houses, clothing, sports, dance, and
foods.
Nonmaterial culture: Beliefs,
practices, aesthetics (what they see
as attractive), and values of a group
of people.
Hierarchical diffusion is basically when an idea or
material thing is thought up or made by someone who
is very important and has lots of connections to the
world. After they share their idea or thing, it is pretty
much remade slightly different by many different
people in a class lower than them. that continues to
happen until it gets down to department stores and or
people who are not as connected to the world.
Fashion is a very good example of this.
Cultural Hearth: The
point of origin of ideas or
products.
How Are Local Cultures Sustained?
Assimilation policies were used
to assimilate indigenous
peoples into the dominant
culture.
Indigenous population in: America-
Indians, Australia- Aboriginals, and
Canada- First Nations and Inuit.
Australian and Canadian governments apologized
to their indigenous people for inflicting grief,
suffering, and loss on these our fellow Australians
and for Canada, they have apologized for creating a
void in many lives and communities.
The answer to the title of the
section's question is that the
cultures try to keep the popular
culture out and their culture in.
These are also the two
goals of local cultures.
Custom: A practice
that a group of
people routinely
follows.
Cultural appropriation:
The process by which
other cultures adopt
customs and knowledge
and use them for their
own benefit.
Local cultures work to
avoid this by keeping
their customs and
their knowledge to
themselves.
Places are important to local cultures because they keep popular
culture out, keep their culture in , and maintain control over customs
and knowledge. Places reinforce their culture and beliefs.
Rural Local Cultures
The Anabaptists are followers of the
new religion that broke off from both
the Catholic Church and the new
Protestant churches.
They
maintained
their culture
by moving to
rural areas
to live apart,
alone, and
avoid
persecution.
The Hutterites are different from other
Anabaptist groups because they are the
only group who live communally rather
than living with immediate family on a
farmstead.
They are mostly
concentrated in Alberta,
Saskatchewan, and
Manitoba.
Hutterite culture: They join every night as well as
Sunday's, they readily accept technologies that help
them in their agricultural pursuits, it is common for
young Hutterites to use online dating sites to find other
eligible Hutterite partners, also their whole lives revolve
around farming.
When a local culture discontinues its
major economic activity, it faces teh
challenge of maintaining the customs that
depended on the economic activity, and, in
turn, sustaining its culture.
When a local
culture decides to
reengage in a
traditional
economic activity
or other cultural
custom, it can no
longer decide in
isolation.
When the Makah
reinstates the whale
hunt, tribal members
interviewed by
journalists spoke to
their traditional
culture as their
reason for returning
to the whale hunt.
Little Sweden, USA is an example of neolocalism because
they seeking out the regional culture and reinvigorating it
in response to the uncertainty of the modern world.
Urban Local Cultures
Ethnic neighborhood: practically a world
apart, a place to practice their customs,
within a major city.
Examples of ethnic neighborhoods are Hasidic Jews in
Brooklyn, New York, and Italian Americans in the North
End of Boston Massachusetts.
Having their own ethnic neighborhood enables members of a local culture in an
urban area to set themselves apart and practice their customs.
Local Cultures, Cultural Appropriation, and Authenticity of Places
The greatest challenge to local cultures in urban areas
is that they find themselves trying to keep their
customs for themselves, to prevent others from using
their customs as an economic benefit.
Commodification: The process through which something that previously was not regarded as an
object to be bought or sold becomes on in the world market.
An example is a said waffle that is half eaten by President Obama.
An example of a
corporation
commodifying local
culture is the Irish Pub
Company and Guinness.
Cultural Authenticity: Actually how authentic a said extravaganza, item, or idea is from the culture.
How Is Popular Culture Diffused?
Most Facebook users are in the US,
with much of Europe, India, and
Australia to follow. There are very
few Facebook users in China and
much of Africa.
Reasons for these patters would be that the US has lots of access to
Facebook through many different technologies, while places in Africa do not.
The Chinese government just simply does not allow them to use Facebook.
Instead, the Chinese has made a copy of Facebook called Renren.
Distance Decay: When an
idea becomes lesser
known and more vague
the longer you are away
from it. Time-Space
Compression: Explains
how quickly innovations
diffuse and refers to how
interlinked two places
are through
transportation and
communication
technologies.
Airplanes, high-speed trains, express-ways, wireless
connections, fax machines, e-mail, and telephone are
all examples of modern technologies that are
contributing to the compression of time and space
connectivity.
Hearths of Popular Culture
Dave Matthews Band and many others use
contagious and hierarchical diffusion by beginning
on college campuses or in college towns and
building form their base to gain popularity.
Corporations such as Viacom generate and produce popular culture by pushing innovations
in popular culture through the communications infrastructure that links them with the rest of
the world.
Reterritorialization: A
term that refers 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 making it their
own.
The cultural hearth of hip and rap music is the inner
cities of New York and Los Angeles.
Hip hop diffused abroad by immigrants living in major cities.
Hip hop was used to address major
concerns in their local culture.
Replacing Old Hearths with New: Beating Out the Big Three in Popular Sports
Advances in transportation and communication
helped baseball, football, and basketball diffuse
because they could now travel to different places to
compete against teams and people could now listen
on the radio scores to various games.
Advertising contracts and corporate sponsorship padded and
eventually surpassed the salaries of the biggest sports heroes.
ESPN's X games and video games
helped extreme sports diffuse by
propelling them into popular
culture.
Corporate sponsorship has
contributed to Shawn White because
he pretty much went on the same
path as Tony Hawk and after proving
himself, any large corporations
wanted to sponsor him.
“The need for corporations to create the ‘new’ so that they have something to sell
that is ‘socially desirable’ applies to MTV and the music industry, as well as to major
sports promoters and marketers.” Explanation: Those corporations want to come up
with the next big thing so they get all of the credit and publicity, also they want
famous people to want to be the face of them.
Stemming the Tide of Popular Culture
- Losing the Local?
Music,
television, and
film are most
influenced by
North America,
Japan, Western
Europe, South
Korea.
Hallyu or Hanryu are waves of
South Korean popular culture that
move quickly through Asia and have
resulted in significant growth in the
SK entertainment and tourism
industries. An example is K-Pop.
The French government is rationing how much people can be
exposed to outside influences to protect French culture.
The French are doing this, the Chinese are not allowing
people to use American born products and social medias,
and the Anabaptist groups are moving into a very
secluded area all to protect their cultural identities.
How Can Local and Popular Cultures be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?
Cultural
landscape: The
visible imprint
of human
activity on the
landscape.
Placelessness: The
loss of uniqueness
of place in the
cultural landscape
to the point that
one place looks
like the next.
According to the World Distribution of Skyscrapers Map, the most skyscrapers are in the very large
cities across the world. This is what I would expect.
A very good example of a borrowing of an idealized landscape image is Las Vegas. On the
strip you can find all of the famous monuments and popular structures that are around
the world, not native to Las Vegas.
Global-Local Continuum: A notion
that emphasizes that what happens
at one scale is not independent of
what happens at other scales.
Glocalization: A process where people in a
local place mediate and alter regional,
national, and global processes.
Cultural Landscapes of Local Cultures
Mormons in the American West form clustered settlements because they needed
to protect each other because the religious followers were experiencing
persecution in the East and because the settlers' fears were raised by stories of
Indians attacking villages in the West.
In a Mormon village in the American West, each block in the town was
quite large, allowing for one-acre city lots where a farmer can keep
livestock and other farming supplies in town.
The Mormon cultural region is now mostly in Utah,
there are some in Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and
Wyoming.