Chapter 4 Notes

Chapter 4 Notes

Field Note
1. Tata: A family name, they are members of the Parsi religion, and they own many businesses throughout India and the world.
2. Parsi: An ethnic group and religion.
  1. Came to India from Persia (Iran) sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries.
3. 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?
1. Culture: A group of belief systems, norms, and values practiced by a people.
  1. A group of people who share common beliefs can be recognized as a culture by one of two ways.
    1. 1. The people call themselves a culture.
    2. 2. Other people (including academics) can label a certain group of people as a culture.
2. Folk Culture: Is small, incorporates a homogeneous population, is typically rural, and is cohesive in cultural traits.
  1. Popular Culture: Is large, incorporates heterogeneous populations, is typically urban, and experiences quickly changing cultural traits.
  2. 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.
3. Material culture: Things that a group of people constructs, such as art, houses, clothing, sports, dance, and foods.
  1. Nonmaterial culture: Beliefs, practices, aesthetics (what they see as attractive), and values of a group of people.
4. 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.
  1. Fashion is a very good example of this.
5. Cultural Hearth: The point of origin of ideas or products.
How Are Local Cultures Sustained?
1. Assimilation policies were used to assimilate indigenous peoples into the dominant culture.
  1. Indigenous population in: America- Indians, Australia- Aboriginals, and Canada- First Nations and Inuit.
    1. 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.
  2. 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.
    1. These are also the two goals of local cultures.
  3. Custom: A practice that a group of people routinely follows.
  4. Cultural appropriation: The process by which other cultures adopt customs and knowledge and use them for their own benefit.
    1. Local cultures work to avoid this by keeping their customs and their knowledge to themselves.
  5. 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.
2. Rural Local Cultures
  1. The Anabaptists are followers of the new religion that broke off from both the Catholic Church and the new Protestant churches.
    1. They maintained their culture by moving to rural areas to live apart, alone, and avoid persecution.
    2. 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.
      1. They are mostly concentrated in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
      2. 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.
  2. 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.
    1. When a local culture decides to reengage in a traditional economic activity or other cultural custom, it can no longer decide in isolation.
      1. 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.
  3. 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.
3. Urban Local Cultures
  1. Ethnic neighborhood: practically a world apart, a place to practice their customs, within a major city.
    1. Examples of ethnic neighborhoods are Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, New York, and Italian Americans in the North End of Boston Massachusetts.
      1. Having their own ethnic neighborhood enables members of a local culture in an urban area to set themselves apart and practice their customs.
4. Local Cultures, Cultural Appropriation, and Authenticity of Places
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
    1. An example is a said waffle that is half eaten by President Obama.
    2. An example of a corporation commodifying local culture is the Irish Pub Company and Guinness.
  3. Cultural Authenticity: Actually how authentic a said extravaganza, item, or idea is from the culture.
How Is Popular Culture Diffused?
1. 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.
  1. 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.
    1. Instead, the Chinese has made a copy of Facebook called Renren.
  2. 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.
    1. 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.
2. Hearths of Popular Culture
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. The cultural hearth of hip and rap music is the inner cities of New York and Los Angeles.
    1. Hip hop diffused abroad by immigrants living in major cities.
      1. Hip hop was used to address major concerns in their local culture.
3. Replacing Old Hearths with New: Beating Out the Big Three in Popular Sports
  1. 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.
    1. Advertising contracts and corporate sponsorship padded and eventually surpassed the salaries of the biggest sports heroes.
  2. ESPN's X games and video games helped extreme sports diffuse by propelling them into popular culture.
    1. 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.
  3. “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.
4. Stemming the Tide of Popular Culture - Losing the Local?
  1. Music, television, and film are most influenced by North America, Japan, Western Europe, South Korea.
    1. 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.
  2. The French government is rationing how much people can be exposed to outside influences to protect French culture.
    1. 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?
1. Cultural landscape: The visible imprint of human activity on the landscape.
  1. Placelessness: The loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape to the point that one place looks like the next.
    1. 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.
    2. 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.
  2. Global-Local Continuum: A notion that emphasizes that what happens at one scale is not independent of what happens at other scales.
    1. Glocalization: A process where people in a local place mediate and alter regional, national, and global processes.
2. Cultural Landscapes of Local Cultures
  1. 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.
    1. 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.
      1. The Mormon cultural region is now mostly in Utah, there are some in Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming.

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