Chapter 4: Local Culture, Popular

Culture, and Cultural Landscapes

Copyright 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Field Note:
Preserving Culture

The
signs
with
the
Tata
Corporations logo were everywhere
on the landscape of the city of
Hyderabad in India (Fig. 4.1): a Tata
corporate building across the street
from our flat; Tata emblazoned on
the grill of trucks through out the
city; Tata sky satellite dishes
bringing television into homes; Tata
International consulting buildings in
the high-tech district of the city. I
asked my host what the Tata
Corporation was and where the
name came from. He explained,
Tata is a family name. The Tata
family are members of the Parsi
religion, and they own many
businesses throughout India and the
world.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Key Question
What are local and popular
cultures?

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

What Are Local & Popular Cultures?

A culture is 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 in 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.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

What Are Local & Popular Cultures?

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.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

What Are Local & Popular Cultures?

A local culture is a group of people in a particular
place who see themselves as a collective or a
community, who share experiences, customs, and
traits, and who work to preserve those traits and
customs in order to claim uniqueness and to
distinguish themselves from others.
Material culture of a group of people includes
things they construct, such as art, houses, clothing,
sports, dance, and food.
Nonmaterial culture includes beliefs, practices,
aesthetics (what they see as attractive), and values
of a group of people.
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Hierarchical diffusion:
Can occur through a hierarchy of places
The hearth is the point of origin

Figure 4.2
London,
United
Kingdom.
Catherine
Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, enters
Westminster Abbey in a wedding gown
reminiscent of Grace Kellys. Sarah Burton of
the House of Alexander McQueen designed
the gown. Members of the Royal School of
Needlework hand cut and sewed the intricate
lace. The sewers washed their hands every
30 minutes and replaced needles every 3
hours to keep the dress pristine and the work
exact. Samir Hussein/Wire Image.
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Employing the concept of hierarchical

diffusion, describe how you became a
knower of your favorite kind of music
where is its hearth, and how did it reach you?

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Key Question
How are local cultures
sustained?

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

Assimilation: a policy of the U.S. government in the
1800s and into the 1900s to assimilate indigenous
peoples into the dominant culture in order to make
American Indians into Americans rather than
Indians.
Canadians, Australians, Russians, and other colonial
powers adopted similar policies toward indigenous
peoples.
American Indians in the United States are working to
push back assimilation and popular culture by reviving
the customs of their local cultures.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

Local cultures are sustained through customs, practices
that a group of people routinely follow.
A local culture can also work to avoid cultural
appropriation, the process by which other cultures
adopt customs and knowledge and use them for their
own benefit.
Local cultures desire to keep popular culture out, keep
their culture intact, and maintain control over customs
and knowledge.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

Rural Local Cultures
Members of local cultures in rural areas often have
an easier time maintaining their cultures because of
their isolation.
When a local culture discontinues its major
economic activity, it faces the challenge of
maintaining the customs that depend on the
economic activity and sustaining its culture.
Today, when a local culture decides to reengage in a
traditional economic activity or other cultural
custom, it can no longer decide in isolation.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

The Makah American Indians
Hunted whales for 1,500
years, but the U.S.
government stopped
them in the 1920s; the
gray whale had become
endangered.
1994, NOAA removed
the eastern North
Pacific gray whale from
the endangered list.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

Little Sweden, USA
The residents of Lindsborg, Kansas, proclaim their
town Little Sweden, U.S.A.
The townspeople began to celebrate their Swedish
heritage in the 1950s, highlighting the everyday
existence (the local culture) of the Swedes who
immigrated to Lindsborg.
Geographer James Shortridge refers to this as
neolocalism, seeking out the regional culture and
reinvigorating it in response to the uncertainty of the
modern world.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Guest Field Note:

Lindsborg, Kansas

Lindsborg, Kansas, founded by

Swedish Lutherans in 1869, has
remade itself in recent decades as
Little Sweden, U.S.A. Swedish
gift shops, restaurants, and ethnic
festivals, along with faux-Swedish
storefronts, all attract visitors
interested
in
the
Swedish
American heritage.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

Urban Local Cultures
Ethnic neighborhoods
Concept Caching:
Washington Heights, NY

Ines Miyares

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How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

Local Cultures and Cultural
Appropriation
Commodification is the process through
which something that previously was not
regarded as an object to be bought or sold
becomes an object that can be bought, sold,
and traded in the world market.
Question of authenticity follows.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Field Note
One of the most amazing aspects of running the New York City marathon is
seeing the residents of New Yorks many ethnic neighborhoods lining the streets
of the race. Running through the Hasidic Jewish neighborhood in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn was striking: even before noticing the traditional dress of the
neighborhoods residents, I noticed the crowd was much quieterthe people were
not yelling, they were clapping and quietly cheering.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Are Local Cultures Sustained?

Authenticity of Places
The Lost City

Figure 4.9
Sun City, South Africa. The Lost City resort
in Sun City evokes the mystical images of
Africa described in a legend. Lindsay
Hebberd/Corbis.

Guinness and the Irish

Pub Company

Figure 4.10
Dubai, United Arab Emirates. An old Irish
truck marks the entrance to an Irish Pub
Company pub in Dubai. Alamy.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Field Note
The Dingle Peninsula in Ireland was long one of the more remote parts
of the country, and even its largest town, Dingle, was primarily an
agricultural village just a few decades ago. As I walked through the
streets of town, I noticed the colorful inns and houses of the older town.
The Little Bridge Pub on the corner of this intersection in the older town
is an authentic pub, the kind that the Irish Pub Company works to
replicate.
Concept Caching:
Figure 4.12
Mount Vesuvius
Dingle, Ireland
Alexander B. Murphy.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

What is the last place you went to or the last

product you purchased that claimed to be
authentic? What are the challenges of
defending the authenticity of this place or
product while refuting the authenticity of
other similar places or products?

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Key Question
How is popular culture diffused?

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Is Popular Culture Diffused?

Distance decay vs. time-space compression:
With distance decay, the likelihood of
diffusion decreases as time and distance
from the hearth increases.
With timespace compression, the
likelihood of diffusion depends on the
connectedness (in communications and
transportation technologies) among places
(geographer David Harvey).
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Is Popular Culture Diffused?

Hearths of Popular Culture
Establishing a Hearth
Contagious diffusion and hierarchical diffusion
Ex.: the Dave Matthews Band

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Is Popular Culture Diffused?

Hearths of Popular Culture
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
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Is Popular Culture Diffused?

Replacing Old Hearths with New: Beating
out the Big Three in Popular Sports
The Big 3: Football, Basketball, Baseball
Surfing (1960s)
Skateboarding (1970s)
Snowboarding (1980s)
Ultimate Fighting (1990s)
Corporations must create the new so that
they have something to sell that is socially
desirable.
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Stemming the Tide of Popular Culture

Losing the Local?
At the global scale, North America, western Europe,
Japan, India, and South Korea exert the greatest
influence on popular culture at present
North America: movies, television, music, sports,
and fast food
Japan: childrens television programs, electronic
games, and new entertainment technologies
Western Europe: fashion, television, art, and
philosophy
South Korea: television dramas, movies, and
popular music
India: movies
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Is Popular Culture Diffused?

Stemming the Tide of Popular
CultureLosing the Local?
The rapid diffusion of popular culture can
cause consumers to lose track of the hearth
of a good or idea.
When popular culture displaces or replaces
local culture, it will usually be met with
resistance.
Geographers realize that local cultures will
interpret, choose, and reshape the influx of
popular culture.
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Field Note
Just days before the Japanese tsunami in
2011, I walked out of the enormous Lotte
department store in Seoul, South Korea and
asked a local where to find a marketplace
with handcrafted goods. She pointed me in
the direction of the Insa-dong traditional
market street. When I noticed a Starbucks
sign written in Korean instead of English, I
knew I must be getting close to the
traditional market. A block later, I arrived
on Insadong. I found quaint tea shops and
boutiques with handcrafted goods, but the
market still sold plenty of bulk made goods,
including souvenirs like Korean drums,
chopsticks, and items sporting Hallyu stars.
Posters, mugs,and even socks adorned with
the faces of members of Super Junior
smiled at the shoppers along Insa-dong.

Figure 4.21
Seoul, South Korea

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Think about your local community (your

college campus, your neighborhood, or your
town). Determine how your local community
takes one aspect of popular culture and makes
it your own.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Key Question
How can local and popular
cultures be seen in the cultural
landscape?

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Can Local and Popular Cultures

Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?

Cultural landscape:
visible imprint of human
activity on the landscape.
Edward Relph coined the
word placelessness to
describe loss of
uniqueness of place in
the cultural landscape to
the point that one place
looks like the next.

Figure 4.22
Roseville, MN

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How Can Local and Popular Cultures

Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Can Local and Popular

Cultures Be Seen in the Cultural
Landscape?
Cultural landscapes blend together in three
dimensions:
1. Particular architectural forms and planning ideas
have diffused around the world.
2. Individual businesses and products have become
so widespread that they now leave distinctive
landscape stamp on far-flung places.
3. The wholesale borrowing of idealized landscape
images promotes a blurring of place
distinctiveness.
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Can Local and Popular Cultures

Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?
Concept Caching:
Brussels, Belgium

Erin Fouberg

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Can Local and Popular Cultures

Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?

Figure 4.26b
The Venetian
Hotel Casino in
Las Vegas,
Nevada.
David Noble

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Can Local and Popular Cultures

Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?

Global-local continuum concept:

emphasizes that what happens at one scale
is not independent of what happens at other
scales.
People in a local place mediate and alter
regional, national, and global processes, in a
process called glocalization.
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Can Local and Popular Cultures

Be Seen in the Cultural Landscape?
Cultural Landscapes of Local Cultures
The Mormon landscape of the American West:
Created by founders and early followers of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as
they migrated westward under persecution.
Early settlers established farming villages where
houses clustered together and croplands
surrounded the outskirts of the village.

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Guest Field Note:

Paragonah, Utah
I took this photograph in the village of Paragonah, Utah, in 1969, and it
still reminds me that fieldwork is both an art and a science. People who
know the American West well may immediately recognize this as a scene
from Mormon Country, but their recognition is based primarily on their
impressions of the place.
Figure 4.28
Paragonah, Utah
Photo taken in 1969

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Focus on the cultural landscape of your college

campus. Think about the concept of
placelessness. Determine whether your
campus is a placeless place or whether the
cultural landscape of your college reflects the
unique identity of the place. Imagine you are
hired to build a new student union on your
campus. How could you design the building to
reflect the uniqueness of your college?
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Additional Resources
The Irish Pub Company
www.irishpubcompany.com
The Makah Tribe
www.makah.com
The City of Lindsborg
www.lindsborg.org
The Hutterites
www.hutterites.org

2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.