Cultural Geography

Fall 2004

Chapter 7: FOLK AND POPULAR CULTURE: DIVERSITY AND UNIFORMITY

Native American sport influences- field hockey, kickball and lacrosse.

Sports begin as games, local and social. Railroad and telegraph opened games to broader competitions and linked towns and the country. Local, traditional culture becomes organized, standardized popular culture.

Folk culture- material/nonmaterial aspects of daily life (rural, stable, homemade and handmade artifacts, smaller groups, heritage, tradition, self-sufficient, links to ethnic groups.)

Popular culture-

1. Culturally complex societies display social and spatial diversity rooted in ethnic distinctiveness (reviewed in Chapter 6) and in folk cultural differences. They are simultaneously being unified by popular cultural elements spread by modern technologies of communication and transportation. Anglo America serves as a case study of the temporally and spatially varying impact of these separate cultural influences.

2. In Anglo America, material and nonmaterial folk culture developed from local adaptations and modifications of imported artifacts, mentifacts, and sociofacts. Although fast disappearing, evidence of folk culture regions may still be discerned in the built landscape and in local customs. They had their origins in relocation diffusion to recognizable East Coast hearth districts from which expansion diffusion carried cultural identities to the continental interior. Each “hearth” had its own mix of immigrants and its own distinctions of landscape and customs.

Material culture- physical, visible infrastructure- instruments, tools, buildings, the built environment.

Nonmaterial culture- mentifacts, sociofacts, oral tradition, songs, stories and behavior.

True folk culture no longer exists.

Changes- intermixing of cultures, mobility of people and public education

Canada- less change, more preservation of folk traditions (most European traditions still preserved.)

Folk culture is now an individual activity, not groups

Customs- behaviors, arts, traditions and conventions

3. Vernacular housing styles—reflecting spatially varied ideas and materials—are an indicator of folk cultural diversity. Those styles were part of colonists’ imported material culture modified by local resource availability and environmental requirements. Each of the hearth regions displayed and diffused its own folk housing designs: French-inspired in the Lower St. Lawrence Valley and English in the Upper Valley and southern New England, for example. The impress of English and continental European ethnics—in different mix from different origins—was displayed in the Delaware Valley and Chesapeake Bay hearths of the Middle Atlantic. The Southern Tidewater showed English, French, African, and West Indian influences, while French, Spanish, and Haitian inputs were evident in the Delta hearth. Hispanics in the Southwest and Mormons in the deep interior were other charter groups introducing distinctive indigenous or diffused vernacular housing styles.

4. From the eastern U.S. hearths, regionally generalized as the New England, Middle Atlantic, and Lower Chesapeake, traceable diffusion paths carried evidence of folk cultural movement away from the coast; an interior “national hearth” of intermingled streams developed in the Upper Ohio Valley.

Backwoods lifestyle- Finns and Karelians, self-sufficient economies, log-building techniques- became model for US frontier picture

5. Nonmaterial folk culture is gradually lost in modernizing societies, though reminders of it persist in foods, folklore, and song. Regional folk and ethnic cuisines are preserved in cookbooks and local and regional fairs and “fests.” Food and drink specialties reflect both immigrant traditions and indigenous foodstuffs and recipe adoptions. Song regions also reflect imported tradition and American regional isolation, experiences, and traits. Folk medicines and cures derive from imported traditional plant remedies and a vast new supply of native medicinals revealed by Amerindians.

Folk/Ethnic Food culture- most societies:

1. Very concerned with food production

2. World history is story of people migrating for food

3. Food habits are linked to culture and custom. Eating is a social, not a personal experience.

Ethnic merges into the folk, into the popular

Folklore- oral tradition of a group

Folkways- learned behavior of accepted modes of conduct

6. Composite folk cultural regions of the eastern United States suggest several hearths of origin and diffusion: southern and eastern New England, southeastern Pennsylvania, Chesapeake Bay, the coastal Southeast, French Canada, and the Hispanic borderlands.

7. Such regions are blurred by increasingly pervasive popular culture, submerging regional differences in the uniformity imposed by nationally standardized facilities and tastes. Even in the face of leveling national sameness, a greater wealth and variety of goods and ideas free people from the rigid constraints of folk cultural isolation and local uniformities.

The differences between popular and folk culture are rooted in connectivity. As long as a group was isolated and led a self-sufficient lifestyle, its culture was almost entirely identified as a folk or ethnic culture. At one time folk and ethnic culture barely differed from each other since a distinct ethnic group had its own traditional culture. As ethnic groups migrated to new areas and became more intermixed, the aspects of folk culture became more a “folk style” that bridged ethnic groups. Both of these cultural definitions are associated with characteristics of place (environment) and isolation. Popular culture contrasts this. As technology has allowed societies to connect through communications and transport networks, new ideas, products and behavior are rapidly introduced into a many places at the same time. Likewise, these same places become culturally connected through popular culture as groups begin to instantly share cultural traits. These traits include movies, music, art, books, sports, diet, ideas, etc. As mass production became the dominant method to produce goods, the creative function of folk culture artifacts has been replaced by market-driven, packaged culture. A major defining characteristic of popular culture is that is can impact a large number of people over a great distance, in a short period of time. This is also linked to market-oriented forces that turn these cultural ideas into products.

8. Even with national uniformities, different sections of the Anglo American culture realm are felt by their inhabitants to be, somehow, separate and unique. Vernacular regions are an enduring spatial recognition of the threads of diversity within, specifically, United States society.