Unit 4 notes

Unit 4 notes

1. Field note

   • Tata corp plays econ role in India
     • owned by small ethnic group: Parsi
       • Parsi numbers decreasing because of traditions
         • struggle to maintain culture in global world
   • Pop culture diffuses across world
     • Harder for local culture to persist

2. How are local and popular cultures sustained?

   • culture: a group of belief systems, norm, and values practiced by a people
     • folk/local: small/rural, homogeneous pop
       • hard to define, defined by group themselves
       • rely on religion/family strutcure/ lack of interaction to preserve
     • Popular: heterogeneous pop, urban, changing
       • global, rapidly changing
       • diffusion through marketing and transportation
         • fashion trends
           • hierarchical diffusion
     • material culture: physical things like art or food
     • nonmaterial culture: beliefs or pratices

3. How are local cultures sustained?

   • Assimilation: change to another culture, forced or not
     • American Indians
   • Sustained through customs
     • Custom: practice a group follows
     • LC seeks to keep their culture in and others out
       • cultural appropriation: adopting customs for own use
   • Rural local cultures
     • Easier to maintain LC by isolation
       • Hutterites, Amish, Mennonites
     • Makah american Indians reinstated tradition of whale hunting
       • Faced protests, federal court, and regualtion
   • Urban local cultures
     • ethnic neighborhoods
       • celebrations like feast of Italian saints
       • Places of worship, stores, and food
   • commodification: name or idea becomes object to be sold
     • LC food or clothing by selves or others
   • Authenticity of places
     • Authenticity: feeling of a place
       • complex
       • Guinness Pubs capitalize on this feeling

4. How is popular culture diffused?

   • Pace of diffusion very short and reaching farther
     • facebook and Xiaonei
     • distance decay no longer linear now use time-space compression
   • Hearths
     • Dave Mathew's band
     • MTV spreads pop culture
       • Innovators/ trendsetters
     • Hip Hop
       • started in neighborhoods in LA and NY before spreading across the world taking on new iterations based on local culture
     • Old big sports (basketball, baseball, and football) face competetion with new sports like skateboarding using tv
       • Sports have their own market of masculine things to advertise
       • MMA spreading into other cultures
   • Spreading of pop culture can feel like assimilation to Local cultures
     • World more connected - american movies in Korea

5. How can local and popular cultures be seen in the cultural landscape

   • tension between local and pop culture can be seen in cultural landscape
     • cultural landscape: visible imprint of human activity on the landscape
       • Placelessness: loss of uniqueness of a place
     • Skyscrapers are global and a sign of good economic state
       • Fast food chains are also global
     • Borrowing of idealized landscapes
       • Venetian hotel and casino in Vegas
     • global-local continuum: what happens at one scale is not independent of what happens on other scales
       • Local changes national and global ideas to their liking: called glocalization
     • Variety in cultural landscape is caused by local culture
       • Mormon settlers in the west changed how cities and farms looked there