Cultural Interaction in Folk and Popular Cultures

Traditional folk handicrafts and arts often fetch high prices among modern city dwellers, perhaps because they exhibit the quality, attention to detail, and uniqueness generally absent in factory-made goods. Sometimes these folk goods are revised in ways to make them even more marketable. Among the folk items that have successfully penetrated the popular culture are Irish “fisherman sweaters,” Shaker furniture, and the brightly painted miniature wooden animals crafted in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Hip-Hop Music

To see cultural interaction at work, consider urban hip-hop music, which has made a significant impact on American popular culture. Hip-hop music is derived, to a great degree, from elements of African-American music and jazz poetry. However, its roots can be traced farther back, to West African cultures from which many American slave families descended. For example, some experts believe that the practice of spoken rapping, used in much of hip-hop music, stems from “call and response” patterns used in certain African religious ceremonies. Today, hip-hop is a broad international musical style that contains elements of not only rap but also beat-boxing and DJing/scratching. There are also nonmusical cultural elements woven into hip-hop culture, such as graffiti art and break dancing.

Unlike some other musical forms that have roots in traditional folk cultures (like Appalachian music), hip-hop music has not remained confined to the societies in which it first developed. Instead, its popularity spread across the United States, leapfrogging quickly between urban centers beginning in the 1970s. This spread was encouraged by the style’s progression from a performance-based form to a recorded one. During the 1980s, hip-hop began to diffuse throughout the world, with some countries, like Japan, developing large hip-hop subcultures. Since the 1980s, the rapping component of hip-hop has undergone many changes and has branched into multiple (and sometimes regional) styles such as East Coast, West Coast, Southern, and Alternative. It has also begun to merge with other musical styles such as pop and world music. As these mixtures occur, the themes of hip-hop music and rap lyrics also change, commenting on life and issues in diverse popular cultures in the United States and around the world.

From Difference to Convergence …

Globalization, which we introduced in chapter 1, brings up an important question: Does globalization homogenize cultural difference? As we look for the answer in real-world examples, we find that the answer is less than straightforward.

Globalization is most directly and visibly at work in popular culture. Increased leisure time, instant communications, greater affluence for many people, heightened mobility, greater access to the Internet, and weakened attachment to family and place—all attributes of popular culture—have the potential, through interaction, to cause massive spatial restructuring. Most geographers long assumed that the result of such globalizing forces and trends, especially mobility and the electronic media, would be the homogenization of culture, wherein the differences among places are reduced or eliminated. This assumption is called the convergence hypothesis; that is, cultures are converging, or becoming more alike. In the geographical sense, this would yield placelessness, a concept discussed earlier in the chapter.

… And Difference Revitalized

Geographer Peter Jackson is a strong proponent of the position that cultural differences are not simply obliterated under the wave of globalization. For Jackson, globalization is not an all-powerful force. People in different places respond in different ways, rejecting outright some of what globalization brings while transforming and absorbing other aspects into local culture. Rather than one homogeneous globalized culture, Jackson sees multiple local consumption cultures.

Local consumption culture refers to the consumptio n practices and preferences—in food, clothing, music, and so on—formed in specific places and historical moments. These local consumption cultures often shape globalization and its effects. In some ways, globalization revitalizes local difference. That is, people reject or incorporate into their cultural practices the ideas and artifacts of globalization and in the process reassert place-based identities.

For example, Jackson suggests that the introduction of Cadbury’s chocolate into China is more than simply another sign of globalization. He argues that the case “demonstrates the resilience of local consumption cultures to which transnational corporations must adapt.” In cases where companies’ products are negatively associated with their place of origin, such as exports from apartheid South Africa, the global ambitions of multinational companies can be thwarted. Local circumstances thus can make a difference to the outcomes of globalization.

Local resistance to globalization often takes the form of consumer nationalism, which occurs when local consumers avoid imported products and favor locally produced alternatives. India and China, in particular, have a long history of resisting outside domination through boycotts of imported goods. Jackson discusses a case in China in which Chinese entrepreneurs invented a local alternative to Kentucky Fried Chicken called Ronhua Fried Chicken Company. The company uses what it claims are traditional Chinese herbs in its recipe, delivering a product more suitable to Chinese cultural tastes. France also has a long history of objecting to foreign companies doing business on its soil.

Place Images

The same media that serve and reflect the rise of personal preference—the Internet, movies, television, photography, music, advertising, art, and others—often produce place images, a subject studied by geographers Brian Godfrey and Leo Zonn, among others. Place, portrayer, and medium interact to produce the image, which in turn colors our perception of and beliefs about places and regions we have never visited. The focus on place images highlights the role of the collective imagination in the formation and dissolution of culture regions. It also explores the degree to which the image of a region fits the reality on the ground. That is, in imagining a region or place, oftentimes certain regional characteristics are stressed while others are ignored.

The images may be inaccurate or misleading, but they nevertheless create a world in our minds that has an array of unique places and place meanings. Our decisions about tourism and migration can be influenced by these images. For example, through the media, Hawaii has become in the American mind a sort of earthly paradise peopled by scantily clad, eternally happy, invariably good-looking natives who live in a setting of unparalleled natural beauty and idyllic climate. People have always formed images of faraway places. Through the interworkings of popular culture, these images proliferate and become more vivid, if not more accurate.