Culture - the body of material traits, customary beliefs, and social forms that together constitute the distinct tradition of a group of people.

A habit is a repetitive act that a particular individual performs, such as wearing jeans to class every day.

A custom is a repetitive act of a group, performed to the extent that it becomes characteristic of the group, such as many students typically wearing jeans to class.

habit does not imply that the act has been adopted by most of the society’s population. A custom is therefore a habit that has been widely adopted by a group of people.

A collection of social customs produces a group’s material culture; for example, jeans typically represent American informality and a badge of youth.

Folk culture is traditionally practiced primarily by small, homogeneous groups living in isolated rural areas

Popular culture is found in large, heterogeneous societies that share certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics

Each cultural element has a distinctive origin, diffusion, and distribution.

Geographers observe that folk culture and popular culture typically differ in their processes of origin, diffusion, and distribution.

Landscapes dominated by folk culture change relatively little over time. In contrast, popular culture is based on rapid simultaneous global connections through communications systems, transportation networks, and other modern technology.

Rapid diffusion facilitates frequent changes in popular culture. Thus, folk culture is more likely to vary from place to place at a given time, whereas popular culture is more likely to vary from time to time at a given place.

At a global scale, popular culture is becoming more dominant—at least for people with the income to have access to it—threatening the survival of unique folk culture. The disappearance of local folk culture reduces local diversity in the world and the intellectual stimulation that arises from differences in backgrounds.

• Daily necessities, including food, clothing, and shelter. All people must consume food, wear clothing, and find shelter, but different cultural groups do so in distinctive ways.

• Leisure activities, such as arts and recreation. Each cultural group has its own definition of meaningful art and stimulating recreation. For example, people in the United States and Pakistan do not allocate their leisure time in the same way.

Two basic factors help explain the different spatial distribution of popular and folk cultures: the process of origin and the pattern of diffusion.

Culture originates at a hearth, a center of innovation:

• Folk culture often has anonymous hearths, originating from anonymous sources, at unknown dates, through unidentified originators. It may also have multiple hearths, originating independently in isolated locations.

• Popular culture is typically traceable to a specific person or corporation in a particular place. It is most often a product of developed countries, especially in North America and Europe.

For example, hip hop is considered to have originated on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in New York City’s Bronx Borough, during a block party with DJ Kool Herc Kool Herc, whose birth name was Clive Campbell, had been born in Jamaica and moved to the Bronx with his family in 1967.

Folk and popular cultures go through different processes of diffusion:

• Folk culture is transmitted from one location to another relatively slowly and on a small scale, primarily through relocation diffusion (migration).

• Popular culture typically spreads through a process of hierarchical diffusion, diffusing rapidly and extensively from hearths or nodes of innovation with the help of modern communications.

For example, in the late twentieth century, Western dance music diffused rapidly from the United States to Europe, especially Detroit’s techno music and Chicago’s house music.

Hip hop music diffused from the Bronx to nearby Philadelphia during the 1970s and to other U.S. cities during the 1980s.

The music was introduced into Western Europe and Japan and diffused back to Caribbean countries, a principal source of inspiration.

In more recent decades, hip hop reached Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where local cultural styles influenced the music from the original Bronx hearth.

Meanwhile, as sometimes occurs with popular culture, as the style diffuses around the world, it can become less important in its hearth. In fact, sales of hip hop music have declined sharply in the United States since 2005.

Popular culture is distributed widely across many countries, with little regard for physical factors. The distribution is influenced by the ability of people to access the material elements of popular culture. The principal obstacle to access is lack of income to purchase the material.

A combination of local physical and cultural factors influences the distinctive distributions of folk culture. For example, in a study of artistic customs in the Himalaya Mountains, geographers P. Karan and Cotton Mather revealed that distinctive views of the physical environment emerge among neighboring cultural groups that are isolated. The study area, a narrow corridor of 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) in the Himalaya Mountains of Bhutan, Nepal, northern India, and southern Tibet (China) contains four religious groups: Tibetan Buddhists in the north, Hindus in the south, Muslims in the west, and Southeast Asian folk religionists in the east. Despite their spatial proximity, limited interaction among these groups produces distinctive folk customs.

Buddhists. In the northern region, Buddhists paint idealized divine figures, such as monks and saints. Some of these figures are depicted as bizarre or terrifying, perhaps reflecting the inhospitable environment.

Hindus. In the southern region, Hindus create scenes from everyday life and familiar local scenes. Their paintings sometimes portray a deity in a domestic scene and frequently represent the region’s violent and extreme climatic conditions.

Muslims. To the west, folk art is inspired by the region’s beautiful plants and flowers. In contrast with the paintings from the Buddhist and Hindu regions, these paintings do not depict harsh climatic conditions.

Folk religionists. People from Myanmar (Burma) and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, who have migrated to the eastern region of the study area, paint symbols and designs that derive from their religion rather than from the local environment.

Geographers observe that cultural features display distinctive regional distributions. Cultural regions are often vernacular, that is perceived by people to exist as part of their cultural identity. In other cases, a cultural region may be formal or functional. Regions of supporters of sports teams may be considered functional, because the percentage of supporters of the team is typically higher near where the team plays.

For example, according to Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, folk musicians once clustered in particular communities according to shared interest in specific styles, such as Tin Pan Alley in New York, Dixieland jazz in New Orleans, country in Nashville, and Motown in Detroit. Now with the globalization of popular music, musicians are less tied to the culture of particular places. As with other elements of popular culture, popular musicians have more connections with performers of similar styles, regardless of where in the world they happen to live, than they do with performers of different styles who happen to live in the same community.

For example, Kanye West is placed at the interchange between hip hop and soul and Jimi Hendrix at the interchange between rock and blues and country.

Folk songs may tell a story or convey information about life-cycle events, such as birth, death, and marriage, or environmental features, such as agriculture and climate. For example, in Vietnam, where most people are subsistence farmers, information about agricultural technology was traditionally conveyed through folk songs.

In contrast to folk music, popular music is written by specific individuals for the purpose of being sold to or performed in front of a large number of people. It frequently displays a high degree of technical skill through manipulation of sophisticated electronic equipment.

For example, popular music as we know it today originated around 1900. At that time, the main popular musical entertainment in North America and Europe was the variety show, called the music hall in the United Kingdom and vaudeville in the United States. To provide songs for music halls and vaudeville, a music industry was developed in a district of New York that became known as Tin Pan Alley. The diffusion of American popular music worldwide began in earnest during the 1940s, when the Armed Forces Radio Network broadcast music to American soldiers and to citizens of countries where American forces were stationed or fighting during World War II.

Regional variations can be observed in popular music preferences.

For example, the favorite artist in each state during 2014 was identified by Music Machinery on the basis of streaming data from The Echo Nest. The most-played artists in 2014 were Jay Z east of the Mississippi River, Drake in the southwest, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in the northwest

Folk Culture: Origin of Soccer

Soccer, the world’s most popular sport—known in most of the world as football—originated as a folk custom in England during the eleventh century. It was transformed into a part of global popular culture beginning in the nineteenth century.

As with other folk customs, soccer’s origin is obscure. The earliest documented contest took place in England in the eleventh century. According to football historians, after the Danish invasion of England between 1018 and 1042, workers excavating a building site encountered a Danish soldier’s head, which they began to kick. “Kick the Dane’s head” was imitated by boys, one of whom got the idea of using an inflated cow bladder. Early football games resembled mob scenes. A large number of people from two villages would gather to kick the ball. The winning side was the one that kicked the ball into the center of the rival village.

Popular Culture: Diffusion of Soccer

The transformation of football from an English folk custom to global popular culture began in the 1800s. Football and other recreation clubs were founded in the United Kingdom, frequently by churches, to provide factory workers with organized recreation during leisure hours. Sport became a subject that was taught in school.

Beginning in the late 1800s, the British exported association football around the world, first to continental Europe and then to other countries. For example, Dutch students returning from studies in the United Kingdom were the first to play football in continental Europe in the late 1870s. In Bilbao, Spain, miners adopted the sport in 1893, after seeing it played by English engineers working there. British citizens further diffused the game throughout the worldwide British Empire. In the twentieth century, soccer, like other sports, was further diffused by new communication systems, especially TV.

Check-In: Key Issue 1

Where Are Folk and Popular Leisure Activities Distributed?

• Folk culture and popular culture have distinctive patterns of origin, diffusion, and distribution.

• Folk leisure activities typically have anonymous origins, diffuse through relocation diffusion, and have limited distribution.

• Popular music and sports typically originate with identifiable individuals or corporations, diffuse rapidly through hierarchical diffusion, and have widespread distribution.