Comprehensive Study Guide to Cultural Geography: Folk and Popular Material Traditions, Music, and Sports
Foundations of Cultural Geography
Definition of Culture: Culture is the comprehensive body of material traits, customary beliefs, and social forms that together constitute the distinct tradition of a group of people. Geographers analyze culture across three primary components:
Visible material traits: The physical objects, artifacts, and structures that a group possesses, creates, and leaves behind for future generations.
Beliefs and values: Core non-material convictions and systems of thought, centrally encompassing language and religion.
Social forms: The structural institutions that maintain values, govern community life, and protect artifacts, including ethnicity and political institutions.
Distinction Between Habit and Custom:
Habit: A repetitive act performed by a specific individual. An example is a particular student choosing to wear jeans to class every day. A habit does not imply broader societal adoption.
Custom: A repetitive act performed by a group to such an extent that it becomes characteristic of that entire group. An example is a large population of students typically wearing jeans to class. A custom is therefore a habit that has been widely adopted by a group of people.
Material Culture and Symbolic Expression:
A collection of interrelated social customs produces a group's material culture.
Specific customs frequently operate as elements of material culture with distinct social meanings; for example, wearing blue jeans typically represents American informality and serves as a badge of youth.
While a custom denotes an individual element of material culture (such as wearing jeans), culture refers to a society's entire assembled collection of customs.
The Role of Migration and Spatial Interaction:
Cultural geography is intrinsically linked to migration patterns: two distant locations often display similar cultural beliefs, objects, and institutions because migrating populations bring their cultural customs along with them.
Spatial divergence and cultural differences emerge when two groups experience limited interaction, separation, or geographic isolation.
Folk Culture Versus Popular Culture
Defining Characteristics:
Folk Culture: Traditionally practiced primarily by small, homogeneous groups living in isolated rural areas.
Popular Culture: Found in large, heterogeneous societies that share certain common habits despite significant differences in other personal and demographic characteristics.
Spatial and Temporal Dynamics:
Folk Culture: Changes relatively slowly within landscapes dominated by its practices. Because it thrives in isolation, folk culture is far more likely to vary from place to place at a given time.
Popular Culture: Based on rapid, simultaneous global connections facilitated by modern communications systems, transportation networks, and industrial technologies. Frequent innovations and rapid diffusion make popular culture far more likely to vary from time to time at a given place.
Erosion of Diversity and Environmental Impact:
The global dominance of popular culture—accessible predominantly to populations with sufficient income—threatens the survival of unique folk traditions.
The disappearance of local folk customs diminishes worldwide cultural diversity and reduces the intellectual stimulation derived from differences in backgrounds.
Built Environments and Ecology: Each cultural group extracts specific environmental elements to construct "built environments" (landscapes that modify nature). While folk culture is directly rooted in local environmental materials and tends to be more sustainable in protecting physical conditions, popular culture often modifies the landscape in accordance with uniform global values without regard to environmental sustainability.
Emphasized Cultural Elements:
Daily Necessities: Universal survival needs—food, clothing, and shelter—which each cultural group addresses through distinct customs.
Leisure Activities: Arts and recreational pursuits, where each cultural group establishes unique definitions of meaningful art and stimulating play.
Cultural Regions and Time-Use Surveys:
Cultural regions frequently exist as vernacular regions (perceived by inhabitants as integral to their cultural identity), though they may also be formal or functional.
Functional cultural regions occur where an activity radiates from a central node; for example, the territory of sports team supporters is functional because the proportion of fans is highest near the team's home venue.
Time-use surveys measure how populations allocate their days, identifying differences linked to schooling, employment, age, gender, ethnicity, and geography:
In the United States, youth are less likely than older Americans to watch television and read, but substantially more likely to play computer games.
In Pakistan, youth are less likely than American youth to watch television or play computer games, spending significantly more time reading, socializing with friends, and listening to the radio.
Spatial Mechanisms: Hearths and Diffusion Patterns
Hearths (Centers of Innovation):
Folk culture hearths are often anonymous, originating from unidentified sources at unknown dates through unidentified individuals. Folk customs may also develop independently across multiple isolated hearths.
Popular culture hearths are typically traceable to a specific person, corporation, or entity in a specific place, arising primarily in developed countries of North America and Europe.
Case Study: The Origin of Hip Hop:
Hip hop originated on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx Borough of New York City during a block party hosted by DJ Kool Herc.
DJ Kool Herc (birth name Clive Campbell) was born in Jamaica and moved with his family to the Bronx in 1967.
The Bronx hearth was culturally significant because the music directly reflected prevailing neighborhood conditions: violent street gangs, arson, widespread crime, extensive housing demolitions, and the forced relocation of residents to construct the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Industrial Foundations of Popular Culture:
Popular music, clothing, and food depend on advanced industrial technology capable of uniform mass reproduction (such as iPods, T-shirts, and mass-produced pizzas).
Mass consumption of these goods is enabled by expanded leisure time, which grew as the labor force transitioned from agricultural work to manufacturing and service jobs.
Diffusion Contrasts:
Folk culture spreads slowly and on a small scale, relying predominantly on relocation diffusion (the physical migration of people).
Popular culture spreads rapidly and extensively from innovation nodes via hierarchical diffusion, driven by modern telecommunications.
Diffusion Paths in Contemporary Music:
In the late twentieth century, American dance music rapidly diffused to Europe: Detroit techno (rooted in soul, gospel, and African folk music) and Chicago house (rooted in urban hip hop, funk, jazz, and African folk music).
Hip hop diffused from the Bronx to Philadelphia during the 1970s and to other American cities during the 1980s. It then spread to Western Europe, Japan, and back to the Caribbean (a primary source of its original inspiration), eventually reaching Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where regional styles blended with the original Bronx sound.
Spatial Distribution and Isolation: The Himalayan Corridor:
Popular culture distributes widely across nations with little regard for physical boundaries, limited primarily by a population's financial ability to access goods.
Folk culture is shaped by the interplay of physical and cultural conditions in isolated settings. A geographic study by P. Karan and Cotton Mather examined a narrow () corridor in the Himalaya Mountains across Bhutan, Nepal, northern India, and southern Tibet (China). Four distinct religious groups produce starkly different folk art despite their close geographic proximity:
Buddhists (North): Paint idealized divine figures (monks and saints), depicting some as bizarre or terrifying, reflecting an inhospitable, severe mountain environment.
Hindus (South): Paint domestic scenes and daily life, frequently incorporating deities alongside representations of the region's violent, extreme climatic conditions.
Muslims (West): Portray the natural beauty of local plants and flowers, deliberately avoiding representations of harsh climate.
Folk Religionists (East): Migrants from Myanmar (Burma) and Southeast Asia who paint religious symbols and designs derived from their faith rather than the local landscape.
This distribution demonstrates how folk art, dance, architecture, and crafts reflect cultural institutions (religion) alongside environmental factors (climate, landforms, and vegetation).
The Cultural Geography of Music
Universality of Musical Expression: Music researcher Daniel Levitan argues that every culture in human history has maintained a tradition of music, making it an ideal medium for analyzing cultural origin, diffusion, and distribution.
Folk Music Characteristics:
Mythological origin: According to Chinese legend, music was invented in 2697 B.C. when Emperor Huang Ti dispatched Ling Lun to cut bamboo poles producing sounds matching the call of the phoenix bird.
Reality of folk music: Originates anonymously, is transmitted orally, and undergoes generational modifications as daily conditions change.
Lyrical content: Conveys life-cycle milestones (birth, marriage, death) or practical environmental knowledge, such as agricultural practices.
Vietnamese Agricultural Folk Song: In subsistence agricultural regions of Vietnam, farming advice is transmitted through folk lyrics:
Traditional text:
Ma chiêm ba tháng không già
Ma mùa tháng ru oi ăt la không non.
Translation: "While seedlings for the summer crop are not old when they are three months of age, Seedlings for the winter crop are certainly not young when they are one-and-a-half months old."
Popular Music Characteristics:
Written by identifiable individuals for commercial sale and performance before mass audiences, frequently requiring high technical skill and sophisticated electronic equipment.
Emerged around 1900 to supply songs for variety entertainment—known as the music hall in the United Kingdom and vaudeville in the United States.
Tin Pan Alley: A dedicated district established in New York City to compose and publish sheet music for vaudeville and music halls.
Worldwide diffusion expanded during the 1940s via the Armed Forces Radio Network, broadcasting American popular music to soldiers and local populations during World War II.
Geographic Clustering of Musicians:
Historically, researchers Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick observed that musicians clustered regionally by specific genres: Tin Pan Alley (New York), Dixieland jazz (New Orleans), country (Nashville), and Motown (Detroit).
In the modern globalized music industry, musicians cluster across shared creative communities regardless of musical style. They concentrate near employment opportunities, artistic amenities, and booking agencies for live performances.
Nashville maintains the highest per-capita concentration of popular musicians (particularly in country and gospel), while larger metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have both high concentrations and large absolute numbers of musicians.
Regional Streaming Preferences:
Streaming data analyzed by Music Machinery via The Echo Nest identified distinct regional music preferences across the United States in 2014:
Jay Z: Most popular east of the Mississippi River.
Drake: Most popular across the Southwest.
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis: Most popular across the Northwest.
The Cultural Geography of Sports
Folk Origins of Soccer (Association Football):
Soccer originated as an English folk custom in the eleventh century.
Folk origin accounts trace the game to the period following the Danish invasion of England between 1018 and 1042. Workers excavating a building site uncovered the skull of a Danish soldier and began kicking it in an activity called "Kick the Dane's head." Boys imitated the game using an inflated cow bladder.
Early folk matches resembled violent mob scenes where large crowds from rival villages gathered, with victory awarded to the side that kicked the ball into the center of the opposing village.
Transition to Popular Culture:
The shift toward a global popular sport began in the 1800s during British industrialization. Churches and community leaders established recreational football clubs to provide factory workers with structured leisure activities.
The sport was incorporated into school physical education curricula.
Increased leisure time and rising wages allowed spectators to pay to watch matches, leading clubs to hire professional players.
In 1863, several British football clubs formed an association to standardize playing rules and organize professional leagues.
The term soccer derived from the abbreviation of association (shortened to assoc, which morphed into soccer).
International Diffusion and the World Cup:
British students, engineers, and imperial administrators diffused soccer internationally in the late nineteenth century: Dutch students returning from the United Kingdom introduced the sport to continental Europe in the late 1870s, while English engineers working in Bilbao, Spain, introduced it to local miners in 1893.
Modern telecommunications, especially television broadcasts, transformed soccer into a global phenomenon, culminating in the quadrennial FIFA World Cup (hosted in Russia in 2018 for men and in France in 2019 for women). The men's World Cup final routinely breaks records as the most viewed spectator event in world history.
Olympic Sports Criteria:
To be included in the Summer Olympic Games, a sport must be widely practiced in at least countries ( countries for women's events) across at least continents.
The 2016 Summer Olympics featured sports: archery, aquatics, athletics, badminton, basketball, boxing, canoeing/kayaking, cycling, equestrian, fencing, field hockey, football (soccer), golf, gymnastics, handball, judo, modern pentathlon, rowing, rugby, sailing, shooting, table tennis, taekwondo, tennis, triathlon, volleyball, weightlifting, and wrestling.
Leading American team sports—specifically American football and baseball—are excluded from this Olympic program.
Surviving Folk Sports and Regional Preferences:
Cricket: Popular primarily in the United Kingdom and former British territories across South Asia, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean islands.
Ice Hockey: Clustered in cold northern climates, specifically Canada, the northern United States, northern Europe, and Russia.
Wushu: China's most popular sport, combining martial arts forms (kicking, jumping) with combat disciplines (striking, wrestling).
Baseball: Confined to North America until the late nineteenth century, when it diffused to Japan via returning Japanese students who had studied in the United States and American expatriates working in Japan.
Australian Rules Football: Developed in isolation in Australia during the nineteenth century, forming a distinct code separate from soccer, Canadian football, and American football.
Lacrosse: Originated among the Iroquois, who called it guhchigwaha ("bump hips"). European colonists in Canada adopted the game, which then diffused to select American communities, notably Maryland, upstate New York, and Long Island.
Sports as Forces for Regional and Cultural Identity:
Organized spectator sports represent popular culture through the shared global willingness of people to pay to watch professional athletic performances in person or on television.
Sports reinforce strong regional and ethnic identities. Major League Baseball teams maintain entrenched regional fan bases.
Lacrosse provides cultural sovereignty for the Iroquois Confederation of Six Nations (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora). Sanctioned by the International Lacrosse Federation, the Six Nations team participates in the Lacrosse World Championships under its own flag alongside sovereign nation-states such as Australia, Canada, and the United States.