Folk Culture and Geography

Folk culture refers to traditional, often rural, cultural production in the form of symbolic practices and cultural artifacts. In geography it is a concept, traditionally linked to the Berkeley School of cultural geography and Carl Sauer, which fell into disfavor with the rise of critical cultural geography in the 1980s. However, geographers have more recently recovered the concept in the analysis of national identity and commodification of culture and given it a more dynamic meaning.

Prior to the rise of the new cultural geography in the 1980s, cultural geography was focused on rural life and particularly the distribution of cultural artifacts over space. For example, a cultural region could be defined by the style of vernacular or folk architecture found in an area. Geographers located cultural hearth areas and traced the diffusion of particular barn, house, or church styles. This work was based on a relatively static understanding of culture as a coherent “way of life” that changed slowly and could be attached to a particular territory. Urban culture was seen as corrupted and was generally not an object of study. Instead, geographers sought the authentic culture of small isolated groups. With the rise of the new cultural geography under the influence of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, geography's understanding of culture became more sophisticated, and geographers particularly became concerned with culture as a site of struggle. Traditional studies of folk culture fell out of fashion, and geographers concerned with culture focused more on popular culture. However, geographers still found ways to examine folk culture from a critical perspective.

In some ways, popular culture is everything folk culture is not. Popular culture tends to be urban and industrial in nature. There is an explicit recognition of hybridity and change in the study of popular culture. Popular culture is made up of the meanings people create in conversation with mass-mediated, mass-produced, commodified culture. But the distinction between folk and popular culture is not clear-cut. Rural cultures and oral traditions can no longer be seen in isolation from one another and from the world of commodity production. In anthropology, where folk culture and folklore studies are more central than in geography, researchers have moved folklore out of the realm of the static and the rural and begun to concern themselves with the grassroots, oral side of modern life, studying the exchange of folklore via the Internet, for example.

Chinese babies and children are hoisted during the Beizhuang performance in Songxian county in China's Henan Province on February 11, 2006. Beizhuang is a folk art form popular among the people of Zhenxidian Village. Passed down from generation to generation, Beizhuang has developed into a complex performance featuring many aspects of the folk culture of Central China.

Source: AP Photo/EyePress.

The European concern with folk culture goes back to the work of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder in the late 18th century, and the study of folklore became an important element in the creation of nation-states in the 19th century. Folklorists sought to define national cultures and link them to particular territories by going out into the countryside and collecting examples of authentic folk culture. They collected stories, songs, music, dances, and costumes and selectively interpreted their findings to argue for timeless, essentialist national cultures attached to particular territories, thereby legitimizing territory-based nation-states. Critical human geographers have analyzed this process of nation building.

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