Nonverbal communication and culture. Identity, stereotypes and prejudices, страница 72

Participating in folk rituals or maintaining folk traditions usually has no relationship to profit and is not controlled by any particular industry such as advertising or media. For example, the celebration of Oktoberfest in Germany is laden with rituals that differ from one region to another. These differences mark cultural groups. Although the annual celebrations may be open to outsiders, they express and confirm cultural identity and group membership.

The social functions that folk culture serves are quite different from those served by popular culture. Folk culture is not meant to be packaged and exported around the world, whereas the goal of most popular culture industries is to sell their products elsewhere.

Hence, folk culture and folk rituals are not in evidence everywhere and cannot always be practiced by everyone. Some rituals, such as the celebration of New Year's Day, differ widely from one cultural group to another. And they are subject to change. If members of one cultural group move to a new location, they may continue to try to celebrate New Year's Day according to tradition to maintain their cultural group identity. Over time, though, they may adjust their rituals to suit their new location.

Increasingly, however, many popular culture industries use folk culture to situate their products as different. Cultural differences are often highlighted in travel advertisements, for example. After all, why spend a lot of money to travel to a faraway place, if you do not see that the distant location is much different from a nearby destination? So folk culture may be exaggerated to serve the needs of travel advertisements and international business. Hence, the distinction between folk culture and popular culture remains important, but the distinction can become vague and unclear. Given the powerful economic forces behind popular culture and its importance in intercultural interaction, let’s focus on popular culture.

What Is Popular Culture?

Earlier in this course we made a distinction between "high culture" and "low culture," which has been re-conceptualized as "popular culture." Popular culture refers to those systems or artifacts that most people share and that most people know about. According to this definition, television, music videos, and popular magazines would be systems of popular culture. In contrast, the symphony and the ballet would not qualify as popular culture because most people would not be able to identify much about them.

So, popular culture often is seen as populist, including forms of contemporary culture that are made popular by and for the people.

To be made into popular culture, a commodity must also hear the interests of the people. Popular culture is not consumption, it is culture—the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system: culture, however industrialized, can never he adequately described in terms of the buying and selling of commodities.

The ability of musicians to learn from other cultures played a key role in their success as rock-and-roll artists. The popular speaks to—and resonates from—the people, but it speaks to them through a multiplicity of cultural voices.

Intercultural contact and intercultural communication play a central role in the creation and maintenance of popular culture. Yet, the popular is political and pleasurable, which opens new arenas for complicating how we think about popular culture.

There are four significant characteristics of popular culture:

- It is produced by culture industries.

- It is different from folk culture.

- It is everywhere.

- It fills a social function.