Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T05:03:33.633Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Folk culture and the mass media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Get access

Extract

Black students in North American Universities calling for ‘soul’ courses and the official recognition of dialect speech; small underdeveloped nations fearing the cultural encroachment of ‘Americanization’; policy makers wishing to protect village traditions of handicraft from the technology of factory production; planners advocating decentralization and the preservation of regional or neighbourhood groups; minority ethnic group leaders attempting to maintain their religious customs, language and arts—all share one assumption, namely, that folk societies with their characteristic symbolic cultures are viable (1). Some go further and see in these small, homogeneous, proximate groups the last hope that advanced industrial secular societies can be held down to a human scale, can resist the multiple pressures to become, in the pejorative sense of the word, ‘mass societies’ (2).

Type
Myths and Mass Media
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1969

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

(1) The term ‘folk society’ is used here loosely to refer to any small scale social system whether it is a primitive tribe in New Guinea, a peasant village in Latin America or an ethnic neighbourhood in Chicago. Strictly speaking, ‘folk societies’ should be differentiated from ‘primitive’, ‘peasant’, ‘ethnic’, etc. For our purposes, however, they share certain characteristics: (a) small scale so that the preponderance of relationships tend to be face-to-face; (b) ascriptive or territorial bonds are strong and sustained over long periods of time by a symbolic system which sanctions them as ‘right’, ‘proper’, ‘natural’, ‘practical’, ‘divinely ordained’, etc.; (c) the division of labour and social differentiation are relatively simple so that neighbours are often kin, coreligionists and co-workers; (d) utilitarian, technological considerations carry less weight than traditional, magical or moral ones; and (e) stability and closure are of greater concern than adaptability and change.

(2) Among others, Kornhauser, Arthur, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Free Press, 1959).Google Scholar

(3) Greenberg, Clement, Avant-Garde and Kitsch in Hall, James B. and Ulanov, Barry (eds.), Modern Culture and the Arts (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 183.Google Scholar

(4) Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London, Penguin, 1961).Google Scholar

(5) Ellul, Jacques, Propaganda, trans. by Kellen, Konrad and Lerner, Jean (New York, Knopf, 1968).Google Scholar

(6) Graña, Céasar, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois (New York, Basic, 1964).Google Scholar

(7) Benda, Julien, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, trans. by Aldington, Richard (Boston, Beacon Press, 1955).Google Scholar

(8) Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (London, Chatto and Windus, 1957).Google Scholar

(9) McCormack, Thelma, Intellectuals and the Mass Media, The American Behavioural Scientist, IX (1965/1966), 3136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(10) Boorstin, Daniel J., The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, Harper, 1964).Google Scholar

(11) Engels, Frederick, Letter to Hermann Schlueter, 05 15. 1885Google Scholar, reprinted in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Literature and Art, Selections from Their Writings (New York, International, 1947), p. 114.Google Scholar

(12) McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964).Google Scholar

(13) Malraux, André, Art, Popular Art, and the Illusion of the Folk, Partisan Review, XVIII (1951), 487495.Google Scholar

(14) Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. by Strachey, James (New York, Norton, 1962).Google Scholar

(15) Id.Totem and Taboo, trans. by Brill, A. A. (New York, Random, 1938).Google Scholar

(16) Marx, K. and Engels, F., The German Ideology (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1965), vol. I, p. 432.Google Scholar

(17) Trotsky, Leon, Literature and Revolution, trans. by Strunsky, Rose (Ann Arbor, U. of Michigan, 1960).Google Scholar

(18) Ibid. p. 61.

(19) Ibid. p. 94.

(20) Ibid. p. 92.

(21) Ibid. p. 186.

(22) Parsons, Talcott, Societies, Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Eaglewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1966).Google Scholar

(23) Op. cit. p. 27.

(24) Durkheim, Émile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. by Swain, Joseph Ward (Glencoe, Free Press, 1947), p. 36.Google Scholar

(25) Iona, and Opie, Peter, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (London, Oxford, 1959).Google Scholar

(26) Fromm, Erich, The Forgotten Language (New York, Grove, 1951), pp. 235241.Google Scholar

(27) Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Totemism, trans. by Needham, Rodney (London, Merlin, 1962).Google Scholar

(28) Eliade, Mircea, Myth and Reality (New York, Harper, 1968).Google Scholar

(29) Hogben, Lancelot, From Cave Painting to Comic Strip (London, Parrish, 1949).Google Scholar

(30) Durkheim, , op. cit. p. 427.Google Scholar

(31) Fiedler, Leslie A., The Middle Against Both Ends, in Rosenberg, Bernard and White, David Manning (eds.), Mass Culture (Glencoe, Free Press, 1960), pp. 537547.Google Scholar

(32) Frank, Joseph, Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press, 1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(33) Knupfer, Genevieve, Portrait of the Underdog, Public Opinion Quarterly, XI (1947), 103114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(34) Jensen, Adolf E., Myth and Cult Among Primitive Peoples, trans. by Choldin, Marianna Tax and Weisleder, Wolfgang (Chicago, U. of Chicago, 1963).Google Scholar

(35) Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P., Personal Influence (Glencoe, Free Press, 1955).Google Scholar

(36) Weil, Simone, The Need for Roots, trans. by Wills, Arthur (Boston, Beacon Press, 1955), p. 88.Google Scholar

(37) Cooper, Eunice and Jahoda, Marie, The Evasion of Propaganda: How Prejudiced People Respond to Anti-Prejudice Propacanda, The Journal of Psychology, XXIII (1947). 1525.CrossRefGoogle Scholar