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Folk culture and the mass media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

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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

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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.

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