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An essay on effects of popular culture
Influence of the romantic era
An essay on effects of popular culture
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The historical study of popular culture is distinct in that it diverges from the elitist perspective that governs much of our reflection on past events. Although, certain groups may face subordination in a given society, that does not imply a deficiency in their cultural achievements. From the Native people of the new world to the uneducated peasants of later years, their inferior social status in society often led their unique cultural practices into relative obscurity; dominant groups were the societal dictators of culture and the practices that future generations would deem as applicable to that time period. However, neglecting outranked cultural practices of past societies deprives historians of a more complete and accurate depiction of past societal realities. Contemporary accounts of early modern popular culture such as works by Ginzburg, Yassif and Bakhtin allow the reader to witness a shift in the earlier Romantic emphasis on the fascination and domination of the subordinate cultures [Herder] to a notion of cultural reciprocity between the elite and popular strata of society.
The imposition of European culture on Natives during the colonization of the New World entailed not only the desire to dominate/convert supposedly inferior Natives but also an accompanying fascination with their contradictory way of life. Europeans saw Native culture as uncivilized and comparable to a primitive state of European existence. Despite this view, Herder’s account in Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind reflects a Romantic European fascination with the natural and simplistic facets of Native culture. According to Herder, nature has favored Natives by providing them with “no idle fast of pleasing poisons, [nature] has p...
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...nsible for most the educated material and studies done in the early modern period, interest for these studies was most likely conceived at a popular/subordinate level then given importance at a larger, societal level. Acknowledging the reciprocity in popular and dominant culture is a good first step from Herder’s romanticism of fascination and pure domination, but there could be more work done to expound upon the popular underlying interests behind dominant work of the period.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. London: Verso, 2002.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
von Herder, Johann Gottfried. Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1784.
Yassif, Eli. The Hebrew Folktale. Indiana: The Indiana University Press, 1999.
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In George E. Tinker’s book, American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty, the atrocities endured by many of the first peoples, Native American tribes, come into full view. Tinker argues that the colonization of these groups had and continues to have lasting effects on their culture and thus their theology. There is a delicate balance to their culture and their spiritual selves within their tightly knit communities prior to contact from the first European explorers. In fact, their culture and spiritual aspects are so intertwined that it is conceptually impossible to separate the two, as so many Euro-American analysts attempted. Tinker points to the differences between the European and the Native American cultures and mind sets as ultimately
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In Thomas King’s novel, The Inconvenient Indian, the story of North America’s history is discussed from his original viewpoint and perspective. In his first chapter, “Forgetting Columbus,” he voices his opinion about how he feel towards the way white people have told America’s history and portraying it as an adventurous tale of triumph, strength and freedom. King hunts down the evidence needed to reveal more facts on the controversial relationship between the whites and natives and how it has affected the culture of Americans. Mainly untangling the confusion between the idea of Native Americans being savages and whites constantly reigning in glory. He exposes the truth about how Native Americans were treated and how their actual stories were
Native American’s place in United States history is not as simple as the story of innocent peace loving people forced off their lands by racist white Americans in a never-ending quest to quench their thirst for more land. Accordingly, attempts to simplify the indigenous experience to nothing more than victims of white aggression during the colonial period, and beyond, does an injustice to Native American history. As a result, historians hoping to shed light on the true history of native people during this period have brought new perceptive to the role Indians played in their own history. Consequently, the theme of power and whom controlled it over the course of Native American/European contact is being presented in new ways. Examining the evolving
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
The essay starts with the “Columbian Encounter between the cultures of two old worlds “ (98). These two old worlds were America and Europe. This discovery states that Native Americans contributed to the development and evolution of America’s history and culture. It gives the fact that indians only acted against europeans to defend their food, territory, and themselves.
In his essay, “The Indians’ Old World,” Neal Salisbury examined a recent shift in the telling of Native American history in North America. Until recently, much of American history, as it pertains to Native Americans; either focused on the decimation of their societies or excluded them completely from the discussion (Salisbury 25). Salisbury also contends that American history did not simply begin with the arrival of Europeans. This event was an episode of a long path towards America’s development (Salisbury 25). In pre-colonial America, Native Americans were not primitive savages, rather a developing people that possessed extraordinary skill in agriculture, hunting, and building and exhibited elaborate cultural and religious structures.
Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.
Native Americans have had a long history of resistance to the social and cultural assimilation into white culture. By employing various creative strategies, Native Americans have attempted to cope with the changes stemming from the European colonial movement into the Americas. There are fundamental differences in world views and cultural and social orders between Indians and Europeans, which contributed to conservatism in Native American cultures. In this paper, two aspects of such cultural and institutional differences of Native American societies will be examined: holistic Native American beliefs versus dualistic world views and harmony versus domination. These two aspects are important in terms of explaining changes (or lack thereof) in Native American societies because they suggest that the Native American world view is more cyclical and its components are interlinked, while Western societies have a clear demarcation between cultural elements, such as religion, kinship, and morality. However, there are certain limitations to the theoretical frameworks that explain conservatism in Indian cultures because these theories are oriented around the Western world view and were developed based on the Western terms; therefore, indigenous population was not taken into account when these theories were developed.
In Highbrow, Lowbrow, Levine argues that a distinction between high and low culture that did not exist in the first half of the 19th century emerged by the turn of the century and solidified during the 20th century, and that despite a move in the last few decades toward a more ecumenical interpretation of “culture,” the distinction between high art and popular entertainment and the revering of a canon of sacred, inalterable cultural works persists. In the prologue Levine states that one of his central arguments is that concepts of cultural boundaries have changed over the period he treats. Throughout Highbrow, Lowbrow, Levine defines culture as a process rather than a fixed entity, and as a product of interactions between the past and the present.
... fabulous piece remembered long after his time. This was accepted instead of looked down upon because of the shift from dogma to humanism that took place between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Dunkle, Roger. "The Classical Origins of Western Culture" Brooklyn College, The City University of New York. 1986 . Web. 29 July 2015.
In the beginning, the relationship between everyday culture and mass media culture are closed but there are some difference between popular culture and traditional culture. The traditional culture is known as ‘high culture’ which refer to literature, art, music etc. However, popular culture is the produced by mass media, may know it as low culture. People used to entertainment or relaxation. It shared and spread rapidly in groups, communities, societies and so on. Some people may say popular culture help us to understand more about the world because of the globalization factor.
“Culture” is a term that over the years, has taken many forms, served many purposes and has been defined in a variety of contexts. At the rise of the industrial era, inhabitants of rural areas began to migrate to cities, thus starting urbanization. As this new era began to unfold, urbanization, mass production, and modernization became key ingredients in the transformation of culture. As more people became literate and the production of mass media such as magazines, pamphlets, newspapers etc. increased, many had the option and desire to identify collectively – popular culture began to rise. Popular or “mass” culture can be described as a “dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving