Culture, Cultural Change and Globalisation: Folk and Popular Culture

• Culture is the learned, shared and transmitted way of life of a people. Edward Burnett Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871) defined it as the complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and every capability acquired as a member of society.
  • It is learned, not inherited biologically. It is shared by a group and passed between generations, mainly through language.
• Culture is never static. It changes through invention, contact and diffusion, and through people’s changing relation with their environment and technology.
• Globalisation, the intensifying worldwide flow of goods, capital, people, images and ideas, is the most powerful agent of cultural change today.
  • It homogenises some traits, hybridises many, and provokes a revival of local identities in others.
• Change also unsettles the culture realms mapped by classical geography, because global flows now cut across their boundaries.

Culture as a Dynamic Concept

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Components of Culture

• Julian Huxley (1955) divided culture into three interlocking subsystems, a scheme cultural geographers still use:
  • Artefacts (material culture): tools, houses, clothing, food, crops, machines. These are the most visible imprint on the cultural landscape.
  • Sociofacts (social organisation): family, kinship, caste, village community, the state, educational and religious institutions.
  • Mentifacts (ideas): language, religion, values, beliefs, myths, art and music. They are the deepest and slowest-changing layer.
• Traits, complexes and systems: a single element (trait) combines with others into a complex, and complexes form a culture system with a territorial expression.
• Material culture usually changes faster than non-material culture. The resulting mismatch is what William F. Ogburn (1922) called cultural lag.
  • In India, for example, smartphone use spread far faster than the norms governing privacy and online conduct.

Why Culture Is Dynamic

• Classical cultural geography treated culture as a fairly stable superorganic force. In Carl O. Sauer’s Berkeley school, culture is the agent that shapes the cultural landscape.
• New cultural geography of the 1980s, led by Peter Jackson (Maps of Meaning, 1989) and Denis Cosgrove, recast culture as a shifting, contested system of meanings. Different groups produce, negotiate and resist these meanings, and power and identity are built through them.
• Drivers of cultural change:
  • Innovation and invention: new tools, crops or ideas, such as the Green Revolution’s high-yielding seeds, which reshaped farm practices and rural society in Punjab.
  • Contact and diffusion: trade, conquest, migration, missions and, today, media and the internet.
  • Environmental and demographic change: drought, displacement, urbanisation.
  • State policy and law: abolition of untouchability, reservation, language policy.
  • Economic change: market integration and the shift from agrarian to service economies.
• Culture and environment: people do not simply obey nature. Within the range of possibilities an environment offers, culture chooses, and technology widens the range.
  • Julian Steward’s cultural ecology showed how subsistence technology links environment to social organisation. A changed technology therefore changes culture.
  • The canal colonies of Punjab and the tube-well revolution turned a pastoral–dryland culture into one of intensive wheat–rice farming within a century.
• Convergence and divergence: cultures in contact may converge, through shared technology and consumption, or diverge, by deliberately emphasising difference. Both trends run side by side today.
• Indian illustrations of a dynamic culture:
  • Cricket, an English game, has been thoroughly indigenised. Arjun Appadurai calls this the “decolonisation” of cricket.
  • Ganesh Chaturthi became a public festival only after Bal Gangadhar Tilak promoted it in 1893.
  • Diwali is now celebrated worldwide by the diaspora and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2025.
  • Joint families are giving way to nuclear households in cities.
  • Food habits such as millets, tea and pizza keep being reinvented.

Processes of Cultural Change

• Diffusion spreads a trait from its hearth:
  • Relocation diffusion: carried by migrants, as with Indian festivals in Mauritius, Fiji and Trinidad.
  • Expansion diffusion: the trait spreads while staying strong at the source. It takes three forms:
    • contagious: neighbour to neighbour, like an epidemic;
    • hierarchical: from large cities and elites downward, as with fashion and mobile phones;
    • stimulus: the idea spreads but is reworked locally, as in the vegetarian menus of global fast-food chains in India.
  • Torsten Hägerstrand’s spatial diffusion models gave these processes a measurable form, and his work underlies time geography.
• Acculturation: change in the cultures of groups that come into continuous first-hand contact. It was defined by Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton and Melville Herskovits (1936).
  • The change is usually asymmetric: the weaker group borrows more, as in the Westernisation of colonial elites.
• Assimilation: a minority absorbs the dominant culture and loses its distinct identity. Many third-generation immigrant families in the USA, for example, speak only English.
• Syncretism: a fusion of traits from different cultures into a new form.
  • Bhakti–Sufi devotion, Indo-Islamic architecture, Hindustani music and Goa’s Indo-Portuguese culture are examples.
  • Fernando Ortiz (1940) called such two-way creation transculturation.
• Sanskritisation and Westernisation: M. N. Srinivas described lower castes and tribes adopting upper-caste customs to claim higher status (Sanskritisation), and elites adopting Western ways (Westernisation). These are two directions of Indian cultural change.
• Cultural revival: groups re-assert older traits, often in reaction to rapid change, as in language movements and the revival of folk festivals.

Cultural Evolution of Man

• Human culture evolved through a sequence of technological and social revolutions. Each enlarged humanity’s control over the environment and its population.

• Theories of cultural evolution:
  • Unilinear evolutionism: Edward B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan (Ancient Society, 1877) held that all societies pass through the same stages, from savagery through barbarism to civilisation.
    • This was later rejected as Eurocentric and ranking.
  • V. Gordon Childe named the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions, and Leslie White linked cultural progress to the energy a society harnesses.
  • Julian Steward’s multilinear evolution (Theory of Culture Change, 1955) recognised several paths shaped by environment, through cultural ecology. It is close to the geographer’s possibilism. The anthropological neo-evolutionists carried this line further.
  • Diffusionists such as Friedrich Ratzel stressed borrowing between cultures over independent invention.
• Critique: evolution is not linear or inevitable.
  • Hunter-gatherers such as the Jarawa and Sentinelese of the Andamans coexist with information societies.
  • “Progress” brought inequality, disease and environmental damage along with abundance.

Folk Culture and Popular Culture

Folk Culture

• Folk culture is traditionally practised by small, homogeneous, mostly rural groups living in relative isolation.
• Characteristics:
  • Anonymous, multiple hearths: folk traits arise independently in many places and rarely have a known originator.
  • Slow diffusion, mainly by relocation (migration). Traits are passed orally and by example.
  • Close tie to the local environment: materials, diet and dress respond to climate and resources.
    • Examples include Kutch’s round bhunga houses, built to resist earthquakes and heat; the Toda huts of the Nilgiris; and Ladakh’s flat-roofed mud houses.
  • Strong role of custom, kinship and religion; resistance to change.
• Indian examples:
  • painting: Warli, Madhubani, Pithora, Gond;
  • performance: Bihu, Theyyam, Chhau, Kalbelia (the last two inscribed by UNESCO in 2010);
  • crafts: handloom textiles, Channapatna toys.

Popular Culture

• Popular culture belongs to large, heterogeneous, mostly urban societies and is shared across wide areas regardless of local traditions.
• Characteristics:
  • Known hearths: usually in economically powerful places, and often traceable to a company or a person. Examples are Hollywood, Mumbai and Seoul.
  • Rapid, hierarchical diffusion through mass media, advertising and digital platforms.
  • Mass production and standardisation; weak ties to the local environment.
  • Short life cycles: fashions rise and fall quickly.
• Examples: jeans, fast food, the Indian Premier League (2008), Hindi film music, K-pop, streaming platforms and social-media trends.

• Placelessness: Edward Relph (1976) warned that standardised popular landscapes, the same malls, highways and chains everywhere, erode the distinctiveness of places.

Globalisation and Folk Culture

• Negative effects:
  • Homogenisation and loss: mass-produced goods displace handicrafts, and oral traditions and folk languages decline as the young move to cities.
  • Commodification: rituals and arts are staged for tourists and lose their meaning, and festivals turn into consumer events.
  • Placelessness of new landscapes, and erosion of community institutions.
  • Appropriation: global firms market folk designs without benefit to their creators.
• Positive effects:
  • New markets: e-commerce and exports give artisans wider reach. Geographical Indication tags protect products such as Madhubani painting and Channapatna toys.
  • Revival through recognition: UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on intangible cultural heritage, and inscriptions such as Durga Puja in Kolkata (2021), Garba (2023) and Deepavali (2025), India’s 16th element.
  • Cultural tourism sustains festivals such as Nagaland’s Hornbill Festival (since 2000).
  • Diaspora communities carry folk traditions abroad and fund them at home.
• Balance: globalisation does not simply erase folk culture. It transforms it, and outcomes depend on whether communities keep control and benefit.

Globalisation and Culture

Meaning and Drivers

• Globalisation compresses time and space. David Harvey (1989) called this time–space compression, and Marshall McLuhan foresaw a “global village” (1962).
• Arjun Appadurai (1990) described global culture as five flows, or “scapes”, that move out of step with one another:
  • ethnoscapes (people);
  • mediascapes (images);
  • technoscapes (technology);
  • financescapes (capital);
  • ideoscapes (ideologies).
• Drivers:
  • Information and communication technology, the internet and social media.
  • Migration: 304 million international migrants in 2024 (UN DESA), with India the largest country of origin (18.5 million).
  • Transnational corporations, brands and advertising.
  • Tourism, education abroad and global sport.
  • Diaspora: about 3.7 crore overseas Indians (Ministry of External Affairs, January 2026).

Three Outcomes of Cultural Globalisation

• Homogenisation (convergence):
  • A dominant, largely Western and American consumer culture spreads worldwide. George Ritzer’s McDonaldization (1993) names the global spread of efficiency, predictability and standardisation.
  • Cultural imperialism: media flows run mainly from North to South. English dominates the internet, used on about half of all websites.
• Hybridisation (glocalisation):
  • Global forms are localised and local forms go global, creating new mixtures. Roland Robertson popularised glocalisation (1990s).
  • Indian examples:
    • the McAloo Tikki;
    • Hinglish advertising;
    • fusion music;
    • Bollywood’s global reach;
    • yoga returning to India in a globalised form.
• Polarisation and revival of identity:
  • Fear of losing identity provokes resistance and revival: ethnic, religious and linguistic movements.
  • Benjamin Barber’s “Jihad vs McWorld” (1995) and Huntington’s civilisational fault lines describe this reaction.
  • Indian examples include assertion of regional languages, revival of traditional crafts and festivals, and the UN’s International Day of Yoga (first observed 21 June 2015) as soft-power assertion.

Traditional Cultural Identities and Global Connectivity

• Identities under strain:
  • Joint families, community rituals, local dialects and dress are weakening among the urban young.
  • Consumer lifestyles spread through television and smartphones.
  • Migration produces deterritorialised identities, people who belong to two places at once.
• Identities persisting and reinventing:
  • Doreen Massey’s “global sense of place” (1991) holds that places are made of connections, so global links can enrich rather than erase local identity.
  • Diaspora communities often hold traditions more firmly than people at home.
  • Digital media spread regional cinema, folk music and minority languages to new audiences.
  • In India, religious observance remains high despite rapid connectivity.
• Languages feel the strain most: global and national languages advance, and small languages are endangered. Yet translation technology and the internet also give minority tongues new outlets.

Globalisation and Culture in India

• Consumption and lifestyle:
  • Malls, food delivery, streaming platforms and branded fashion have spread from metros to smaller towns.
  • The urban middle class shows the clearest hybrid lifestyle: global brands combined with traditional rituals, family networks and regional food.
• Reverse flows: India is also a source of global culture.
  • Exports include yoga, Ayurveda, Hindi and South Indian cinema, Indian cuisine and the Diwali and Holi festivals celebrated abroad.
  • The diaspora and the information-technology workforce carry these flows, which question the one-way “cultural imperialism” thesis.
• Tribal and folk societies: they face the sharpest pressure from mining, markets and migration. They also show organised resistance.
  • In 2013 the Dongria Kondh gram sabhas of Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills, acting on a Supreme Court order, rejected bauxite mining on a hill they hold sacred.
• Revival and re-invention:
  • The International Year of Millets (2023), promoted by India at the UN, revalued a folk staple.
  • Regional-language cinema and music reach national and global audiences through digital platforms.
  • Folk forms are re-staged in urban festivals and on social media.

Policy Responses

• UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and its 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions recognise culture as more than a commodity.
• India: intangible heritage inventories, GI protection, mother-tongue instruction under NEP 2020, and support for crafts and festivals.
• Cultural diversity as a resource: a source of identity, of the creative economy and of soft power, not an obstacle to development.

Evaluation

• Culture is dynamic and plural. Change is continuous, and what looks “traditional” is often the product of earlier diffusion and fusion.
• Globalisation’s cultural effects are uneven:
  • homogenisation is strongest in consumer goods and urban landscapes;
  • hybridisation in food, music, language and media;
  • revival in religion, language and ethnic identity.
• The outcome is neither a single global monoculture nor frozen local cultures. It is a layered, multifaceted world culture in which global flows are constantly localised.
• Limits of the homogenisation thesis: audiences reinterpret global products rather than absorb them passively, and cultural flows increasingly run South to North too, through Bollywood, K-pop and yoga.
  • Yet market power and language dominance remain unequal, so small cultures and languages still need active protection.
• For India, a civilisation long practised in absorbing and reworking outside influences, globalisation is the latest chapter of an old process, now running at far greater speed.