Why skateparks in the community are effective?

Introduction

To fully understand the concept of folk culture, we must first separate the two words and define them individually, then rejoin them to completely comprehend the term's overall concept. Folk , or folkways, are routine conventions of everyday life. They are the customary ways that people act: eating, personal hygiene, dressing, and so on. Folkways are actions and customs that are of little moral significance; they are often matters of personal taste. While, culture is a characteristic of societies, not of individuals. Culture is all that is learned in the course of social life and is transmitted across generations, determining social hierarchy. It is the learned, socially transmitted heritage of artifacts, knowledge, beliefs, values, and normative expectations that provide the members of a society with the tools for coping with problems. Thus, Folk culture exists within a society, and it is whatever a member must know or believe in order to operate in a way that is acceptable to its members; thus, they must do so in any particular role that they have accepted for themselves. Folk culture is what individuals must learn and is separate from their biological heritage. It is the forms and means of ideas that people have in their minds, their way of perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting these forms. It is the things people say and do, their social arrangements, and events, which are products or by-products of their society as they apply it to the task of insightfulness and dealing with circumstances.

The metabolism of folk cultural expressions as they occur in contemporary American society is often used colloquially and by commentators in ways that are complex and contradictory. Common to all definitions, though, is the idea that popular culture is associated with mass consumption. Popular culture can thus be seen to include everything from magazines, movies, and television to Internet phenomena such as Facebook and MySpace. Folk culture generally refers to the field of material culture and practice that is associated with everyday people, usually in opposition to “high” culture, which refers to the material culture and practice associated with socioeconomic elites. Alternatively, folk culture can refer to a globalizing Western culture that is seen in opposition to local folk cultures. In either case, folk culture is usually framed in negative terms, although this has changed in the social sciences and humanities over the past few decades (Martha Sims and Martine Stephens, pp.55).

Geography has engaged with folk culture in two ways. In the first, folk culture is theorized as a commodity, with a few sites emerging as sites of production, complemented by broader patterns of consumption. In the second formulation, folk culture is theorized as a purveyor of ideology, with geographers considering the messages and ideologies contained within it—either as a source of anxiety and danger or as a tool for creating communities. This entry first examines the origins of folk culture and then discusses the popular geographies of production and consumption. It then explores the ways popular culture ...