(2010-06-30) Rao Fischer Folkways Globalization

Venkatesh Rao wonders how David Hackett Fischer's Folk Way-s Model matches up with Globalization. So what exactly is a folkway? It’s an interrelated collection of default ways of conducting the basic, routine affairs of a society. Fischer lists the following 23 components: speech ways, building ways, family ways, gender ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways, learning ways, food ways, dress ways, sport ways, work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways, social ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways. (Kinda reminds me of a Culture. Or a Pattern Language.)

As Fischer shows, just four folkways (the Puritans of New England, the Jamestown-Virginia elites, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and migrants from northern parts of Britain to Appalachia), all emerging in 17th and 18th century Britain, suffice to explain much of American culture as it exists today.

It is still seems reasonable to expect that this process, “globalization,” is destroying something and creating something equally coherent in its place. It is reasonable to expect that there are coherent new patterns of life emerging that deserve the label “globalized Life Style-s,” and that large groups of people somewhere are living these lifestyles. It is reasonable in short, to expect some folkways of globalization. Surprisingly, no candidate pattern really appears to satisfy the definition of “folkway.” Have to finish and write notes from David Greenberg's A New Look At Schools for his thinking on the PostIndustrial Super Culture.