Jack Child’s article on Latin American Postage Stamps was truly enlightening. Postage stamps were something that I had always taken for face value and never thought too deeply about. Little did I know that they often facilitate propaganda.

Child introduced me to 3 levels of popular culture; folk, mass, and high. He says that postage stamps fall into the broader definition of popular culture as they derive from the government, not the people. This illustrates that even though the government is intended to represent and serve the people, their output is not necessarily a direct reflection of the people. Yet, postage stamps are essential and, therefore, popularized by the people. This challenges popular culture as this element of ‘popular culture’ is popularized by necessity, not purely by choice. (Side note: are masks considered part of pop culture now?)

This emphasizes the historical element of popular culture. Historical context is imperative to understanding what Child calls ‘the Trichotomy of Signs’. For example, the Argentine postage stamps in response to the US government refusing to import their cattle. It would be obtuse if they were issued today, yet they were a direct reflection of current issues at the time. With historical significance in mind, how do we determine when something is no longer considered popular culture? I think that popular culture can easily become ahistorical based on its level of popularity. Of course, that becomes subjective again, but the point that I am trying to make is that the more relevant in the people, the more likely something is to become a staple to pop culture.

Another problem arises with the term ‘the people’. Postage stamps began to contain nationalistic messages following the rise in prevalence of nationalism. Nationalism is considered a newer concept and gave the people a new ‘community’ to resonate or identify with. Presently, there are an umpteen number of groups for people to identify with. Each group can engage with its own culture, thus creating their own popular culture within their group. This challenges the definition of pop culture because there can be popular culture within a subgroup that has not been spread to the larger group. So, who do we classify as ‘the people’? Is it on a nation-state basis? How specific can we get with demographics when discussing popular culture with it still being ‘popular’? Does popular carry the connotation of mutual agreeance within a population (meaning that popular culture is a direct reflection of the wants of the people)? In this article, nationalistic messages are essentially forced onto citizens through postage stamps.