Popular Culture
Penrod, an 11-year-old boy in a 1929 Booth Tarkington story set in the midwestern United States, suffers intensely for being forced to wear a bag of asafoetida on his neck and encounters a girl in the same condition.
In the movie El Dorado (1966), asafoetida was a component of a hangover remedy that was introduced by James Caan's character "Mississippi".
In the "Snidely's Sawmill" episode of Dudley Do-Right, villain Snidely Whiplash tells Nell Fenwick preparatory to her being tied to a log that "Because, Miss Fenwick, beneath this black exterior there lies a mustard plaster and over the mustard plaster lies an asafoetida bag. On it, imprinted in pica are the words, "Whippy Loves Nelly!""
In the Khyber Pakhtoon khowa (NWFP) area of Pakistan, people hang a small bag of asafoetida around the neck or tie it around the arm to keep safe from seasonal, bacterial and viral illnesses, the effectivity of which might have more to do with repelling potentially infected people rather than the disease-causing organisms themselves.
In Robertson Davies' novel, Fifth Business, the barber Milo and his father hung bags of asafoetida around their necks to fight the Spanish flu (26).
In Sinclair Lewis' novel Arrowsmith the protagonist smells asafoetida as part of a fraternity initiation.
Read more about this topic: Asafoetida
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
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“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)