armchair folklorist

blog where i post quotes related to folklore and communication studies, with a focus of contemporary legend and rumor research.

[rumorologist]

"Widely republished in cheap editions and therefore readily available for inspection, [The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion] was easily exposed as a clumsy forgery. Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists repeatedly cited its existence as proof that an international Jewish plot was at work. Cited, indeed, but rarely quoted or even summarized except in part of general assertions that Jews were scheming to take over the world. Randall L. Bytwerk (2015), an expert on Nazi propaganda, observes that the Protocols were surprisingly absent from official German publications. Although Nazi agitators widely disseminated the forgery, "far more copies were sold than were read" (214). Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s chief propaganda minister, acknowledged that the work was a forgery but saw that fact as immaterial: "I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols" (213). Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer, a Nazi tabloid, was likewise direct when challenged about the truthfulness of the Jewish plot. An eyewitness to a 1929 trial in which he was accused of libel summarized his reasoning: "The printed word possesses remarkable persuasive power. That which is found in some book or newspaper is irrefutable truth. Catholic legends presenting . . . the murder of Christian children are historical documents. 'Gentlemen of the bench,' exclaimed Streicher to the jurors again and again, if it were not true it could not have been printed" (Bytwerk 2001, 47). The jury convicted him of spreading lies about Jews, but Ong would have understood perfectly. In different ways, both Goebbels and Streicher acknowledged the technological usefulness of this forgery: its reality as a physical database was in and of itself proof of the Jews’ treachery. Forgery or not, it generated trust in Hitler’s minions as they mobilized efforts leading to the Holocaust. Magical books owned by the accused Salem witches and the Protocols were all the more powerful, that is, for not being read. Even today, according to Bytwerk, the antisemitic work is seen not so much as a verified source of alleged Jewish treachery but as a fetish object, a "true book" that for its owners substantiates "a conspiracy in which they already believe" (2015, 224). Sociologist Francesca Bolla Tripodi (2022) makes a similar observation about contemporary American conservatives, who often proclaim the existential truth of statements in the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Nevertheless, Tripodi points out, they "also believe truth to be self-evident" and rarely critique other sources that they read for latent or underlying meanings" (19). Expanding on this insight, in a culture of secondary orality, books are not sources of information but technological fetishes, manufactured sources of innate spiritual power that validate a cultural faction’s worldview. When a source—print, media, or oral—states that witches are evil, that Jews are poisonous, or that the Deep State needs to be rooted out, such claims do not need proof: they are self-evidently true."

Bill Ellis, "What History Tells Us About QAnon", published in Whispers in the Echo Chamber: Folklore and the Role of Conspiracy Theory in Contemporary Society (2025).

[littlestpersimmon]

Not to be like this but Europeans immediately turning unhinged at the slightest jab is actually insane to me. Like British people randomly turning into Ludwig The Accursed whenever an American is mildly amused at cultural differences.. going "Well AT LEAST WE DONT SHOOT UP CHILDREN IN OUR SCHOOLS FKSKKDSJSI" and random Dutch people and Swedes immediately turning to racism against the global south because people think it's odd that a lot of them do not invite guests to dinner. Like sometimes you guys are the butt of jokes. Sometimes people will be shocked at cultural differences. You guys have singlehandedly changed the trajectory of the planet because you wanted spice, you guys can handle people laughing at you for once instead of praising your Prisons That Look Like Apartments built on stolen wealth from the global south. Jesus fucking wept. Get over yourselves and learn to say "yeah we suck"

[vacuouslyfalse]

Will never understand the tendency among leftists to sincerely view individuals as extensions of their ancestors or their countries, like ethnonationalism is funny as a bit but you guys get that this way of looking at the world isnt good for us, right?

[rumorologist]

From Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 1 – The Birth of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and David Vandermeulen, illustrated by Daniel Casanave

[rumorologist]

The career of a rumor, unlike experiments in serial transmission, is not a process of unilinear development. As in the days following the assassination of President Kennedy, people who focus upon a common area of preoccupation talk things over. The participants are not robots who parrot automatically what they have heard. Some individuals introduce conjectures of what might have happened. Others speculate on what is likely to follow. Some are inclined to make comparisons with similar situations with which they happen to be familiar. A person with special contacts may add some real “leaks” of confidential information. Although deliberate lies are not common in human discourse, this possibility certainly cannot be ruled out. Some ask questions; they challenge statements and demand explanations. Out of this welter of verbalizations certain items of information gradually begin to stand out and enjoy priority in communication, and in this way a collective interpretation develops. Serial transmission is possible, but it is rarely found outside the laboratory.

Tamotsu Shibutani, “Improvised News: a sociological study in rumor”

[rumorologist]

Persons involved in spreading rumors are treated as if they were disparate entities, each acting as an independent unit. What one contributes to a rumor is explained in terms of his ability in perception and recall and in terms of his motives. Rumor is recognized as a social phenomenon only in the sense that more than one person is necessarily involved; that human beings acting together in any enterprise are intertwined in a complex web of social relationships is ignored.  Many investigators look upon rumor as a pathological phenomenon rather than as something to be expected of all men in given circumstances. If something is pathological, then special explanations are necessary to account for deviations from the normal. Instead of studying the conditions under which a recurrent form of communication takes place, investigators have been preoccupied with distortion of content, special defects of those who introduce error, neurotic traits of “rumor-mongers,” and ways of removing obstacles to normal communication, which is presumably accurate. It appears that the uncritical adoption of a popular concept has brought in unexamined value judgments, and these have seriously hampered effective study.

Tamotsu Shibutani, “Improvised News: a sociological study of rumor”

[rumorologist]

Only when picked up and shared by others who see the story as credible, even if they doubt its accuracy, can it be considered legend. The distinction is an important one because we can, and should, call out the intentional manufacture of false information for what it is: fake. But we also can and should recognize that if that story finds purchase among us as the folk, we can and should attend to it as legend. And so to the issue of credibility and truth. The hallmark of the legend is not that it is true, nor that it purports to be true, but rather that its truth is questioned and debated (Marsh 2018). Based on these assumptions, Elliott Oring challenged folklorists to put their money where their mouths were. If legends were stories shared as true, then we should embrace all stories told as true or with "the rhetoric of truth" as legend (Oring 2008). In doing so, Oring argued for what amounts to a truth-centered approach to legend. I want to keep that approach as an important avenue of analysis, but I also want to suggest a parallel approach that refocuses analysis on doubt rather than truth. A doubt-centered approach to legend is not just politically expedient for the types of politically charged narratives I have been studying around the issue of welfare, and not just attractive because I am deeply distressed at politically motivated attacks on journalism, verifiable facts, and democracy. A doubt-centered approach to legend is initially attractive simply by more honestly and accurately labeling much of the work we are already doing.

Tom Mould, “A Doubt-Centered Approach to Contemporary Legend and Fake News”

[rumorologist]

We do not mean to be flippant because it is obvious that both racism and racial paranoia are destructive; yet we cannot wait until these feelings have vanished, nor can we use our failings as a means to discredit others.  We must not make those we hope to understand so ashamed of their beliefs that they will engage in self-censorship or intense self-monitoring. This will only make our contacts artificial; or even worse, it may destroy any pretense of honest communication. If one is afraid that one's moral standing-- or one's career-- is at risk, [it creates a culture] in which people have intolerant thoughts but are afraid that these views may slip out, with dire consequences.  Tolerance is a virtue, especially when directed toward those with dirty hands. The situations that we confront have been constructed by whites and blacks, together with self-fulfilling prophecies arising from the images of both groups.

“Whispers on The Color Line: Rumor and Race in America” by G.A. Fine and Patricia A. Turner

[rumorologist]

In old-fashioned folkloristics, the goal of studying folk narrative was to determine the personality of the narrator and the function or significance oft he story for the teller and community. But legends circulate for many reasons and so may not have a set significance, even for one narrator. Can we answer the question that many in the general public often assume we can answer: what do legends mean? I propose that, in and of themselves, legends have no meanings. This does not mean that meanings aren't constructed from legends. This is the one thing that we can be sure about: that legends compel their hearers to construct meanings. But it would be lost labor to study their content, history, and morphology as a key to some "hidden message" intrinsic to all variants of a given narrative.

Bill Ellis, “The Life of Legends” in Aliens, Ghosts and Cults

[rumorologist]

If the group has experienced the legend, they may reduce it to a simple allusion to one of its distinctive elements—a protagonist's body part (the Hook); a piece of dialogue ("Have you checked the children?"); even a sound effect ("scratch, scratch, scratch"). Such an element is a "metonym," a part that stands for the whole. In such cases, the allusion recalls the whole story simultaneously present in the minds of the group's members, without interrupting the topic of conversation to replay it. Legend metonyms show up everywhere but are often opaque to outsiders. To that extent, they define the boundaries both of the group's world and of its membership. Sometimes, though, legends simply resist the reverse entropy needed to restore them to narrative form. "The Razor Blades in the Apple," as Sylvia Grider has found, is a metonym, since even the allusion to the allusion universally represents a narrative that is almost never performed.  In such cases we can reconstruct the "implied" text only by surveying the cultural uses of the metonym, just as the compiler of a dictionary produces the implied definition of a new word by comparing its various uses.

Bill Ellis, “The Half-Lives of Legends” in Aliens, Ghosts and Cults

[rumorologist]

Folklorists are often called on to explain why a given legend has emerged. This is often hard to do, because legends circulate for reasons independent of the narrators' personality. French sociologist Jean Noel Kapferer demonstrated this by taking a series of surveys on a widespread contemporary legend: the "Blue Star Acid" story.1 According to this story, which has circulated in the United States since the 1970s, drug dealers give free LSD to small children in the form of "lick-and-stick" tattoos laced with drugs that can be absorbed through the skin. When this legend went through France in 1988, Kapferer distributed a questionnaire to his students. He found that two-thirds found the legend credible and 60 percent passed on the story to others, either orally or by copying a flyer with a version of the legend. But the 60 percent who circulated the rumor were not all drawn from the 67 percent who believed it. Of the believers, 27 percent said they did nothing, a factor made up by the 26 percent of nonbelievers who nevertheless passed on the warning to others. Interestingly, the percentage of those who physically duplicated the leaflet was actually higher among nonbelievers and those inclined to disbelieve than among firm believers and those inclined to believe.

Bill Ellis, “Why is a Legend?” in Aliens Ghosts and Cults

[rumorologist]

However, if, for example, through hard work, a white man becomes an expert of African American gospel singing, a black man becomes an expert of classical Baroque music, and a Mexican man becomes an expert chef of Chinese cuisine, how should we understand these people and the traditions they claim? Based on the previous paradigm, it is likely that these people and these phenomena would be considered exceptional and be excluded from the study of an “ethnic group’s” tradition. On the contrary, if we think within the tenets of folkloric identity, we would focus more on how a tradition is sustained through “anyone’s” practices, regardless of that person’s “race” or “ethnicity.” That is how a tradition is created, like Jazz and Blues. Thus, the bottom line is we must analyze from which paradigm we begin to understand such phenomena.

Juwen Zhang, “The Folkloric Identity is the Thing” in Western Folklore

[rumorologist]

On one hand, when one turns to the question "why" (rather than "what"), one enters the ever treacherous area of interpretation. Interpretations often tend to be subjective rather than objective. It is a legitimate question whether one can effectively "prove" the validity of one interpretation over another. Nevertheless, I believe it is incumbent upon professional folklorists to offer interpretations of their data. They must make the best case they can for the particular interpretations they espouse. Ideally, the interpretations should be read out of the data rather than being read into the data!

Alan Dundes, “Preface” in Interpreting Folklore (ix)

[rumorologist]

The influence of semiotics upon folkloristics has not been altogether salutary. The scholarship of semiotics seems bloated with pompous terminology and littered with competing unintelligible abstract formulations...  Structuralism perceived as one branch of semiotics should be considered as being essentially a rigorous means of descriptive ethnography. Structural analyses attempt to tell us what an object is, not what the object is for or what it means... It is only that pure structuralism has a tendency to stop after describing in agonizing detail an object's actual or imagined constituent elements and the patterns of interrelationships between those elements.  In short, however useful semiotics may be for honing the tools of description and classification in folkloristics, it has yet to prove itself in the study of the meaning of folklore.

Alan Dundes, “Projection in Folklore: A Plea for Psychoanalytic Semiotics” in Interpreting Folklore (35)