Fakelore or pseudo-folklore is inauthentic,
manufactured
folklore presented as if it were genuinely
traditional. The term can refer to new stories or songs made up, or
to folklore that is reworked and modified for modern tastes. The element
of misrepresentation is central; artists who draw on traditional stories
in their work are not producing fakelore unless they claim that their
creations are real folklore.[1]
The term fakelore was coined in 1950 by American folklorist
Richard M. Dorson.[1]
Dorson's examples included the fictional
cowboy
Pecos Bill, who was presented as a folk hero of the
American West but was actually invented by the writer
Edward J. O'Reilly in 1923. Dorson also regarded
Paul Bunyan as fakelore. Although Bunyan originated as a character
in traditional tales told by loggers in the
Great Lakes region of
North America,
James Stevens, an ad writer working for the Red River Lumber
Company, invented many of the stories about him that are known today.
According to Dorson, advertisers and popularizers turned Bunyan into a
"pseudo folk hero of twentieth-century mass culture" who bore little
resemblance to the original.[2]
Folklorismus, often
Anglicized to folklorism, also refers to the invention or
adaptation of folklore. Unlike fakelore, however, folklorism is not
necessarily misleading; it includes any use of a tradition outside the
cultural context in which it was created. The term was first used in the
early 1960s by German scholars, who were primarily interested in the use
of folklore by the
tourism industry. However, professional art based on folklore, TV
commercials with
fairy tale characters, and even academic studies of folklore are all
forms of folklorism.[3][4]
Controversy
The term fakelore is often used by those who seek to expose or
debunk it, including Dorson himself, who spoke of a "battle against
fakelore".[5]
Dorson complained that popularizers had sentimentalized folklore,
stereotyping the people who created it as quaint and whimsical[1] –
whereas the real thing was often "repetitive, clumsy, meaningless and
obscene".[6]
He contrasted the genuine Paul Bunyan tales, which had been so full of
technical logging terms that outsiders would find parts of them
difficult to understand, with the commercialized versions, which sounded
more like children's books. The original Paul Bunyan had been shrewd and
sometimes ignoble; one story told how he cheated his men out of their
pay. Mass culture provided a sanitized Bunyan with a "spirit of
gargantuan whimsy [that] reflects no actual mood of lumberjacks".[2]
Daniel G. Hoffman said that Bunyan, a folk hero, had been turned into a
mouthpiece for capitalists: "This is an example of the way in which a
traditional symbol has been used to manipulate the minds of people who
had nothing to do with its creation."[7]
Others have argued that professionally created art and folklore are
constantly influencing each other, and that this mutual influence should
be studied rather than condemned.[8]
For example, Jon Olson, a professor of anthropology, reported that while
growing up he heard Paul Bunyan stories that had originated as lumber
company advertising.[9]
Dorson had seen the effect of print sources on orally transmitted Paul
Bunyan stories as a form of cross-contamination that "hopelessly muddied
the lore".[2]
For Olson, however, "the point is that I personally was exposed to Paul
Bunyan in the genre of a living oral tradition, not of lumberjacks (of
which there are precious few remaining), but of the present people of
the area."[9]
What was fakelore had become folklore again.
Examples of
fakelore
"Follow the Drinkin' Gourd"
Considered by many an authentic artifact of the
Underground Railroad, the song "Follow
the Drinkin' Gourd" is in fact of uncertain origin and was not
published until 1928, sixty-three years after the end of slavery.[10]
American folk
heroes
In addition to Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, Dorson identified the
American folk hero
Joe Magarac as fakelore.[2]
Magarac, a fictional
steelworker, first appeared in 1931 in a Scribner's Magazine
story by the writer Owen Francis. He was a literal man of steel who made
rails from molten metal with his bare hands; he refused an opportunity
to marry in order to devote himself to working 24 hours a day, worked so
hard that the mill had to shut down, and finally, in despair at enforced
idleness, melted himself down in the mill's furnace in order to improve
the quality of the steel. Francis said he heard this story from
immigrant steelworkers in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; he reported that they told him the word
magarac was a compliment, then laughed and talked to each other in
their own language, which he did not speak. The word actually means
"jackass" in
Serbo-Croatian. Since no trace of the existence of Joe Magarac
stories prior to 1931 has been discovered, Francis's informants may have
made the character up as a joke on him. In 1998, Gilley and Burnett
reported "only tentative signs that the Magarac story has truly made a
substantive transformation from 'fake-' into 'folklore'", but noted his
importance as a local cultural icon.[11]
Other American folk heroes that have been called fakelore include
Old Stormalong,
Febold Feboldson,[2]
Daddy Joe,
Daddy Mention,
Big Mose,
Tony Beaver,
Bowleg Bill,
Whiskey Jack,
Annie Christmas,
Cordwood Pete, and
Antonine Barada. Marshall Fishwick describes these largely literary
figures as imitations of
Paul Bunyan.[12]
Neopagan
A number of
Wiccan,
Neopagan and even some "Traditionalist" or "Tribalist" groups have a
history of spurious "Grandmother Stories" – usually involving initiation
by a Grandmother, Grandfather, or other elderly (and conveniently dead)
relative who is said to have instructed them in the secret,
millennia-old traditions of their ancestors.[13]
As this "secret wisdom" has almost always been traced to recent sources,
or been quite obviously concocted even more recently, most proponents of
these stories have eventually admitted they made them up. These "origin
myths" are sometimes also referred to as "The Myth of the Wicca." In
these cases, rather than a case of folklorists from outside the
community calling the Wiccan stories "fakelore", phrases such as
"Grandmother Stories" and "The Myth of the Wicca" have become synonyms
and shorthand for a specific type of fakelore found within the
communities in question.[14]
Slender Man
An example of this in
Internet culture is
Slender Man or Slenderman, a fakelore tale created on June 10, 2009
by user Victor Surge on
Something Awful. Depicted as a tall thin man wearing a suit, with a
blank, white and featureless face, he is most often described as
abducting, stalking and traumatising people, particularly children.[15]
The Slender Man is the result of a contest launched on the
Something Awful forums to
edit photographs so that they contained "supernatural" entities[16],
although subsequently the character has been the topic of videos,
stories, and even a character in video games.
Slender Man has been called "the first great myth of the web".[17]
While nearly everyone involved understands that Slender Man is not real,
the Internet allows others to build on the established tropes, and thus
lend an air of authenticity.[16]
See also