The truth does hurt, but not as much as ignorance and denial.
It's not just a bunch of whacked out stories. Folklore is powerful. Knowledge is powerful.
Watch the video above and think about it. Folklore isn't for the weak at heart.
Why is this important? Why watch this? Isn't it just a story?
No.
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Nothing is ever just a story.
What people believe matter. The stories we tell matter. Words matter and the truth matters. We have to ask ourselves where our stories come from? What happens when we repeat a story? What is freedom of speech and what is abusive speech? What power does the verbal folklore "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me" carry? Is it just a fun little game, or can words hurt? Do stereotypes deliver unintended violence into our psyches? Do stereotypes make it easier to see other as less than human? Why does this same story keep showing it's face over and over and over?
Folklorists have become adept at tracing the beliefs and customs shared by group members, even if we don’t always understand where or how these beliefs and customs emerged. One very helpful resource is the Motif-Index of Folk Literature, a magisterial six-volume compilation of myths, legends, and folktales collected by folklorists in the early twentieth century and arranged in alphanumeric order.
There we can find, for instance, motifs that reference child abduction (R10.3), child sacrifice (S260.1.1), and killing children for their blood (V361)—all of which help to explain why the legend known as the blood libel remains so persistent. Based on the false belief that Jewish people have used the blood of abducted Christian children for ritual purposes, it is a legend that keeps reemerging—around the Greco-Roman Mediterranean in the first and second centuries BCE, throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, and revived in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.
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Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage
December 7, 2020 | James Deutsch, Levi Bochantin
The Folkloric Roots of the QAnon Conspiracy
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Living Folklore, 2nd Edition: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions
Martha Sims, Martine Stephens
"Choosing to identify with a group often involves or requires deliberately expressing a clear sense of connection to the values, practices, and beliefs of a particular group...It means taking a position that says 'this is who I am' rather than "this is what I believe'" (pg. 43)