Το ιστολόγιο αποσκοπεί στην επικοινωνία με επιστήμονες(λαογράφους, ανθρωπολόγους, εθνολόγους, ιστορικούς, κοινωνιολόγους, φιλόλογους, κ.λπ)αλλά και σε όλους όσους αγαπούν το λαϊκό πολιτισμό, τη λογοτεχνία, ανησυχούν για την εκπαίδευση και την κοινωνία και αναζητούν μέσο έκφρασης. Είναι μια σκηνή για ενημέρωση και ανταλλαγή απόψεων. Ακόμη,το ιστολόγιο περιλαμβάνει στήλη(blogaρίσματα) για τη διατύπωση απόψεων σε τρέχοντα ζητήματα.
ΣΤΙΣ 9 ΜΑΡΤΙΟΥ του σωτηρίου έτους 2020, ο υπουργός υγείας ανακοίνωσε το κλείσιμο όλων των εκπαιδευτικών ιδρυμάτων λόγω της παγκόσμιας επέλασης του κορωνοιού.
Η χώρα εσώκλειστη. Το φανταστικό εισέβαλε στη σφαίρα του πραγματικού.
Ο πλανήτης στο γύψο. Οι μέρες περνούν και οι εσωτερικοί αρμοί αρχίζουν να χάνονται.
Ο εγκλεισμός αυτός θα μείνει βαθιά χαραγμένος στη μνήμη όλων.
Στη δική μου καταγράφηκε τελεσίδικα. Έφυγε ταξίδι στους γαλαξίες και τους αστεροειδείς ένας από τους πιο αγαπημένους ανθρώπους της ζωής μου, ο Νίκος Κατσάνος.
Ο χρόνος σταμάτησε να κυλά μέσα στο σπίτι. Περνούσε ξυστά έξω απ’ αυτό.
Και έγινε ο εγκλεισμός αφόρητος. Η ζωή ακανόνιστη και τα δάκρυα ποτάμια.
Έτσι κι αλλιώς οι αποχωρισμοί φέρνουν δάκρυα κι απόγνωση.
Καταβυθίστηκα εντός μου για να ανταμώσω τις αξιοθαύμαστες ήττες μου.
Οι βυθοί που ταξίδεψα ήταν γεμάτοι με τις αποτυχίες μου.
Κοιτούσα στο ταβάνι αυτά που δεν έζησα. Πάνω στις πευκοβελόνες, με τις οποίες είχε στρωθεί το πάτωμα, εγώ έψαχνα τη βελόνα που θα μαντάριζα ξανά τη ζωή μου.
Ασφυξία.
Για να μπορώ να ξεφεύγω βρήκα ρήματα μυστικά και λέξεις ακριβές και άρχισα τα φανταστικά καθημερινά μου ταξίδια δίκην ημερολογίου.
Αφού δεν μπορούσα να αποκτήσω το βήμα του ταξιδευτή, απέκτησα το βλέμμα του.
As the world enters its second full month dealing with the deadly coronavirus that has dominated headlines, killed hundreds, and sickened thousands, misinformation is running rampant. For many, the medical and epidemiological aspects of the outbreak are the most important and salient elements, but there are other prisms through which we can examine this public health menace.
There are many facets to this outbreak, including economic damage, cultural changes, and so on. However, my interest and background is in media literacy, psychology, and folklore (including rumor, legend, and conspiracy), and my focus here is a brief overview of some of the lore surrounding the current outbreak. Before I get into the folkloric aspects of the disease, let’s review the basics of what we know so far.
First, the name is a bit misleading; it’s a coronavirus, not the coronavirus. Coronavirus is a category of viruses; this one is dubbed “COVID-19.” Two of the best known and most deadly other coronaviruses are SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, first identified in 2003) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, identified in 2012).
The symptoms of COVID-19 are typical of influenza and include a cough, sometimes with a fever, shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting, and/or diarrhea. Most (about 80 percent) of infected patients recover within a week or two, like patients with a bad cold. The other 20 percent contract severe infections such as pneumonia, sometimes leading to death. The virus COVID-19 is spreading faster than either MERS or SARS, but it’s much less deadly than either of those. The death rate for COVID-19 is 2 percent, compared to 10 percent for SARS and 35 percent for MERS. There’s no vaccine, and because it’s not bacterial, antibiotics won’t help.
The first case was reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China. About a month later the Health and Human Services Department declared a U.S. public health emergency. The average person is at very low risk, and Americans are at far greater risk of getting the flu—about 10 percent of the public gets it each year. Three cruise ships and several airplanes have been quarantined. There are about a dozen confirmed cases in the U.S., and most of the infected are in China or are people who visited there. Though the number of people infected in China sounds alarming, keep in mind the country’s population of 1.4 billion.
The information issues can be roughly broken down into three (at times overlapping) categories: 1) Lack of information; 2) Misinformation; and 3) Disinformation.
Lack of Information
The lack of information stems from the fact that scientists are still learning about this specific virus. Much is known about it from information gathered so far (summarized above), but much remains to be learned.
The lack of information has been complicated by a lack of transparency by the Chinese government, which has sought to stifle early alarms about it raised by doctors, including Li Wenliang, who recently died. As The New York Times reported:
On Friday, the doctor, the doctor, Li Wenliang, died after contracting the very illness he had told medical school classmates about in an online chat room, the coronavirus. He joined the more than 600 other Chinese who have died in an outbreak that has now spread across the globe. Dr. Li “had the misfortune to be infected during the fight against the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic, and all-out efforts to save him failed,” the Wuhan City Central Hospital said on Weibo, the Chinese social media service. Even before his death, Dr. Li had become a hero to many Chinese after word of his treatment at the hands of the authorities emerged. In early January, he was called in by both medical officials and the police, and forced to sign a statement denouncing his warning as an unfounded and illegal rumor.
Chinese officials were slow to share information and admit the scope of the outbreak. This isn’t necessarily evidence of a conspiracy—governments are often loathe to admit bad news or potentially embarrassing or damaging information (recall that it took nearly a week for Iran to admit it had unintentionally shot down a passenger airliner over its skies in January)—but part of the Chinese government’s long standing policies of restricting news reporting and social media. Nonetheless, China’s actions have fueled anxiety and conspiracies; more on that presently.
Misinformation
There are various types of misinformation, revolving around a handful of central concerns typical of disease rumors. In his book An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease, Jon D. Lee notes:
People use certain sets of narratives to discuss the presence of illness, mediate their fears of it, come to terms with it, and otherwise incorporate its presence into their daily routines … Some of these narratives express a harsher, more paranoid view of reality than others, some are openly racist and xenophobic, and some are more concerned with issues of treatment and prevention than blame—but all revolve around a single emotion in all its many forms: fear. (169)
As Lee mentions, one common aspect is xenophobia and contamination fears. Many reports, in news media but on social media especially, focus on the “other,” the dirty aberrant outsiders who “created” or spread the menace. Racism is a common theme in rumors and urban legends—what gross things “they” eat or do. As Prof. Andrea Kitta notes in her book The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore:
The intriguing part of disease legends is that, in addition to fear of illness, they express primarily a fear of outsiders … Patient zero [the assumed origin of the “new” disease] not only provides a scapegoat but also serves as an example to others: as long as people do not act in the same way as patient zero, they are safe. (27–28)
In the case of COVID-19, rumors have suggested that seemingly bizarre (to Americans anyway) eating habits of Chinese were to blame, specifically bats. One video circulated allegedly showing Chinese preparing bat soup, suggesting it was the cause of the outbreak, though it was later revealed to have been filmed in Palau, Micronesia.
The idea of disease and death coming from “unclean” practices has a long history. One well known myth is that AIDS originated when someone (presumably an African man) had sex with a monkey or ape. This linked moralistic views of sexuality with the later spread of the disease, primarily among the homosexual community. More likely, however, chimps with simian immunodeficiency virus were killed and eaten for game meat, which is documented, which in turn transferred the virus to humans and spawned HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), which in turn causes AIDS.
The fear of foreigners and immigrants bringing disease to the country was of course raised a few years ago when a Fox News contributor suggested without evidence that a migrant caravan from Honduras and Guatemala coming through Mexico carried leprosy, smallpox, and other dreaded diseases. This claim was quickly debunked.
Disinformation and Conspiracies
Then there are the conspiracies, prominent among them the disease’s origin. Several are circulating, claiming for example that COVID-19 is in fact a bioweapon that has either been intentionally deployed or escaped/stolen from a secure top secret government lab. Some have claimed that it’s a plot (by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or another NGO or Big Pharma) to sell vaccines—apparently unaware that there is no vaccine available at any price.
This is a classic conspiracy trope, evoked to explain countless bad things, ranging from chupacabras to chemtrails and diseases. This is similar to urban legends and rumors in the African American community, claiming that AIDS was created by the American government to kill blacks, or that soft drinks and foods (Tropical Fantasy soda and Church’s Fried Chicken, for example) contained ingredients that sterilized the black community (for more on this, see Patricia Turner’s book I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-America Culture.) In Pakistan and India, public health workers have been attacked and even killed trying to give polio vaccinations, rumored to be part of an American plot.
Of course such conspiracies go back centuries. As William Naphy notes in his book Plagues, Poisons, and Potions: Plague Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps c. 1530-1640, people were accused of intentionally spreading the bubonic plague. Most people believed that the plague was a sign of God’s wrath, a pustular and particularly punitive punishment for the sin of straying from Biblical teachings. “Early theories saw causes in: astral conjunctions, the passing of comets; unusual weather conditions … noxious exhalations from the corpses on battlefields” and so on (vii). Naphy notes that “In 1577, Claude de Rubys, one of the city’s premier orators and a rabid anti-Protestant, had openly accused the city’s Huguenots of conspiring to destroy Catholics by giving them the plague” (174). Confessions, often obtained under torture, implicated low-paid foreigners who had been hired to help plague victims and disinfect their homes.
Other folkloric versions of intentional disease spreading include urban legends of AIDS-infected needles placed in payphone coin return slots. Indeed, that rumor was part of an older and larger tradition; as folklorist Gillian Bennett notes in her book Bodies: Sex Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend, in Europe and elsewhere “Stories proliferated about deliberately contaminated doorknobs, light switches, and sandboxes on playgrounds” (115).
How to Get, Prevent, or Cure It
Various theories have surfaced online suggesting ways to prevent the virus. They include avoiding spicy food (which doesn’t work); eating garlic (which also doesn’t work); and drinking bleach (which really, really doesn’t work).
In addition, there’s also something called MMS, or “miracle mineral solution,” and the word miracle in the name should be a big red flag about its efficacy. The solution is 28 percent sodium chlorite mixed in distilled water, and there are reports that it’s being sold online for $900 per gallon (or if that’s a bit pricey, you can get a four-ounce bottle for about $30).
has received many reports that these products, sold online as “treatments,” have made consumers sick. The FDA first warned consumers about the products in 2010. But they are still being promoted on social media and sold online by many independent distributors. The agency strongly urges consumers not to purchase or use these products. The products are known by various names, including Miracle or Master Mineral Solution, Miracle Mineral Supplement, MMS, Chlorine Dioxide Protocol, and Water Purification Solution. When mixed according to package directions, they become a strong chemical that is used as bleach. Some distributors are making false—and dangerous—claims that Miracle Mineral Supplement mixed with citric acid is an antimicrobial, antiviral, and antibacterial liquid that is a remedy for autism, cancer, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, flu, and other conditions.
It’s true that bleach can kill viruses—when used full strength on surfaces, not when diluted and ingested. They’re two very different things; confuse the two at your great peril.
Folk remedies such as these are appealing because they are something that victims (and potential victims) can do—some tangible way they can take action and assume control over their own health and lives. Even if the treatment is unproven or may be just a rumor, at least they feel like they’re doing something.
There have been several false reports and rumors of outbreaks in local hospitals across the country, including in Los Angeles, Santa Clarita, and in Dallas County, Texas. In all those cases, false social media posts have needlessly alarmed the public—and in some cases spawned conspiracy theories. After all, some random, anonymous mom on Facebook shared a screen-captured Tweet from some other random person who had a friend of a friend with “insider information” about some anonymous person in a local hospital who’s dying with COVID-19—but there’s nothing in the news about it! Who are you going to believe?
Then there’s Canadian rapper/YouTube cretin James Potok, who last week stood up near the end of his WestJet flight from Toronto to Jamaica and announced loudly to the 240 passengers that he had just come from Wuhan, China, and “I don’t feel too well.” He recorded it with a cell phone, planning to post it online as a funny publicity stunt. Flight attendants reseated him, and the plane returned to Toronto where police and medical professionals escorted him off the plane. Of course he tested negative and was promptly arrested.
When people are frightened by diseases, they cling to any information and often distrust official information. These fears are amplified by the fact that the virus is of course invisible to the eye, and the fears are fueled by ambiguity and uncertainty about who’s a threat. The incubation period for COVID-19 seems to be between two days and two weeks, during which time asymptomatic carriers could potentially infect others. The symptoms are common and indistinguishable from other viruses, except when confirmed withlab testing, which of course requires time, equipment, a doctor visit, and so on. Another factor is that people are very poor at assessing relative risk in general anyway (for example, fearing plane travel over statistically far more dangerous car travel). They often panic over alarmist media reports and underestimate their risk of more mundane threats.
The best medical advice for dealing with COVID-19: Thoroughly cook meat, wash your hands, and stay away from sick people … basically the same advice you get for avoiding any cold or airborne virus. Face masks don’t help much, unless you are putting them on people who are already sick and coughing. Most laypeople use the masks incorrectly anyway, and hoarding has led to a shortage for medical workers.
Hoaxes, misinformation, and rumors can cause real harm during public health emergencies. When people are sick and desperately afraid of a scary disease, any information will be taken seriously by some people. False rumors can not only kill but can hinder public health efforts. The best advice is to keep threats in perspective, recognize the social functions of rumors, and heed advice from medical professionals instead of your friend’s friend on Twitter.
Further Reading:
An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease, Jon D. Lee
Bodies: Sex Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend, Gillian Bennett
I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-America Culture, Patricia Turner
Plagues, Poisons, and Potions: Plague Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps c. 1530-1640, William Naphy
The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter, Gary Alan Fine and Bill Ellis The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore, Andrea Kitta
On the morning of March 16, I received an email from a colleague that contained an urgent warning about COVID-19: “Insider knowledge from one of my sons suggests a nationwide two-week, everything closes down, quarantine may be coming to be announced either tomorrow night or the night after. So go to the grocery store. A friend’s dad is in healthcare and met with Trump.”
At the same time, similar messages were circulating widely in cyberspace. According to the fact-checking website Snopes.com, one typical version advised, “within 48 to 72 Hours the president will evoke what is called the Stafford act. Just got off the phone with some of my military friends down in DC who had a two hour briefing. The president will order a two week mandatory quarantine for the nation. Stock up on whatever you guys need to make sure you have a two week supply of everything. Please forward to your network.”
Receiving one of these messages may trigger much anxiety. However, seeing the messages as clusters is a call to apply the methods and interpretations of folklore. Folklorists do not equate folklore with materials that are necessarily false or fake; rather we believe that folklore is the lifeblood of various folk groups—be they based on geographic region, race or ethnicity, religion, occupation, gender, or age. Folklore is one of the best indicators for understanding these groups’ fundamental values and beliefs, including their concerns and anxieties.
A folkloristic analysis of the two messages above will recognize certain patterns and conventions that mark them as folklore:
The attribution to “a friend’s dad” and “some of my military friends,” who are what folklorists call FOAFs, or friends of a friend.
The similarities, such as the timeframe of forty-eight to seventy-two hours (“either tomorrow night or the night after”).
But also some differences. Folklore always appears with some slight variation because it never comes from a single authoritative source, but rather is transmitted more informally from person to person or group to group—nowadays often via text messages or social media.
Folklorists would classify these two messages as rumors because they provide plausible, unofficial information and because they emerge during a real-world situation of potential danger. Folklorists recognize the very real dangers of spreading misinformation, but we also understand how folklore functions for members of folk groups, especially when those groups feel threatened. Like all examples of folklore, rumors seek to inform and to build solidarity and cohesion among members of folk groups, as those groups seek to maintain their identity in the modern world.
A similar folkloric form is the legend, which folklorists define as a story believed to be true, which is always set in real time and in the real world. The difference between legends and rumors, as noted by psychologists Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia in their article on “Rumor, Gossip, and Urban Legends,” is that “Rumors are shorter, non-story-like bits of information without an established plot,” while legends “tend to be longer, with setting, plot, climax and denouement.” Legends also differ from myths, which (as defined by folklorists) take place before the beginning of time and before the world (as we know it) was created.
Not surprisingly, legends are also emerging during the current coronavirus crisis. One that was shared on Publore, a listserv for public folklorists, is that criminal gangs are taking advantage of people trying to remain safe at home. They are sending crying children to residential homes; if the door opens (because who can resist a crying child?), the gangs rush in to commit unspeakable mayhem (depending on the version). Folklorists recognize this legend as a variant on the “Baby Car Seat Lure,” in which criminals supposedly leave an infant’s car seat (usually with a blanket draped over it) by the side of the road get people (mostly women) to stop and get out of the cars. Like rumors, legends seek to inform—whether true or not—and to enhance cohesion, in part by warning members of the group about potential threats to their safety and well-being.
One of the folkloric genres that is especially relevant at this time is folk medicine, which includes folk remedies and cures to combat illnesses, especially when more conventional medicine has been ineffective. One such belief, debunked by the New York Post and New York Times, is that you can gargle with warm water and salt or vinegar to eliminate the coronavirus. Even one of the panelists on the March 21 episode of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me cited a variant—albeit skeptically—in which gargling with hot water will supposedly force the virus into your stomach, where your stomach acid will kill it.
While gargling saltwater won’t hurt you, studies show it won’t protect you either, especially if it’s in lieu of proven protective measures. Folk medicine typically operates in tandem with conventional medicine, but may be especially effective in validating and reinforcing the beliefs and conduct of a particular group, as indicated by recent research on American ginseng by Smithsonian folklorists.
As grim as much of this coronavirus folklore may be, folklorists also trace the humor shared among folk groups, especially in times of anxiety. According to the first sentence in “At Ease, Disease: AIDS Jokes as Sick Humor,” by the noted and highly provocative folklorist Alan Dundes, “Disasters breed jokes.” In this richly documented article, Dundes analyzes some of the gruesome folk humor that followed not only the 1986 explosion of the Challenger but that also accompanied the HIV/AIDS pandemic during the mid-1980s—at a time when the disease was still closely associated with gay men.
He concludes that the jokes about AIDS involved two topics that were taboo at the time: “homosexuality and a deadly disease. . . . Hence it makes sense for there to be a joke cycle that facilitates the ventilation of private fears about contracting AIDS (and about possible connections with homosexuality). By joking about AIDS, one can distance oneself from the disease and from homosexuality.”
In perhaps similar fashion, coronavirus humor may help to relieve anxiety (in part by joking about such a serious, even taboo topic), build group solidarity, and even provide some entertainment—which is still another function of folklore. Not surprisingly, one consistent theme of humor borrows from the proliferation of online animal videos—in this case, dogs and cats adopting very human reactions to sneezing and coughing. Others deal with puns on Corona and the shortage of toilet paper.
Another theme borrows from a poster and T-shirt that are popular in Indian Country, which uses a Native American perspective to reverse mainstream notions of homeland security and terrorism. From this same Indigenous perspective in the context of COVID-19, an image on Twitter notes that Native Americans have been “fighting viruses, plagues, pandemics, and invasive species since 1492.” An article by Dalton Walker on Native responses to the coronavirus threat includes this image with an observation by Navajo artist and designer Eugene Tapahe that “Humor is the best medicine; it got our ancestors through much, it will get us through more.”
In the meantime, folklorists remain alert to the culture (non-biological) of the coronavirus, even as we conduct our research in isolation. Our research will certainly evolve as the pandemic itself evolves. But one of our primary concerns will remain constant: to better understand how our cultural expressions (be they stories, customs, text messages, or memes) may function as folklore—by informing, by validating and reinforcing the beliefs and conduct of a particular group, by building solidarity and cohesion among members of that group, and even by providing some entertainment at this vitally serious moment in world history.
James Deutsch is a curator at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage who holds a PhD in American civilization with a concentration in folklife from George Washington University.
