Urban Legends Research Articles

Mythodesign as a Sociocultural Technology of Designing Modern Myths: Visual Aspect

The purpose of the study is to reveal the role of mythology as a manipulative tool for the creation of social illusions, which form the “picture of the world”. Consider relationships between mythodesign and art, and advertising. Justify that advertising design is an aesthetic facet of mythodesign. Research methodology. The methodological basis of the research is made of the analytical, systematic, and comparative methods, as well as theoretical developments in the field of art history, cultural studies, and psychology. Scientific novelty consists in deepening and expanding aspects of the analysis of design technologies that reflect the dynamics of form formation in the system of different spatiotemporal cultural coordinates. Mythodesign is characterized as multiple interpretations of an informational text in visual forms, where the specificity of the phenomenon lies in the fact that it is based on a matrix-type message, understandable for everyday consciousness, and oriented to its inherent archetypes of world perception. It is considered and theoretically justified that advertising design is an aesthetic component of mythodesign. Conclusions. Mythological consciousness is an integral part of the human worldview. Research of mass culture myth-making gives reason to talk about the great possibilities of mythodesign in creating a virtual “picture of the world” and social illusions in various spheres of life. It is justified that mythodesign creates design models in which objects are transformed into mythological components of almost endless sequences that are synchronized with the same infinity of ideas about the “picture of the world”. The aesthetic facet of mythodesign can be characterized as a creative series of images created by advertising design and perceived by society as a sensory reality. It was found that the objects of the natural environment, “passing” through the visual design objectification, become signs that the consciousness assigns certain meanings. In such a situation, the instrumental potential of mythodesign, which allows visual information to be shaped into aesthetic images, becomes relevant.

Review: Hope and Fear: Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories, and Pseudo-History, by Ronald H. Fritze

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Hope and Fear: Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories, and Pseudo-History, by Ronald H. Fritze Hope and Fear: Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories, and Pseudo-History. By Ronald H. Fritze. Reaktion Books, 2022. 271 pages. £20.00 hardcover. Susannah Crockford Susannah Crockford University of Exeter Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2023) 26 (4): 120–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2023.26.4.120 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Susannah Crockford; Review: Hope and Fear: Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories, and Pseudo-History, by Ronald H. Fritze. Nova Religio 1 May 2023; 26 (4): 120–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2023.26.4.120 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNova Religio Search Hope and Fear sells itself as a history of “pseudo-history” or what Ronald Fritze labels “junk knowledge” (14). Methodologically, this means taking a historical approach to conspiracy theories and broadly arguing that so-called junk knowledge has a long history. The book’s introduction serves as a bullhorn denouncing all that is untrue. Relying on psychological research, the first chapter provides some justification for why people believe conspiracy theories—despite these ideas being categorically false and irrational, according to Fritze. The subsequent chapters comprise the real meat of the text, however, which provides a historical overview on the myth of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, then skips between periods of European and American history: Inquisition Spain, Sabbatai Zvi in the Ottoman Empire, the Templars, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Nazis, and then Roswell, New Mexico. The field of western esotericism might link these disparate cultural and historical periods together, if there were... You do not currently have access to this content.

Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer by Davis W. Houck

Reviewed by: Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer by Davis W. Houck Julie Buckner Armstrong Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer. By Davis W. Houck. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Pp. xiv, 153. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4078-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4079-0.) Davis W. Houck’s small book raises big questions about Freedom Summer. Coming in at 127 pages, not counting notes, Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer examines two intersecting historical memories. One is the murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James E. Chaney, whose deaths became a touchstone for the 1964 summer when college students from across the country, most of them white, converged on Mississippi to register Black voters and work in Black communities. Another is the belief that, during the search for the three men after they disappeared, federal authorities discovered multiple unidentified Black bodies (more than two dozen in some accounts) in the state’s rivers, swamps, and bayous. Why, Houck asks, did the names “Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney” evolve into “the six syllables that today form something of an American civil rights anthem,” while two Black men whose bodies were found around the same time—Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee— wound up largely forgotten (p. 8)? And what are historians today to make of the unsubstantiated but persistent claims of books, films, songs, museums, and more that Mississippi’s waterways were awash with far more bodies than those of Moore and Dee? Houck structures his exploration of these questions in an unconventional manner: not by chapters but into sections headed by quotations from the events’ various actors. The book thus operates as a long essay or meditation on the myth, and meaning, of Freedom Summer. In the first half, Houck examines an important but less widely known precursor. The 1963 Freedom Vote set the stage for bringing white college students to Mississippi on a large-scale basis. Their presence was considered newsworthy, unlike Black residents’ grassroots organizing and the persistent violence their communities faced. Houck describes Freedom Summer as a tactic of leveraging racism against itself to create change. An unintended consequence of this tactic was how the students’ presence—along with the deaths of Goodman, Schwerner, and [End Page 388] Chaney (even though the latter was Black)—bolstered a white savior myth. Claims of multiple “Black bodies pulled out of rivers,” Houck explains, call into “question the centrality of murdered white men in the larger story of Freedom Summer” (pp. 71, 9). In the book’s second half, he explores how these claims originated in the deaths of Moore and Dee, killed by the Ku Klux Klan and discovered by two people fishing, not, as erroneously reported, in the search for the missing civil rights workers. The story took on a life of its own, erasing Moore’s and Dee’s names and expanding the number of bodies, first in folk songs and later through academic studies and documentary films about Mississippi and Freedom Summer, eventually making its way into historical markers and school curricula. Some readers might want more discussion of why figures such as historian John Dittmer and the creators of the documentary series Eyes on the Prize accepted without criticism claims not supported by evidence. Comparisons with other violent events that became fodder for urban legend might also provide broader context. Still, Houck provides an excellent case study of how historical facts coalesce into stories accepted as “truth.” Julie Buckner Armstrong University of South Florida Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

The Future Is Furby

The Future Is Furby

A Tiny War in a Human: aids, Art, and Protest in Poland

Abstract Unearthing sociocultural histories of hiv/aids in Poland, this article focuses on heretofore silenced and dismissed narratives of the crisis and the ways in which hiv/aids in Poland posed a challenge to socialist rule, but also to Polish society and the state in the early days of neoliberal democracy. I focus on the first decade of the aids epidemic in Poland (1985–1996) to investigate how narratives of the crisis made palpable people’s anxieties about the changing political, economic, and social conditions, gentrification, as well as the linear logic of progress encapsulated in the desire to catch up with the West. I analyze sociocultural responses to the crisis, specifically artistic interventions, underground gay, lesbian and aids activism, public demonstrations against the state’s inept management of the epidemic, the lack of media coverage, and urban legends circulating in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In doing so, I examine how the intersection of public discourse of the aids crisis and the changing political landscape played out on the level of a body with aids through the biopolitical logic of “biological citizenship.”

“The First Foretaste of the True East” – A Polish Reporter in Post-Ottoman Ruse

The article confronts the urban myth about Ruse as the “most European city” in the Bulgarian lands with the reports from October 1886, published in Antoni Zaleski’s book "Z wycieczki na Wschód. Notatki dziennikarza" (From a trip to the East. A journalist’s notes). The comparison of the Polish observer’s notes with the most persistent elements of this myth reveals diametrically opposite notions about the city’s role in the modernization of Bulgaria during the second half of the 19th century. The key points in the narrative on Ruse as “the city of first things” and “the Gateway to Europe” include the Islahhane grand hotel as “the pearl” of modern Bulgarian accommodation and hospitality facilities; Ruse as a “Little Vienna” because of its architecture; Ruse as an important diplomatic center due to the presence of numerous consulates; the railway from Ruse to Varna as proof of the successful integration of the Bulgarian lands into the European transport system; and social and cultural life in Ruse as evidence of the break with the Oriental lifestyle. The article shows that the city regarded by its inhabitants as a “gateway to the West” was perceived by foreign visitors as a true “gateway to the East.” Zaleski builds his reports on the categories of East and West, European and Ottoman, Bulgarian and Turkish; his portrayal of the city puts it in the frame of an unquestionably Eastern, mixed Turkish-Bulgarian, post-Ottoman reality.

Moral foundations and perceptions of rape in Colombia (Fundamentos morales y percepciones del abuso sexual en Colombia)

ABSTRACT Two studies addressed links between moral foundations, political attitudes, religiosity and perceptions of rape in Colombian respondents. In Study 1, the authors developed a Colombian version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). In Study 2, the MFQ was further validated in relation to the acceptance of modern myths about sexual aggression (AMMSA), victim vs. perpetrator blaming regarding a rape vignette, political orientation and attitudes towards religion. Results showed that the Colombian MFQ was more reliable than an existing Spanish version. Endorsement of conservative foundations (ingroup loyalty, obedience to authority and purity) predicted right-wing political attitudes, higher religiosity, higher AMMSA and more rape victim blaming. Conversely, endorsement of liberal foundations (care and justice) predicted lower SDO and less rape victim blaming. These results replicate and extend previous work, including the critique that conservative foundations may reflect amoral attitudes rather than universal moral intuitions. Implications and requirements for further research are discussed.

An urban myth? Government involvement in the economy and left–right politics

People frequently assume that attitudes towards the government’s involvement in the economy differentiate left- from right-wing politics. This paper compares this idea to a version of acceptance of inequality theory, where acceptance of inequality is the principal element of left–right competition, but the specific inequality motivating individuals’ left–right choice may differ. Using multilevel regression models with survey data from the World Values Survey, as well as two case studies, this paper finds that: (a) acceptance of inequality is a better context-independent predictor of left-right self-placements around the world; and (b) in the Netherlands and Denmark, the correlation between acceptance of an inequality (regarding class or immigration) and right-wing self-placement is stronger when the specific issue dimension is salient to citizens. However, the paper finds no equivalent interaction effect for attitudes towards economic statism. The evidence thus supports the view that the left–right dimension concerns acceptance of inequality, rather than economic interventionism.

Yingling and women imagery in contemporary Taiwanese media culture: The Tag-Along film series as an example

With the assistance of textual analysis, this article examines the images of yingling (spirits of aborted or miscarried foetuses) in The Tag-Along and The Tag-Along 2. This popular cinematic demonology searches for a Taiwanese identity through urban legends and folklore. In the films, yingling are imagined as pitiful and malevolent. The spiritual being has desires, emotions and agency. This feto-centric imagination echoes the religious discourses that frame the newly popularized abortion ritual in Taiwan. Women are depicted as determined, independent and mutually supportive. However, the essentialist sexual differences remain highlighted, meaning that they are portrayed as mothers, and their bodies are represented through polluting blood, a signifier of excessive yin that serves the patrilineal needs of reproduction. During the process of modernization, Taiwanese society experienced drastic changes, yet, the ghost, as the persistent past, continues to impact the present. Through the investigation of irrationality, the reality surrounding women and children is revisited and debated.

Valery Bryusov and Urban Folklore: a game with genre tradition

The subject of the study is a literary game with the genre tradition of urban romance and factory (working) songs in the poetry of the poet of the Silver Age Valery Bryusov. The object of the study is Bryusov's genre palette and his creative searches in relation to the extensive development of genres of domestic and foreign literature, as well as folklore. The authors consider in detail such aspects of the topic as Bryusov's genre strategies, his playing with genre constants and the deliberate distortion of the genre "grid" of the working song with the involvement of features of another, related genre of violent urban romance. Special attention is paid to the catamnesis of Bryusov's texts: their further embodiment in music as songs, both purposeful and spontaneous. The main conclusions of the study are observations on the stylization of folklore in the literature of the Silver Age and reflections on the genre nature of the works of one of the most significant collections of poems by Bryusov, “Urbi et orbi” (1903). A special contribution of the authors to the study of the topic is their consistent tracing in Bryusov's "songs" of the presence of references to specific realities included in the apperceptive base of the reader and the author himself. The novelty of the research lies in the appeal to the genre of urban romance and factory song in Bryusov's work and in the expansion of the evidence base of observations on the genre diversity of the work of this poet and prose writer.

A well-oiled engine: Towards a critical petro-aesthetics of Singapore

While Singapore is not an oil-producing nation, it occupies an important role as one of the largest refinery hubs and the world’s busiest bunkering port for tankers and container ships. However, existing scholarship on petroculture has largely bypassed Singapore in its focus on direct representations of oil centred on upstream producers such as the United States, Canada and countries in the Middle East. This article traces the emergence and eventual disappearance of oil in Singapore’s visual culture through two moving images made separately in the late 1950s and the early 2000s. Comparing L. Krishnan’s film Orang Minyak (), which headlined a series of local films that featured the urban legend of the orang minyak (‘oily man’), with Tan Pin Pin’s documentary video 80km/h () allows us to consider the sudden eruption and eventual disappearance of oil in Singapore’s visual culture, set against the historical developments of Singapore’s oil industry. Of interest here is an attention towards both direct and indirect representations of oil. The article ends with a formal analysis of Tan’s 80km/h, through which I argue for a critical petro-aesthetics particular to Singapore itself, in thinking through its role as an important middleman in the global supply chain of petroleum and petrochemicals.

Fears of Enchantment: Advertising Theory in Britain and the Making of a Modern Myth

This article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms levelled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism.

Pilgrimage and Return: A Preliminary Study on the Prototype of James Gunn’s Transcendental Novels

Archetype is the path to the unconscious, myth is one of the forms of archetype in ancient times, and science fiction is a modern myth. What science fiction and myth have in common is the reflection on the current order and the imagination of the unknown world (the dream about the unknown). James Gunn’s “Transcendent”, science fiction series is a contemporary re-writing of Campbell’s heroic model, as well as a re-creation of the pilgrimage narrative model in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with Jung’s immutable archetype lurking behind it. This paper attempts to explore the prototype and mechanism created by James Gunn through the analysis of the hero mode and pilgrimage journey in this series of science fiction. The driving force behind the pilgrimage mode and hero mode is the process of subverting people’s spirit of having no support and longing for direction based on the development of science and technology and trying to find the right answer. It is a manifestation of the human panic at the loss of direction and the growing sense of impending doom.

Między radykalnym od-graniczeniem a krytycznym dystansem. Dekonstrukcyjne adaptacje mitu w prozie Brunona Schulza

Myth forms the central interpretive category for Bruno Schulz’s fiction. The approaches range from ideological appropriations through the Polish messianism, biographical reductions or theological exegeses. In the present article, on the other hand, connections are made to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to show how Schulz adopts in his narratives resounding theorems of modern myth reception. It is argued that the transfer of the concept of myth to the subjective world of his own childhood is linked to questioning of rational models of reality. At the same time, this is differentiated from the assumption that Schulz uses myth in an irrationally transfiguring way: the power of myth is broken by the fact that he consistently relativizes his mythologizing principle and in this way presents himself as a dubious agent of rationalization. This leads to a claim that his reference to myth is not an affirmative adoption of modern mythologization, but it turns out to be a deconstructive play with traditional aesthetic forms, which is systematically geared towards the outsourcing of his fiction from normative categories and, at the same time, reflects the potential danger of mythologization that promises salvation.

Evidence of environmental urban design parameters that increase and reduce sense of place in Barcelona (Spain)

Urban planning design considers sense of place attributed to the environment because it is important to quality of life and influences citizen support for planning proposals. In this paper, the physical and geographic characteristics that increase and decrease levels of sense of place were analyzed. Mediation effects of prior expectations and belief in urban legends attributed to specific environments were controlled for. A total of 1727 residents from 10 different districts of the city of Barcelona participated. Empirical urban parameters were measured for each district (e.g., hectares of parks and rate of streets with noise above 60 dB) and the weight with which they predicted levels of sense of place was objectively quantified. Perceived quality of life and residents' positive expectations of green spaces were measured also. Structural equation modeling (SEM) assessed theory relating green environments to sense of place and tested which urban elements had a detrimental effect. When including the mediating effects of prior expectations and perceived quality of life, urban parameters related to green spaces predicted increases in sense of place between 11% and 40%. Decibels, pedestrian streets, and the number of police arrests predicted systematic reductions in sense of place between 18% and 20%. Accordingly, the authors proposed two urban models of positive and negative feedback on sense of place. Application of these will improve urban planning by enhancing decision making efficacy.

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

A Semiotic Paradox: Scientific Language in the Narrative of TV Advertisement-

The narrative we find in TV advertisement especially abounds in scientific terms that the viewers hardly understand. The apparently ‘scientific’ language induces them to believe in the modern myth of science as absolute truth, which inevitably produces alienation from reality. The more such language triumphs, the more alienation they suffer without knowing it. Such is our situation today that reminds us of the time of Nazi in which alienating language was dominant. However, whether the use of scientific language on TV advertisement becomes alienating or not depends on the socio-cultural context of the viewers. For example, in Japan where the tradition gives more power and space to the ‘signifiant’ than the ‘signifié’, scientific terms used in advertisement are not necessarily meant to indicate ‘truth’ but just play the role of fascinating signifiants that stimulate the viewers’ dream of paradise, of a wonderland. Those viewers momentarily impersonate ‘the modern Westerners’, enjoying the participation in a collective dream which gives them much pleasure. If they purchase the advertised product, it is not because they believe its effect is scientifically proved but because it invites them to share the collective dream stimulated by the advertisement. One may say it is a semiotic paradox for the ununderstandable makes sense in their mind.

North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook, edited by David J. Puglia

Who doesn’t love a good monster story? A delicious chill shimmies up the spine and tingles the hairs of listeners huddled around a dying fire on an autumn night as clouds cross the moon and extinguish its light, while the narrator’s hushed voice winds the taut wire of terror to the breaking point. And then dry leaves crackle somewhere off in the dark. Anyone indifferent to the monster lurking just beyond the firelight is surely a dead soul…though I hesitate even to think the thought, lest a new monster be born. This world and every world visited by the human imagination comes well-stocked with monsters. They have always been with us and remain robust in modern times. The realm of folklore with its giants, witches, trolls, and dragons gave many of us our first unnatural scares, and no scholarly discipline than folklore seems more tailor-made to study their cause. North American Monsters undertakes that responsibility with an anthology of nineteen articles, fourteen drawn from scholarly journals and five written for this volume, each committed to the understanding of monsters in contemporary legends.
 Ah, the scholarly anthology. It often suggests a dutiful assemblage of dust-dry writing where the reader soon sleeps a sleep akin to coma and where all hopes of joy and excitement go to die. Well, this one is quite something more. Far from dull and dreary, here is a collection worthy of its subject. Editor David Puglia has chosen lively articles based on the authors’ field research to introduce a range of fearsome creatures, some long-lived, some deceased, some recent and still walking among us. Beyond passing acquaintance, these articles familiarize the reader with their subjects, how these monsters are born and grow and die, the environments that favor them, the human energies that feed and sustain them. We get to know them. Sometimes they are villains, forces of nature, even tragic figures, but all of them have a purpose in the human realm that goes beyond eating people or leaving tracks and turds in the forest.

"The Most Gentle of Lethal Methods": The Question of Retained Consciousness Following Decapitation.

Since the development of the infamous guillotine in the French Revolution, physicians have debated how long consciousness persists in decapitated heads. Fueled by anecdotes of severed heads that blink, blush, and appear to retain intelligence, numerous experiments have investigated this macabre subject for nearly 250 years. In this paper, we examine the evidence, both historical and modern, and ultimately conclude that, while the truth may never be fully known, all evidence appears to indicate that loss of consciousness appears to occur within seconds of decapitation. The rumors that circulated through the European consciousness during the Terror of the French Revolution appear to be just that - curious urban legends from an awed and terrified public.

Why ‘Religion’ and ‘Secular’ Categories in Sociology: Decolonizing the Modern Myth by Mitsutoshi Horii is a major contribution to critical religion

Why <i>‘Religion’ and ‘Secular’ Categories in Sociology: Decolonizing the Modern Myth</i> by Mitsutoshi Horii is a major contribution to critical religion