The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate

Dégh, Linda; Vázsonyi, Andrew

doi:10.2307/538735

Cited by 26 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…The credulity of this type of rumour rests on what appears to be some kind of first‐hand, eyewitness account of SARS contractions in the asserted vicinity. The term ‘memorate’ was first proposed by Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (as opposed to ‘fabulate’) to refer to a particular narrative genre that circulates by reproducing people’s ‘own, purely personal experiences’ to an interested audience (cited in Dégh and Vázsonyi 1974: 225). However, as Dégh and Vázsonyi (1974: 226) point out, the classic Sydowian formulation in its strict interpretation must mean that ‘a memorate can be known only by that single person and respectively by as many people as heard it from him [or her]’.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The rumouring of SARS during the 2003 epidemic in China

Tai

Sun

2011

Sociology Health & Illness

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By analysing rumour content as covered by major Chinese newspapers, this article explores the multiple dimensions of SARS-related rumouring throughout China during the 2003 epidemic. Findings indicate a strong correlation between the scale of SARS infections and level of rumour activities across regions. As for channels of dissemination, the rumour process still found a natural habitat in word of mouth, while internet-based platforms and cell phone text messaging emerged as viable grapevines. Our particular typology of SARS-incurred rumours leads us to identify four distinct types of rumours: legendary rumours; aetiological narratives; proto-memorates; and bogies. The four types of rumours are discussed against the background of superstitious beliefs, folklore practices, popular mentalities, and China's particular socio-political information environment.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The rumouring of SARS during the 2003 epidemic in China

Tai

Sun

2011

Sociology Health & Illness

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“…They engage in telling what folklorists call "personal narratives" that relate individual experiences within American structural and stylistic expectations of the "good story." Often events that spark the personal narrative as a folkloric frame are family sagas, workplace dramas, scary situations, social faux pas, supernatural or miraculous experiences ("memorates" in folkloristic terminology), and sexual encounters (Boatright 1958;Braid 1996;De Caro 2013;Dégh and Vázsonyi 1974;Fine 1987;Honko 1964;Pentikainen 1973;Robinson 1981;Sebba-Elran 2003;Stahl 1977;Sweterlitsch 1996;Tucker 1992;Wilson 1991;Zeitlin et al 1982).…”

Section: Folklore As Processes In Everyday Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

The Challenge of American Folklore to the Humanities

Bronner¹

2018

Humanities

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American Folklore consists of traditional knowledge and cultural practices engaged by inhabitants of the United States below Canada and above Mexico. American folklorists were influenced by nineteenth-century European humanistic scholarship that identified in traditional stories, songs, and speech among lower class peasants an artistic quality and claim to cultural nationalism. The United States, however, appeared to lack a peasant class and shared racial and ethnic stock associated in European perceptions with the production of folklore. The United States was a relatively young nation, compared to the ancient legacies of European kingdoms, and geographically the country's boundaries had moved since its inception to include an assortment of landscapes and peoples. Popularly, folklore in the United States is rhetorically used to refer to the veracity, and significance, of cultural knowledge in an uncertain, rapidly changing, individualistic society. It frequently refers to the expressions of this knowledge in story, song, speech, custom, and craft as meaningful for what it conveys and enacts about tradition in a future-oriented country. The essay provides the argument that folklore studies in the United States challenge Euro-centered humanistic legacies by emphasizing patterns associated with the American experience that are (1) democratic, (2) vernacular, and (3) incipient.

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“…Sometimes the chain of links is shortened by a narrator, who may even claim it all happened to himself. Dégh and Vázsonyi's (1974) examples of well-known contemporary legends show that while the legends spread and there is need to retain credibility, the narrative strategies vary flexibly and the same contents can be performed as memorates or fabulates depending on the choice of narrative voice. When arguing that memorates easily become fabulates and vice versa, Dégh and Vázsonyi based the terms on the distinction between first-person and thirdperson narration, rejecting the Sydowian division between the content deriving from one's own experience or a traditional plot.…”

Section: Classificatory Ideal and Its Critique In Legend Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%