Who Are the Folk in 2024?

Kristian Bjørkelo, University of Bergen

In order to establish concepts such as folk worlds and folk mechanics, we need to understand how folklore and the folk are entangled in video games, internet culture and contemporary nationalist imaginations and politics. We need to interrogate who or what constitutes the folk in 2024.

 With Dan Ben Amos’ suggestion that folklore was artistic communication within small groups (Ben-Amos 1971), he not only circumvented the notion that folk and folklore were bound to a mythical traditional society, but suggested that the folk consisted of smaller groups of people with something (values, ideals, history, interests) in common. Or as Alan Dundes put it

“any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is-it could be a common occupation, language, or religion-but what is important is that a group…have some traditions that it calls its own” (Dundes 1965:2).

In his seminal work “Who are the folk?”, Alan Dundes further expanded the understanding of the folk, to include those who primarily lived in urban and even academic environments – answering his own question with a solid “among others, we are!” (Dundes 1977). This is an inclusive and democratic understanding of the folk, which has allowed folklorists to understand contemporary, urban and even online folk expressions as folklore (Blank and McNeill 2018; Phillips 2015). And while folkloristics still seek relevance and legitimization in tying contemporary secondary orality (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Ong 1979) with traditional expressions, I believe we should adopt an even more inclusive understanding of folk and folklore in order to understand the contemporary culture of political memecraft and games.

 In this presentation, I will engage with classic and contemporary scholars in folklore to answer the question Who are the folk in 2024.

Kristian A. Bjørkelo is a folklorist who has researched political extremist culture online and offline. He teaches digital culture and communication at the University of Bergen, and has done so for a decade and a half. Starting in 2024 he will teach communication at Nord University, Bodø as an Associate Professor. His PhD research was on transgressions in games and game culture, while his current research interests include emergent narratives and procedurality in tabletop gaming, the therapeutic use of games, and the creative future of artificial intelligence. In his sparse free time he paints tabletop miniatures and writes short fiction for a small audience. He lives in Bergen with his partner, two children and the cutest cat ever.