An allegory of Fama and Historia: rumor studies, collective memory, and semiotics

1 Introduction

There is a constant tension between history and rumors. While history is crafted through rigorous methodologies, seeking to construct a coherent and verified narrative of past events, rumors operate on the peripheries of these narratives, offering alternative, and sometimes contradictory, interpretations. However, both history and rumors illustrate a shared reconstruction of the past, in which the tension represents the fluid nature of knowledge and truth in societal contexts, where rumors can both challenge and complement historical understandings. The article seeks to construct a link between history and rumor on a decentralized common ground of collective memory and discuss the reciprocal relationship between collective memory and rumor, and the mechanisms maintaining that relationship. History has long been a subject matter of collective memory studies; however, the relationship between rumor and collective memory is less discussed due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the phenomenon. Moreover, since collective memory is a passive corpus presenting itself in multiple discourses, semiotics brings forth a perspective of analyzing its structure and meaning-making mechanisms under a social pressure, providing insights into the dynamic relationship between collective memory and rumors.

Figure 1:

Allegorie der Fama Und Historia, Hendrick Goltzius, 1586. Photo credit: Katharina Anna Haase, 2020. https://sammlungen.uni-goettingen.de/objekt/record_kuniweb_1314107/1/-/.

The engraving Allegorie der Fama und Historia (Figure 1) by Hendrick Goltzius (1586) underscores the dynamic between rumor and history. Fama, the goddess of rumor and fame, is rising from the book that Historia is reading. As Hans-Joachim Neubauer describes,

In seiner Dynamik demonstriert der beinahe nackte Leib der Fama die Macht des Ruhms. Übermütig wirft sie ihr linkes Bein vor, während sich ihr lose umgelegtes Gewand von Schwung des Fluges zu den Seiten hin aufbauscht.

[In its dynamism, the almost naked body of Fama demonstrates the power of fame. She lifted her left leg in high spirits, while her loosely wrapped gown billows out to the sides from the momentum of the movement.] (Neubauer 1998: 80, translation mine)

Apart from the artist’s own symbolic manifestations, the allegory showcases the sharp difference between history and rumor: history is a systematic understanding and documentation of the human past. What exactly happened then, i.e., the certainty of historicity, is the utmost importance laid at the basis of Geschichtwissenshaft, or the study of history. However, rumor, as a fleeting and ephemeral phenomenon, is constantly imbuing uncertainty in the progression of history. Rumors are seemingly impeding the fundaments of the subject matter and are therefore marginalized in history research. As Sebastian Jobs underscores, the idea of including rumors in history research is “counterproductive to the mission of creating a reliable and provable narrative of the past” (2020: 1). The study of history has traditionally been regarded as a disciplined approach that values precision and reliability, especially authoritatively purported official histories that are taught in classes.^[1] Even though some rumors are indeed archived in historical accounts, they are recorded to enshrine the precision of historical records, namely, a certainty of uncertainty, not to delve into the uncertain world that rumors themselves shed light on. In other words, the archived rumors in historical archives have already been “categorized or pre-interpreted … in a certain fashion that assumed a very specific meaning, […carrying] the connotation of a dubious piece of information that is potentially untrue” (Jobs 2020: 2). In this regard, there is an intrinsic tension between rumor and official history. Rumors are predefined as the other side of the “true” history, an “annoying background chatter of real history” (Jobs 2020: 4) that needs to be carefully excluded, which reduces history to a centralized discipline that goes alongside the grand narratives (Lyotard 1984) of a given culture and society, which is definitely needed for the cohesion of given communities. But rumors, on the other side, become merely texts in archives and fanciful stories from mouth to mouth.

Moreover, from the other way round, scholarship regarding the rumor phenomenon is conducted in a sheer different way from history studies. Rumors became a subject matter for academia especially during and after WWII, when the truthfulness of information was highlighted due to the panic instigated by the war. Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman defined rumor as “a specific (or topical) proposition for belief, passed along from person to person, usually by word of mouth, without secure standards of evidence being present” (1947: ix). In line with the sociological paradigm, Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia understand rumor as “unverified and instrumentally relevant information statements in circulation that arise in contexts of ambiguity, danger, or potential threat and that function to help people make sense and manage risk” (2007a: 13). As explanations towards a social concern, rumors represent the current epistemological processes among the public to comprehend what is going on in the perceived social reality. Tamotsu Shibutani (1966) understand rumor as “improvised news” to cope with the ambiguity and current uncertainty of the social situation. In this regard, rumor is “the cornerstone of epistemology” (Fine 1997: 741).

However, as the epistemological patterns for comprehending ambiguity, rumors are not articulated out of the total fantasies of an individual. Before being addressed as rumors, such discourses can find their roots in the preceding communications in society; some were recent, and some were spoken long ago. In other words, rumors also have their own histories. Understanding the rumor phenomenon, in this regard, also requires a historical approach to understand its dynamics in diachronic depth and how it is transformed in a time span. The present-day situation where rumors abound indicates that the past was also chimed with rumors. These accounts used to be rich and heterogeneous; but after selection and marginalization, seldom appear in what we have as historical archives and narratives after the selection and marginalization process, which are “reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down” (Foucault 2001: 158). But these discourses cannot be overlooked and are inevitable if we are to understand the past: alongside the official history that educates people what happened in the past, the footnotes of such grand narratives are also present and functioning in the social sphere. As Marc Bloch (2013 [1921]: 2) noted, “The study of the past should rely on the same material as the observation of the present.” With regards to this, the multivocality that is happening now also happened before, only later being carefully selected by historians and archivists. The diachronicity of the rumor phenomenon demonstrates that the present rumors are also both “future’s past,” as Reinhart Koselleck (2004) underscores, and “past’s future.”

In this sense, the tension between history and rumors is never as simple as merely antagonism. The rumor phenomenon showcases that alongside with the official history as a linear narrative, alternative narratives also exist and are interwoven with official narratives of the past. They constitute the vast ground of the shared past of mankind and maintain the collective corpus to the futures ahead, which requires historicizing rumors as narratives with their own special status in historical accounts.

2 The heteroglossia and the expanded horizon of history

Rumor is, in its very essence, a public behavior to comprehend what is going on in the perceived social reality with shared intelligence to reach a satisfying interpretation (Kapferer 1990: 139; also see Shibutani 1966). Rumors are impossible if they remain to be personal imaginations and reactions towards raw facts. They appear, transmit, and dissipate as a discursive practice, in which every participant has a say. The multivocal nature of the rumor phenomenon leads to the fact that rumors constitute an “informational black market” (Kapferer 1990: 9) to explain the current situation as improvised news (Shibutani 1966). Under such circumstances, the authoritative informative channel is absent, either absent per se or losing its credulity among the public; as Gary Alan Fine underscores, “Rumor indicates a breakdown of institutional trust [and] reveals uncertain trust in fellow citizens” (2007: 7). Without the presence of a grand narrative that convinces the public to reunite heterogeneous interpretations of raw facts, different individuals or groups provide their own versions of the event and communicate with their fellow individuals and groups to share their findings and interpretations for a better grasp of the perceived social reality. More importantly, the rumor public (Peterson and Gist 1951) believes in each other as they are trying to reshape the incomprehensible social reality. The belief, indeed, does not come from nowhere. Apart from the institutional authority that is believed to be the homologous informative channel to know what is happening and the centralized knowledge to explain, there are alternative institutions on the discursive level, which are at times marginalized, and which come back easily when the institutional authority is no more credible.

What else can be resorted to, if not the institutional authority that regulates the social informative channel to provide unified discourses to explain what is happening in the social reality? Ülo Valk points out that “Authority is not an inherent textual quality, not something that is pre-given, but a product of mediational performances, involving the replication of a prior discourse” (2022: 15). From this perspective, authority can rise from the repetitive discursive practices in the social sphere, to which communities adhere and with which such communities carry on to the coming generations. That is tradition, in its broadest terms. As Robert Glenn Howard underscores, “On the one hand, tradition can refer to the empirical quality of an act as having been handed down, while on the other hand, it can refer to a noninstitutional or vernacular authorizing force perceived by those participating in an act” (2013: 73). The participation of such discursive practices, by “repetition and sharing” (Lachmann 2008: 307), constructs vernacular authorities that are also regulating the social sphere in their heterogeneity beyond the reach of the homogeneous, grand narratives. As Howard notes,

Alternate to institutional authority, however, vernacular authority emerges when an individual makes appeals that rely on trust specifically because they are not institutional. Trust is justified by the assertion because the claim does not rely on any authority arising from formally instituted social formations like a church, a newspaper company, or an academic journal. (Howard 2013: 81, italics in original)

Rumor rises when various vernacular authorities step out to give explanations towards a social concern. As “a central way tradition functions discursively” (Howard 2013: 76), these alternative authorities appeal to the rumor public with their “power grabs” in the name of tradition and bring the past texts to the present to function as the key to comprehend what is happening around the public and as a counter force for the public to resist official accounts on what is happening around. Therefore, the rumor phenomenon represents a heteroglossia concerning a specific topic, in which different vernacular authorities, in the format of cultures, traditions, beliefs, taboos, and rituals, claim to exert their ability to interpret what is happening here and now. Furthermore, these authorities are not claiming to be the only truth as the grand narratives do, to understand the situation. They are connected to each other, support each other, and of course, conflict with each other at times. Jobs underscores that “rumors and gossip give us the chance to historicize the panorama of subjective perspectives, contextualize the rumor-mongering and give room to the voices of the many in these stories, even if it means that they contradict each other” (2020: 6). In this regard, rumors function as footnotes that go along with the self-description of the given community about their shared past and become part of cultural history (Burke 1997; Lotman 2019; Torop 2017), providing a more intimate view of historical events. As Luise White (1994: 81) points out, “Gossip, in practice, contains interests, embodiments and local strands of power. It precisely reveals those passions, complaints and revisions that are sometimes suppressed in the lives written about from oral interviews.” Historicizing rumors, in this regard, indicates historicizing the authoritative web woven by different authorities, both the institutional and the vernacular.

Therefore, institutional authorities and the vernacular authorities should have the same weight in historicizing the rumor phenomenon. Rumors, as well as fake news, conspiracy theories, gossips and hearsays, should be regarded as part of “microhistory” (Ginzburg 1993) that manifests the local power relationships and how knowledge is sought for under different authorities,^[2] which echoes what Bloch (2013 [1921]) argued about the historicity of fake news during WWI. Bloch reflected on traditional positivist approaches in historiography and furtherly argued that the fake news should be taken seriously for analyzing the historical contexts and back-to-date social pressures. The case of Pierre Rivière (Foucault 1982) has showcased the possibility of investigating these histories in the corners: alongside the ghastly murder that Rivière killed his mother to free his father and the family, the crime scenes, opinions of different central figures and the murderer’s own memoir were included to demonstrate the whole situation in which “the murder and the narrative of the murder were consubstantial” (Foucault 1982: 200). Historicizing rumors should have the same spirit: before the mediation of archivists and historians, different voices should be recorded from different perspectives to illustrate past knowledge structures, no matter endorsed by institutions or endowed by traditions.

In short, rumor is a social discursive practice in which different cultures and traditions coexist and clash with each other within a local community and under a social context, shaped by diverse aspects, beliefs, and interpretations of various individuals and groups. The heteroglossic nature of the rumor phenomenon manifests the complexity and the diversity of social discourse. From this perspective, rumors provide a window towards the collective imagination of the time and of the place, as well as the local communication within a given community. The problem now occurs as how to record them as they are: The relationship between history and rumor is still an antithesis: rumors are represented as the “infamous,” the marginalized, or the repressed, whereas history is represented as the persecutor, the central, and the repressor. The word “history” itself contains already the authoritative gazing that minimizes the complexity to a univocal account of the past, giving events a unified meaning without further debates regarding the historical status of the event, which reduces rumors, as the discursive attempts to explain raw facts, to a dusted archive to enshrine the truthfulness of history. In this regard, bringing the heteroglossia back to the study of history requires an expansion of historical methods to narrate and represent history from a new perspective by historicizing rumors in the same way as grand narratives that dominate the podium.

Moreover, in daily practice, the relationship between the two is not that intense: the grand narratives and the surrounding heterogeneous discourses, on the contrary, construct a dynamic cultural and social sphere in which various discourses are interrelated with each other. It is precisely in this heteroglossia that the central functions as the central and the marginal as the marginal. And daily communications are traversing between the central and the marginal; as Michail M. Bakhtin (1981: 272) points out, “Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces).” Therefore, to incorporate historical approaches to rumor studies, i.e., to delve into the cultural and social corpus to trace how rumors are generated in response to a social concern, there should be a grander conceptual framework to include all these discourses under the same scope; discourses are therefore freed from strands of power relationships that situate rumors in the margins and rumor discourses are included in re-representing rumors themselves. In other words, to add diachronic depth to the problematics of the rumor phenomenon requires new conceptualizations, by which rumors are no more a fleeting, ephemeral shadow but a discursive phenomenon that leaves its own trails in human past. With the conceptualizations, the tension between rumors and history can be suspended as both will become neutralized as discourses freed from historiographical prejudices. In this sense, rumors are transferred from a pseudepigraphy-like status to a solid foundation for discussion, in the same way as history, which leads to a search for a deeper common ground for the two.

3 Rumors, history, and collective memory

There is still a more profound logic of the allegory by Goltzius: both Fama and Historia are what people recount and retell towards the same raw facts; only after these texts enter the social sphere are they mediated as history or rumors of the past. As Jean-Noël Kapferer underscores, “After the event, many interpretations arise: at the outset they coexist and feed off each other. Certain interpretations are abandoned while others continue to spread” (1990: 139). Therefore, before being trapped in the web of power relationships and being selected, all the generated texts are truth claims regarding the social concern structured by different authorities. As stated above, authorities are constructed via discursive performance and representations, turning into belief systems as the epistemological paradigms of the given community. The communicative nature of these authorities, in this regard, presumes that alongside the synchronic “web” between various authorities, each of them has its own diachronic depth with its projection on the synchronic plane. In other words, the authorities that individuals and groups have their presence not only as the web of power relationships, but also their crystalized histories of how they acquire such authority. Therefore, the authoritative power also comes from what people recall as knowledges of the past and bring them here and now. The shared experience is collective memory, as Fine notes: “Many wish to persuade us of truth claims, or, at the very least, to share them. These claims may have an uncertain provenance, but, under the right circumstances, we incorporate them into our belief system, act upon them, and recall them through collective memory” (Fine 2007: 5).

In this vein, it is possible to include rumor studies under the perspective of collective memory to delve into the belief systems of the given community and excavate how rumors appeal to their audience. Early in the 1930s and the years to come, Jamuna Prasad (1935, 1950) analyzed the rumors that haunted the population during the earthquake in India. Besides the viral transmission of earthquake rumors, Prasad also discussed the mythological patterns that are inherited in Indian culture and their roles in the generation and transmission of related rumors. The collective memory of the given group shapes how the raw facts are configured and structured as the social reality for communication. Therefore, different communities may have sheer different interpretations towards the same raw fact, due to discrepancies in respective collective memories. Françoise Reumaux points out that it is impossible to ignore the mythological fabric behind the rumor phenomenon, as well as the intertextual relationship that maps out the sphere of collective memory:

Les traces de l’acte, cependant, sont évidemment présentes dans la mémoire sociale, où l’on peut penser qu’elles sont demeurées prégnantes à travers les siècles, assurant la continuité du tissu social, l’enveloppe de la nymphe, et liant les mentalités d’un indispensable ciment culturel … Cela signifie que pour expliquer la rumeur, il faut non seulement lire dans le contexte social où elle apparaît, mais aussi relier ce tissu au tissu mythologique qui en est la trame, et éclairer ce contexte à la lumière de ce que nous apprend la mémoire collective qui en est le texte.

[The traces of the act, however, are obviously present in the social memory, where one can think that they remained pregnant through the centuries, ensuring the continuity of the social fabric, the envelope of the nymph, and binding mentalities with an indispensable cultural cement … This means that to explain the rumor, it is necessary not only to read in the social context in which it appears, but also to link this fabric to the mythological fabric which is its frame, and to shed light on this context in the light of what collective memory teaches us, which is the text.] (Reumaux 1996: 16, translation mine)

By the very end of Edgar Morin’s diary on investigating the rumors in Orleans, he wrote down his wonder if he has missed an important, mystical element that “revoked” the public imagination towards the social concern:

The pattern I have sought is a fluid, multiform one, where the disruption of one element will shake all the rest, and modify the overall structure. At this level, I feel satisfied with my analysis. Yet I cannot but wonder whether it has not let slip through its meshes what may well be the essence of the matter, something … almost inexpressible: that fabulous poetic element, transmuting dream and reality, mystically associating one with, and within, the other, a poetry which habitually eludes sociological investigation, and which all speculation (as regards its origins, causes and consequences) does no more than reduce to an entity that explains everything bar itself. (Morin 1971: 167)

In the same vein, Lindsay Porter (2017: 10) also points out that during the French revolution, there had already existed a group memory that modified how people were reacting to hearsays and gossips, which snowballed into a rumor that haunts the whole society. The collective memory, in this regard, provides epistemological tools for communities and groups to structure what is happening around them with previous experiences, often inherited from predecessors of the community.

Unfortunately, even though these scholars mentioned the term “collective memory” in many places and showcased the possibility of this approach, they did not refer directly to the study of collective memory but used the term as an umbrella term (along with Reumaux’s “social memory,” Porter’s “group memory,” etc.). Researchers in rumor studies have not built up the linkage with the academic concern on collective memory, which was initiated by Maurice Halbwachs and further developed by scholars in recent decades. Nevertheless, in collective memory studies, in fact, there are similar terms used in various works, including social memory (Fentress and Wickham 1992; Olick and Robbins 1998; Welzer 2001), political memory (Aleida Assmann 2016) and collective remembering (Wertsch 2002, 2009). Social memory is focusing on how social order and relationships are built upon a shared recollection of the past as Halbwachs (1992) conceptualized as frameworks of society, collective memory is a more general term to denotate the exact texts and discourses that constitute its field. It is without doubt that by studying rumors the social aspect of memories shall not be neglected, yet the diachronic factors that stretch through the history of a rumor are more than their projections onto the social reality perceived now: some of the factors may not have a direct influence upon the social order under investigation but function in the articulation of certain rumors as archived texts (Aleida Assmann 2008) or context of articulation (Lotman 1988). What Reumaux (1996) termed as “social memory,” therefore, is closer to collective memory under the context of rumor studies. In this regard, to maintain the neutral, decentralized approach to study rumor, collective memory is a better term to designate the subject matter that rumor is constantly interacting with.

From the other way round, recent developments in the study of history have altered the course of its scholarship and provide places for rumors to enter history in terms of collective memory. As the “mnemonic turn” is dawning on horizons, “The notion of mnemohistory allows one to move beyond the (although still important) question of ‘what really happened’ to questions of how particular ways of construing the past enable later communities to constitute and sustain themselves” (Tamm 2022: 550). In line with listing Aby Warburg as one of the predecessors of the new turn, Tamm (2015: 11) notes that this new regime of historicity illustrates that “we are surrounded by a symbolic Nachleben [afterlife] of the past, which continuously influences our own historical imagination and understanding,” which joins the academic discourse with scholars on collective memory on the present representations of the past. In this sense, rumors, as comprehensions of the current ambiguity and danger in the social sphere, enter the realms of cultural history that has been constantly reworked, restructured and reinterpreted, demonstrating the phenomenon’s own dynamics and recurrence in different epochs of history.

Understanding the rumor phenomenon from the perspective of collective memory is promising: according to Jan Assmann (2008), there are three levels of memory: inner, social, and cultural. Since rumor is a collective phenomenon, the latter two levels are highlighted. But individual memory also plays an important role here: it is the individuals that are communicating their personal memories in the social sphere and come up with the rumors that are trying to comprehend. In this regard, collective memory acknowledges individual differences in remembering human past, therefore it presumes the ambiguity of human memory and provides the fertile ground for understanding rumor. Collective memory has two layers: cultural memory and communicative memory. Cultural memory is “a kind of institution” (Jan Assmann 2008: 110) that identifies members of a culture and, therefore, models the collective intelligence that are trying to comprehend what is going on. In this regard, within culture, as the “nonhereditary memory of a community, a memory expressing itself in a system of constraints and prescriptions” (Lotman and Uspenskij 1978: 213), it is precisely in cultural memory that different vernacular authorities reside and function as such institutions. On the other hand, communicative memory is non-institutional. Harald Welzer pointed out that it is the “short-term memory” (2008: 285) of the society. As it is already discussed above, when the raw facts are observed in the social sphere, different interpretations occur. However, before such interpretations emerge, these raw facts have already registered their place as the information shared by a given community, and more importantly, as the common basis for reaching an interpretation. In this regard, communicative memory is always the buzzword of the time for groups and communities and “has only a limited time depth” (Jan Assmann 2008: 111). As the communication proceeds in the social sphere, different authorities channel the process and various interpretations of the event are produced. Therefore, the two levels are intersected: on the one side, some texts are crystalized, sedimented as vernacular authorities to channel communication in the social sphere, and on the other side, some texts present themselves as texts to be communicated. Juri Lotman (1988: 54) notes that texts have two tendencies to function, one is integration, by which texts function as themselves for communication, and the other is disintegration, by which texts function as contexts of communication. The two tendencies correspond to the two layers of collective memory and the textuality of collective memory sheds light on rumor studies, since rumor is primarily a communicative phenomenon.

In this way, the rumor phenomenon can be understood as a manifestation of the dynamics between the two layers of collective memory, instigated by the raw facts observed and restored in individual memories. Cultural memory provides the canon (as in Aleida Assmann 2008: 100, the “working memory”; also see Rigney 2016: 65, culture and its role in shaping what is remembered and how) that models the interpretation of the social concern, which is represented in the communicative memory of the time and exchanged in the social sphere. Many scholars have already noticed the new potential for building links between rumor studies and collective memory (Podoshen and Hunt 2009; for example, Feldman-Savelsberg et al. 2017). Feldman-Savelsberg et al. underscore the relationship between collective memory and rumor as such:

Collective memory is thus related to rumor in at least two ways. First, collective memories create fertile ground for the reception of rumor; within the structures of collective memory, certain truth claims “make sense,” are linked to a set of beliefs and attitudes about the nature of the social order, and thus appear plausible to the audience of rumor. Second, collective memories, including memories of past rumors, can actually contribute to the production of new rumors; speakers may draw upon or refer to past events in their creation of rumor narratives. In other words, the genesis of rumor is path dependent. (Feldman-Savelsberg et al. 2017: 141)

Therefore, in collective memory, Fama and Historia are finally reconciled. The study on collective memory has been developed a great deal in the past several decades; however, few brought the fruition to the field of rumor studies. History has long been studied under the framework of collective memory as a “subcategory” of it (Burke 1997), a “mnemonic practice” (Lotman 2019; Olick and Robbins 1998), or “an art of memory” (Hutton 1993); yet the detailed relationship between rumor and collective memory is still underdeveloped and needs a more elaborated effort to contribute to the current scholarship on the rumor phenomenon. Nevertheless, with its full potential to investigate the rumor phenomenon, now it is time to bring the topic of collective memory back to the agenda of rumor studies and return to the promise of it. Rumors, as the records of local pressure and power relationships of the time, are the discursive linkages between Geschichtwissenschaft and history of the infamous based on the collective memory of given communities. In this sense, the reconciliation between the two deities leads to a more substantiated discussion on the mechanisms between rumor and collective memory.

4 Rumors and collective memory: a cultural semiotic perspective

With the reconciliation, the rumor phenomenon gains its diachronic depth and ontological status in human past and has its corner in the course of history. The first task of analyzing a rumor phenomenon, then, lies in conceptualizing the rumor public (Peterson and Gist 1951), since they are both the subjects and objects of rumor as a communicative process. According to Reumaux, there are three stages of the rumor process, analogous to the metamorphosis of an insect (Table 1).

From this conceptualization, it is evident that apart from setting eyes on rumor generation and transmission, Reumaux underscores that there is one more stage before rumor generation, namely, the pre-generation stage, which precedes the articulation of certain rumors. The larval stage of the rumor process reveals that before a rumor text appears in the social sphere, the past conflicts, cultural texts (mythologies), and collective memory of given groups have already prepared the venue for the rumor to circulate, which echoes previous discussions on mnemohistory and historicizing rumors on the ground of collective memory. Peter Burke (2015: 271) notes that “making the past present in this way involves a process of mythologizing it.” The present use of the past as a meaningful corpus of rumoring introduces semiotic aspects in understanding rumors and rumoring as a meaning-making process. Salerno notes on the semiotic aspect of memory studies:

Semiotics does not aim to differentiate between what is true and false, or to reconstruct facts and events per se; it does not study the ‘world’ or ‘things as they are, but the ‘n possible versions’ we can give of these, and the ways in which they are connected and in relationship. Likewise, a semiotic perspective applied to memory does not aim to study the past per se, but the n possible versions and interpretations of the past that we can locally identify, and their mutual relationships. (Salerno 2021: 88)

In this sense, rumor, as other narratives of the reality, is put under a semiotic scope. How rumors were like in the past is of secondary importance; the focus of historicizing rumors on the ground of collective memory is to investigate what is rumoring here and now under the influence of preceding texts, previous rumors included, and it’s use to help people make sense of what is happening right now and manage the world around them. In this regard, the rumor text has its intertextual relationship with the preceding texts that construct the cultural memory of a given community; it recalls the collective corpus of what the community remembers and functions as the present interpretation of the social concern, which again calls back the perspectives of mnemohistorical investigation as reconstructing “the webs of intertextuality as discourse” (Salerno 2021: 95–96).

The next step of rumors, namely, the nymphal stage, happens when the reality becomes ambiguous and necessitates the public to comprehend it, in which individual creativity (as individual memory) is incorporated into the public imagination of the current situations, and rumors are therefore incubated, smoldering in the corners under the influence of pre-existing conflicts and tensions in cultural memories of social groups. Rumors therefore start to take shape in concrete discourses and texts and to circulate in the social sphere, leading to the stage of explosion, which is a collection of the representations about public imaginations. In this sense, as it was discussed in previous pages, the occurrence of rumors is always the result of a double resonance: one originates from a remote, mythological past (cultural memory), and one from the current ambiguities that are the topic of public discussion (communicative memory). In illustrating the idea, Reumaux (1996: 8) refers to the explosion of rumors about Lapu-lapu fish (a kind of grouper fish). Lapu-lapu was a legendary chieftain of a local tribe. When the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan landed on the Philippine islands during his voyage of circumnavigation, Lapu-lapu and his people defeated and killed him in the Battle of Mactan (1521), which delayed the upcoming Spanish colonization. In the Philippines, Lapu-lapu is commemorated as a national hero, and the grouper fish, one of the main products of Philippine fisheries, is named after him. The rumor started to incubate when the news reported that the cruise ship Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker, Vector, at Tablas Strait on December 20, 1987. According to the official number, the incident, which happened not far from where Lapu-lapu defeated Magellan, claimed more than 4,000 deaths (Hooke 1997). As the remains of some victims were washed up on shore, rumors came out that some housewives reported finding human fingers, ears, and rings in the stomach of the Lapu-lapu fish, even though grouper fishes, according to maritime specialists, do not eat dead human flesh. When the rumors travelled further to Manila, the capital city, rumors became more shocking as one lady telephoned a local radio, claiming that she found male genitalia in the fish belly. Rumors of reporting human remains in a fish’s belly after an incident as such are quite normal and can be expected, but why especially in the bellies of the fish called Lapu-lapu? There are four centuries between the heroic deeds of Lapu-lapu and the collision, yet the time of latency (temps de latence) was magically removed by the presence of rumor (Reumaux 1996: 10). During the four hundred years, the legends of Lapu-lapu had infiltrated every corner of the social sphere in the Philippines. Lapu-lapu had become a national emblem, situating in the very center of Philippine national identity. And on that December night, people immediately related the national legend to the disastrous event, since dead bodies sank into the seas that the hero was to safeguard: the sacred sea areas were tainted by human flesh, and Lapu-lapu, the most lucrative fish of the areas, bore the brunt of rumors. As Reumaux notes on the double resonance of rumors,

… d’une part parce que l’éclosion, spontanée et apparente, est en fait l’aboutissement d’un processus qui peut être long, ou même très long, l’imaginaire étant ici, littéralement, ce que la réalité laisse sourdre, d’autre part parce que, loin de proposer des figures errantes, nées du hasard, il reproduit soit telles quelles, soit en les modifiant, soit en les travestissant, c’est-à-dire en en inversant les signes, les figures élaborées dans les mythologies et recueillies dans le creuset de la mémoire collective.

[On the one hand, because hatching, spontaneous and apparent, is in fact the culmination of a process which can be long, or very long. The imaginary here arises, literally speaking, is conceived by reality. On the other hand, the imaginary is far from being ambiguous figures born of chance, but a reproduction of their own shapes, modified or disguised. That is to say that they are the reversion of signs and figures that are elaborated in mythologies and collected in the forge of collective memory.] (Reumaux 1996: 18, translation mine)

In the case of Lapu-lapu rumor, the communication of national mythologies and memory texts during the four centuries is notable. Quite before the communication of certain rumor in the social sphere, there is already communication of certain memory texts within the chosen rumor public; and the rumors that come later, therefore, are special kind of manifestations of the whole communicative process in the history of such discourses. Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka point out that “Cultural memory preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity” (1995: 130). This awareness takes time: the story of Lapu-lapu defeating Magellan, being retold for four centuries, has become the canonical text that configures the Philippine national identity. And at the same time, from another way round, it has paved the way for later rumors to circulate. The communication of the legendary stories of Lapu-lapu demonstrates the “legend conduit,” by which the channel of transmission among certain groups is constructed, and cultural identity thus developed. As Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi underscore, legend conduit is “the sequence of individuals who qualify as legend receivers and transmitters” (1976: 96). The sequence, according to the same authors, is multifarious (the Multi-Conduit Principle, see Dégh and Vázsonyi 1975). In this regard, the legendary story slowly moved towards the canon during the communication process and finally functioned as “disintegrated” text (Lotman 1988: 54) in the cultural memory of the Philippine people.

And when rumors are incubated, they occur and follow the paths to reach and mesmerize the same people regardless of the sequence in the same conduits. Therefore, it is possible to conceptualize a rumor conduit in the social sphere, in which the communicative memory is shared and communicated. These conduits are constructed out of the legend conduits. As Ralph L. Rosnow and Fine point out:

No psychological rule states that rumormongering, like neural impulses, is a one-way transmission. Indeed it can be argued that rumormongering is actually a two-way channel, since communication is often marked by an exchange of messages (either by another rumor or by a judgement about the one received). Even when looking at two structurally similar examples, communication patterns can vary considerable due to random of idiosyncratic factors. It is theorized that there are conduits (like neural pathways) in which different kinds of information travel, but which can vary depending on the form of the report. (Rosnow and Fine 1976: 32)

Following the insight from Rosnow and Fine, during the larval stage of the rumor process, pathways that rumors can reach their population are prepared. And in the nymphal stage, certain texts are articulated under the mediation of the preceding cultural texts. These new texts are then not a story told from an individual to another, as the legendary stories are; they are set loose and reach members of a given community, and more importantly, they grasp and mesmerize members of the community. The multifarious conduit is therefore transformed into a network among the rumor public. The rumors are convincing to these individuals because the preceding texts, which are already articulated time and again, have created this intertextual network in which the new texts, instigated by the social concern, are well situated. From another way round, in the case of Lapu-lapu, it is precisely among the Philippine people that rumors regarding the Lapu-lapu fish have their market, because the legendary stories, in four hundred years’ time, have already pre-selected their audience for the reception of such rumors. The contamination of the rumor process is now ready to incubate these rumors to be articulated.

The contamination aspect concerns the demographic structure of the rumor phenomenon. To those who hold such cultural memory and are included in the contamination process, related rumors sound plausible. Algirdas J. Greimas (1989 [1980]: 651) underscores that “the concept of plausibility is necessarily subject to a kind of cultural relativism.” As the case of Lapu-lapu shows, when these texts are communicated and shared, they become the buzzword of the time and are widely discussed in society, especially and precisely in the Philippines. Due to the heterogeneity of vernacular authorities, these interpretations often conflict with each other and finally transform into a rumor complex (Fine and Ellis 2010: 29), driven by cultural memories of the social groups involved. It is only at this stage that rumors have become rumors. In other words, the heteroglossia of rumors in communicative memories of different social groups is constructed by their respective cultural memories, which in return select the rumor public via the channels that are constructed by such memories. Greimas terms the dynamics of plausibility as “veridiction contract” that “constructs a discourse whose function is not truthsaying but rather seeming-to-be-true” (Greimas 1989 [1980]: 658). It is precisely in this sense that rumors are always “too good to be false” (Fine 2007: 6). When rumor travels beyond the boundaries demarcated by such cultural memories, it loses its charm suddenly and becomes merely stories to be told, no longer as a tool to manage the reality around individuals. By coming up with discourses that social groups acknowledge out of their respective cultural memories, the rumor phenomenon reiterates the language of self-description (Lotman 1979; Uspenskij et al. 1998) by members of cultures to identify themselves, which is same with history but at a different level away from grand narratives. In this regard, rumors are a process of a culture’s autocommunication that “is transferred in time” (Lotman 1990: 20), consolidating identities of respective social groups and maintaining the identification to the future.

From this perspective, the rumor public becomes the model readers of the rumor texts (Eco 1979) that understand the codes of rumor texts perfectly; they know the rules and they are well engaged in rumoring due to social pressure. Eco points out that “One must observe the rules of the game, and the model reader is someone eager to play the game” (1994: 10). The contamination process of the rumor phenomenon highlights the network of cultural texts in the social sphere that consolidates social groups with their respective cultural memories, which again brings culture to the foreground in rumor studies. Therefore, culture cannot be overlooked or simplified in rumor studies, since cultural memory reveals certain rumors with interpretations and the public that articulates and transmits such rumors. Collective memory can bring insights to the table for analysis’ sake, regarding both the textual level and the demographic level. From the perspective of collective memory, society is always well prepared for rumor generation, since the making meaning out of the current situation always require a cultural context. It is a sphere teemed with conflicts, woven by different memories, conceiving new rumors like a hypnotic volcano; once the public senses something, it erupts; as Reumaux put it, “les conflits éclater et la réalité exploser en une pluie d’imaginaire [conflicts erupt and reality explodes into a rain of imagination]” (1996: 18, translation mine).

5 Rumor sedimentation and rumor recurrence

Drops come from and return to the water. Rumor, which rises from collective memory, can also be sedimented in the collective memory corpus for future recurrence. Whereas rumor communication, both before and after a certain phenomenon, concerns the synchronic crystallization of the past and the present, rumor sedimentation concerns the diachronic dynamics of rumor discourses in a historical manner, which further showcases the diachronic aspect of collective memory. Neubauer underscores that “In Konkurrenz zum Rationalen, zum Logos und zur schriftlichen Tradition schafft und bewahrt die pheme so etwas wie ein kollektives Gedächtnis [in contrast to rationality, Logos and written tradition, the pheme (rumor) creates and preserves something like collective memory]” (Neubauer 1998: 40, translation mine). According to Halbwachs (1992), generations are the framework for collective memory to circulate. Collective memories are communicated to the following generation along with the cultural identification of the group that an individual is raised. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out: “The young members of the tribe no longer had to learn only from their own experiences what was dangerous and what was valuable in their environment; instead, they could rely on the collective memory of past generations, and possibly avoid repeating their mistakes” (Csikszentmihalyi 1993: 57).

Collective memories are therefore inherited by the next generation without actually living that event. Marianne Hirsch coined the term “postmemory” to describe the memories that can be remembered “only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (2012: 3). In this regard, rumors of the time, which are part of the communicative memory, are also transmitted to the next generation as the postmemory of them, which are also incorporated as part of history that the next generation shares. For example, in the case of the Covid-19 outbreak around the world, many fake news items, conspiracies, and rumors were recorded and remembered. They have constituted the “false memory” (Mangiulli et al. 2022) of the given communities and when recollected afterwards, the truthfulness of these memories has become ambiguous. They are kept as narrative fragments and are intertwined with true memories of the past event. Therefore, it is obvious that the memory of Covid-19, which is to be communicated to the next generation, will be further hazed with such muddy discourses.

Discourses as such are indeed nowhere to be found in a linear, univocal history; they are sedimented more deeply in people’s own living memories, into abundant, diversified cultural narratives, which record human past experiences and perspectives “as cohesive wholes and without reconstructing their original process of formation” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 87). In this regard, there is a “plenitude” (Rigney 2005) of human experiences and discourses in the collective memory of a community, in which the past heteroglossia has its register. Plenitude indicates that the present recollection of the past is constantly reinterpreted and reconstructed in response to changing social and cultural contexts. In analyzing a rumor phenomenon, acknowledging plenitude means that, on the one hand, all rumors base their textual materials upon the plenitude of the human past as the “organic substrate (Organisches Substrat)” (Aleida Assmann 1993: 14), as “there is nothing new under the sun.” And on the other hand, the current situation, namely, the social concern, is modelled by the preceding texts that provide epistemological structure to comprehend what is going on. But more importantly, these texts are also sedimented and continuously being disintegrated as the context for new texts that are coming ahead. In the case of rumors, even though rumors are refuted and denied, they leave traces and discursive fragments, which are intertwined in the plenitude and ready to be revoked as future discourses, which are represented as the recurrence of certain rumors in different epochs.

Moreover, the recurrence of rumors is also a model of forgetting (Haas and Levasseur 2013). Since “Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch 2012: 5), when transferred to the next generation, collective memories are undoubtedly affected by recollection, reinterpretation and remodeling. Some truthful elements are forgotten, whereas the rumoring essence pertains the social sphere. Carl Gustav Jung (1959) conceptualized the recurrent rumor phenomenon as “visionary rumor.” In analyzing the UFO rumors that are reappearing in different locations around the world, Jung underscores that the recurrent UFO rumors are projections of psychological visions which can be dated back to the very beginning of mankind. These projections have already been reiterated thousands of times in the course of human history and represent themselves constantly in individual mentalities, which is evidenced by different artistic works and various dreams from individuals that have never had personal contacts. The representations in return entrench those visions in the course of time, and become part of the cultural memories that pertain to function as epistemological paradigms to model human experiences.

However, when rumors are sedimented into the plenitude of human experiences and a shared past, the communicative memory of the time fails to enter the deeper realm of collective memory of a given community and remains in history. In other words, during the progression of time, the “short-term memory” does not maintain its status as the buzzword in the community and continuously fades away. As memories are communicated from generations to generations, they are constantly lost “like water transported in a leaky bucket which slowly runs dry” (Rigney 2005: 12). Aleida Assmann distinguished two forms of forgetting, namely, a passive and an active one. The active form of forgetting is “implied in intentional acts such as trashing and destroying”; and the passive form of forgetting is “related to non-intentional acts such as losing, hiding, dispersing, neglecting, abandoning, or leaving something behind” (Aleida Assmann 2008: 97–98). In the case of rumors, both forms are functioning. On the one hand, the rumors are always dismissed as “rumors” in the course of history and marginalized away from the canonical texts. When people look back to the rumors that once possessed them, they may find them absurd and do not recall the reason why they were mesmerized, since history has already finished selecting a path in the plenitude, whilst all other texts, as heteroglossia of the past, cannot have a voice in the univocal history (Song 2022: 19), which is the “official memory” (Burke 1993: 299) provided by grand narratives. And on the other hand, the communicative memory of the time will lose its glamor of being the buzzword as new social concern is raised, as mankind has limited capacity of remembering. The past heteroglossia is therefore merely “archived” in the social sphere and turns inert in discursive practices, losing the original “place in life” (Aleida Assmann 2008: 103).

In this regard, the dynamics of the rumor phenomenon are integrated in the course of history and operate on the two levels of collective memory as discussed above: the visionary elements, in Jung’s terms, are embedded in the cultural memory level and constantly present themselves as new discourses and outlive the texts that remain on the communicative memory level, which are both passively and actively forgotten by a given community. As a process of autocommunication, the rumor phenomenon showcases the dynamics of culture in diachrony in the form of remembrance along with forgetting: What is canonical is recurrent through remembrance, whereas the ephemeral communication of the time is constantly forgotten and imbued with new elements, reconstructing the past and transferring texts towards future generations. It is precisely in this sense that rumor is both a fleeting phenomenon that escapes from historians, and a significant embodiment of the cultural memory of the community, which constantly resurfaces to communicative memory under the need for meaning-making in the current situation.

6 Conclusions

Wulf Kansteiner (2002: 180) conceptualizes collective memory as the result of three historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions, which “frames our representation of the past”; the memory makers who “selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions”; and the memory consumers who “use, ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their own interests.” Rumors reach all three factors in the course of history: various cultures and traditions permeate society as vernacular authorities, making the social sphere as a hotbed for rumors. Rumors appear as explanations towards a social concern, surpassing the individuality of gossiping to comprehend what is going on; different interpretations therefore appear, constituting a heteroglossia in which different vernacular authorities function as epistemological paradigms. And the rumor public, as bearers of cultures and traditions, consumes these rumors as products of their cultures. It is precisely under the framework of collective memory that the three aspects are united under a more detailed investigation. As a form of mass communication, the rumor phenomenon rises from the collective cultural corpus, which is the cultural memory of a community, and remains active in the communicative memory of the time. Then it is sedimented back to different levels of collective memory: some are forgotten by the mass and archived; some go deeper and entrench the cultural canon.

Therefore, rumors demonstrate collective memory in a semiotic way. Different from history, which represents a linear narrative of human past, rumors underscore a cylindric progression of history as heteroglossia every time when heterogeneous interpretations surface to the social sphere under social pressure, which cast their influences towards the current discursive practices. From the perspective of the present, the power of rumors in making meaning out of an ambiguous situation lies precisely at the sedimentation of previous discourses on different levels of culture; it selects its audience according to the existence networks of cultural texts and generates new texts under the influence of the current situation. In this regard, the eternal return and the proliferation of rumors correspond to the explosion of culture with its unpredictability (Lotman 2009: 123). “Every time history lays probability on the table, we find ourselves at the intersection of several different paths” (Lotman 2013: 65). Rumors are the reminiscence of collective memory of the human past at the time when cultural explosion happens, and the time when the path is chosen, rumors also finish their life cycles and sediment for the future.

The complexity of the rumor phenomenon demonstrates that it cannot be fully grasped under one single discipline; it requires a transdisciplinary effort to understand its trajectory from the very beginning to the very end. What collective memory studies can contribute is to acknowledge that human past is not a univocal line, but a vast territory of human past with heterogeneous texts, which are agglomerated, constantly recalled, reinterpreted in the present, and project themselves towards the future. On the pathless terrain of collective memory, Fama and Historia go hand in hand; a trail is behind the shadows of Historia; but more importantly, Fama opens her wings, by which shadows cover the endless realm of human past.