4.1 Urban legend as a (vernacular) genre

The first vernacular conceptualization of urban legend analyzed here – urban legend as a folk genre category – emerged directly from the scientific/folkloristic discourse, where the term was first introduced and defined. Thus, it most closely resembles the semantic function it has (or has had) in folkloristics. By using the term urban legend within this conceptual framework, people identify and describe a loosely defined distinct type of narrative folklore phenomena. “Genres […] are ‘ethno’ or ‘native’ concepts in that their audience can massage the meaning the meaning of discourse by their understanding of the genre. […] [as they] regularly categorize the type of discourse to which they are exposed.” (Fine 1995: 124). Thus, one can understand this particular conceptualization primarily as a mechanism of vernacular taxonomy: “We should assume that if the folk does know a genre it has a ‘name’ for it, so the native terms just demonstrate the existence of the genres.” (Voigt 1999: 24). This approach towards genre in folklore theory – its realistic understanding – was an important realization of 1990s-era folkloristics, as it shed new light and gave rise to more context-oriented approach to folk narrative analysis.

Observing vernacular genre conceptualization at its own internal logic, however, renders this taxonomy hardly useful for the purposes of scientific debate, as it is neither systematic nor consistent or self-reflexive. This became evident rather quickly during my fieldwork research in Slovenia as well, since urbana legenda, as perceived by my informants, encompasses a much wider array of narrative material than what is being (and has been) recorded and studied by folklore scholars as urban legends. This folk narrative material entails various genre categories as defined in folkloristics, which overlap and mix constantly. Thus, people ascribe the name urban legend to various mono- or multi-episode narratives, with or without a developed plot, which may correspond to legendry, jokes, gossip, short narrative forms, humorous stories, stereotypes, dyadic or polyadic traditions, and so on. On the other hand, the name urban legend is also attached to those elements of everyday communication that are not the subject of typical folkloristic research, i.e. individual positive statements or messages that merely suggest narrative traits. Under the umbrella term urban legend, then, the world of the emic brings together a multitude of elements whose systematics (if we can call it that) and use are constantly changing and adapting, closely linked to the context of individual narrative situations again and again. It is no wonder, therefore, that research often leads to very interesting conceptual discrepancies in the emic-etic relation, which are immediately apparent to the folklorist who enters the field with their own methodological apparatus and a range of comparative material, only to be faced with a completely different conceptual reality.

The following story, for example, can also serve as evidence of the futility of using the essentialist qualifier urban in folklore studies. The story alludes to an explicitly idyllic village setting. What is more, the narrator felt it necessary to emphasize this idyll with the words “there, where people are still grateful”, which is unequivocal information about the assumed primordial human solidarity as a great social value belonging to a different time and place. The story goes on to describe traditional grape pressing and generally highlights personal ‘homemade’ efforts. Despite all this essentialist rurality, the story was actually presented (introduced) as an urban legend by the narrator:

I have one urban legend for you. Somewhere in Dolenjska, where people are still grateful (smiles), there was a farmer. And he really, really wanted to thank his doctor, because he had just cured him of something. Well, and he – he brought him one bottle of wine, a homemade one! He had also put such a nice label up, homemade as well, and up on the label there was him, with his feet – with his bare feet, crushing the grapes. And everything would have been cool if that doctor hadn’t cured him of one severe case of fungus infection on his feet (laughs).^[11]

The second example violates some of the structural elements that define the genre of legend because it does not follow the narrative arc of the story, or at least does not follow it to the end. The narrator introduces the characters and the plot, only to have the narrative stop abruptly. The story does not have a narrative twist that would present it as funny, shocking, or scary, which would make it deliver a stronger impact upon the listener. The absence of a stronger narrative point is all the more extraordinary because the example also contains all the contextual and textual elements of a legend’s ‘typical’ narrative delivery. The narrator has declared himself as believing the story to be true and has presented its relationship with wider reality as well as with a final commentary on the event described.^[12] Despite this structural ‘flaw’, which makes its interpretative value in the scholarly debate questionable, the narrative was also introduced as an ‘urban legend’ when recorded:

This is a sad urbana legenda, that – I believe it, in fact – because … there were two guys who couldn’t even finish primary school. And then, they decided one day to catch a little old granny, throw her in the trunk of a car, take her in the middle of the woods, leave her there, and just drive away (laughs). And I’ve heard from a lot of people that this really happened! (laughs). Now, why – why would one go and do such a thing though (laughs).^[13]

Despite its conceptual looseness, when discussing the vernacular discourse on urban legend as a genre category, one can also identify some aspects that narrow it down semantically. The first of these is its definition. A genre that is recognized as such needs a definition, and that goes for every field of its use – inside or outside of the scientific discourse (Voigt 1999: 24). Among the folklore bearers (in the context of the ‘folk’), however, the mere mentioning of the term tends to suffice, as this usually works as a substitute for a more precise definition. By introducing a narrative as an urban legend, both the storyteller and their audience usually understand the genre that is implied and its characteristics.^[14] Nevertheless, one can still come across articulated definitions of the urban legend in the context of vernacular communication as well. These are either provided by informants or found in the media discourse. Some are loosely descriptive; others can allude to or be taken from the scientific literature on folkloristics.^[15] The key elements that these definitions employ most often are the question of stories’ veracity, the unusual nature of the events described, the indeterminable first source, and untraceable oral or media transmission.

– I mean, there are stories that you’ve heard and you don’t know exactly whether they’re true or not.

– That’s exactly it, yes.

– Well I heard that Martin Strel swam the Amazon (loud laughter from everybody present).^[16]

This week, we checked what urban legends about sex are spreading on the streets of Ljubljana. You know, those weird stories that circulate among people. (cf. Kvartič 2017: 66)

Thanks to nosy tabloids, angry ex-partners, and jealous colleagues, many bizarre stories circulate in the celebrity world. Some of them have become true urban legends, obscure stories of unknown origin for which there is no evidence whatsoever. (Dnevnik 2010)

Finally, people employ the term urban legend as a (indirect) genre conceptualization when they are simply trying to summarize a story efficiently. In this case, the mentioning of the term plays the structural role of introductory formula, which places the following information, stripped of the narrative arch, in the appropriate semantic context for its addressees. Thus, the use of the term itself may only allude to the story or even replace it entirely.

Although urban legend has it that the boss of the video library has watched all the films in it, he himself admits that this is not true. (Alič 2013)

I should also mention that a frequent conceptual companion to the urban legend as a genre category in the realm of the emic/vernacular is the so-called urban myth (Slovenian urbani mit). In contrast to urban legend, the term is of purely vernacular origin and does not appear in any scholarly literature as a folkloristic concept. In terms of meaning, the urban myth usually characterizes simple positive claims or information about a certain fact or an event – without an identifiable plot. In other words, urban myth is used to denote widely held perceptions and misunderstandings conveyed by various discourses. Used in everyday communication, both phrases ([urban] legend and myth) tend to overlap as well. While the urban legend emerged directly from theoretical folkloristic work and is sometimes still relevant in communication between scholars, the urban myth is useless as a scholarly category. Myth in folklore studies, and in the humanities in general, is roughly understood as a dogmatic description of events in the distant past that justify and explain the world and its origins, the established ritual order and taboos, and, in general, the place of man in nature and the universe (Bascom 1984: 9). Thus, the urban myth is a kind of folk genre discombobulation, most often used in relation to the question of the veracity of the stories it signifies.

4.2 Urban legend as a frame of reference

The second distinctive vernacular conceptualization of urban legend is one of a frame of reference that helps define, “its status as a representation of reality” (Fine 1995: 126). More accurately, everyday communication applies the concept of urban legend as a negative frame of reference that a priori and categorically signifies the conveyed information (a story, a claim) as untrue. Untruthfulness, or at least dubiousness, which may be based on the unverifiability of information, on the presentation of contradictory information in the same narrative context, or on the recognition of contextual nonsense, is thus an inherent property of a claim labeled as (an) urban legend. Moreover, this label rejects the possibility of narrators themselves believing the truthfulness of their own story. In this sense, the labeling of information as an urban legend also becomes a narrative device by which the narrators distance themselves from the narrative’s content when it comes to the question of reality/veracity. Therefore, with this conceptualization, an interesting paradox arises, since it represents a contradiction or even a perversion of the urban legend’s conceptualization as a (folk) genre. With the latter, the conveyance of the reality/veracity of the events described is, so to speak, the most important (if not necessary) substantive component. Not with urban legend as a frame of reference though:^[17]

– I heard once that McDonald’s made a phantom company when they supplied them with meat, and they called it ‘Pure Beef’, just so that they could write in their commercials that their products were 100 % pure beef.

– But did they really?

– Well, it was an urban legend.^[18]

The key idea behind this conceptualization of urban legend is not reality, though, but belief – a vernacular category of everyday communication that describes the attribution of reality and validity to something, thereby expressing a persuasion, an accepted truth, or an opinion about the way things are (cf. Valk 2012). The objective reality of a narrative and the belief of its narrator are not equivalent categories, as the belief expressed through narrative folklore is not fixed and is constantly changing with the individuals participating in the narrative event (Mencej 2006: 29). This is because narratives are not merely the articulation of belief but also its proposition, which the narrator communicates to his audience, who in turn decides on its acceptance (see Fine 1995). Declaring something an urban legend thus proposes disbelief on the part of the narrator. This does not affect the dissemination of the narrative though, as studies have shown that even skeptical narrators usually continue to tell and retell the story regardless of their (declared) disbelief (Dégh and Vászonyi 1976: 94).

Urban legends can be identified as a (negative) frame of reference most easily when they are paired with a proposition of reality, to which it presents a binary opposition: “Either it is true, or it is an urban legend.” (cf. Voje 2005: 215). This pairing is often expressed dialectically, when one of the participants in the narration asks a question about the information’s veracity, while the other, using the term urban legend, at least downplays if not outright denies its truth. More often than not, the two contradictory elements appear together in the same retort or sentence:

I don’t know whether it is an urban legend or whether it is actually true that there has been only one job posted for an ethnologist/cultural anthropologist in the last five years.

This latter text is, of course, not an example of folk narrative material. I received it by email, completely outside the context of my research. However, it is a good illustration of how this particular conceptualization goes beyond the genre system of narrative folklore, and even beyond narratives as such, since the use of the term has also become a label for any kind of widely known (if not widely accepted) but inherently false claim. In fact, urban legend is used to describe widely held, established, and familiar but erroneous, poorly argued, difficult to verify, or blatantly misleading information that appears in a wide variety of discourses: media, political, ideological, and other discourses that convey information from a position of authority, as well as in everyday communication.

All the mountain guides describing the trail across Kranjska Reber point out that the soil there is so different from the surrounding area that it is home to rare botanical wealth. After such an introduction, you’d expect a botanical garden. However, if you arrive in mid-June, you are rather disappointed. The whole mountain is covered with thick grass through which only few flowers can emerge. Maybe I visited at the wrong time, or maybe Kranjska Reber is just another urban legend that travels from guidebook to guidebook. (PoHribih 2013)

In addition to individual pieces of information, urban legend can also collectively refer to a whole series or system of false and/or misleading claims. The information labeled this way is rounded up into thematic and semantic clusters, and as a result, a wide variety of articles, excerpts, columns, articles, and manuals presenting (and refuting) urban legends on and of the specific field can be observed. There are ‘sets’ of urban legends regarding medicine, cosmetics industry, construction, finance, business, the energy sector,^[19] the judiciary, and so on.

4.3 Urban legend as a metonym

The third vernacular conceptual manifestation of the ‘urban legend’ occurs when it becomes a signifier for a specific person and it therefore functions as a political representation of how that person is perceived by their community or by wider society (Adams 2009: 81–82). In this context, it has a similar function to a nickname. We cannot equate the two, however, as nicknames are always individualized and more permanent, whereas an urban legend can also be only a momentary and performance- or context-contingent signifier.

The moniker urban legend is given to an individual when particular episodes of their life or general patterns of their behavior are so interesting, special, or unusual that they become motifs within the narrative repertoire of the people who share a common element of identity with them on a synchronous level (attend the same school or live in the same place as them). The label thus arises when individual narratives about a person are so much a part of the discourse about them that their basic representation in the community is based on these narratives. Both the labeled person and the stories about them are a part of the same process of cultural construction of their identity. This is why this particular articulation of urban legend is a metonymy – it functions as a poetic device by which the stories about the person replace the person themselves. Such metonymic labeling occurs at a varying degree of permanence, as it can also take place at the micro level in the context of a single narrative event. Nevertheless, it happens often enough to warrant attention.

The articulation of urban legend as a label of a specific person can manifest itself in very different ways, but from a point of view of folkloristic analysis, the narratives most often correspond to so-called personal narratives (memorates), that is, narratives that describe a personal experience from first or second hand (Stahl 1977: 20). These are narratives related to legends proper, but lacking their poetic characteristics and their tradition (Dégh 2001: 58). It is not necessarily the case that a narrative follows the label urban legend at all: it can stand on its own and be a story or a set of stories implied merely by its articulation.

In general, transcultural parlance, a legend is a common signifying nickname that expresses respect for a person, their achievements, or their specific ethical stance (e.g. Kosi 2009, Žnidarčič 2000). Thus, this moniker is something that an individual ‘earns’. The justification for the moniker urban legend is usually the opposite in that the stories that legitimize this designation usually emphasize the behavioral and conceptual deviation of an individual from socially accepted norms. This culminates into a set of motifemes that are also present in and essential to contemporary (urban) legendry – the strange, the bizarre, the unbelievable, and the ridiculous are highlighted in the individual’s interaction with the world. Through this, the individual is also distinguished from the anonymous protagonists who carry the plot in legends in general. This also gives these urban legend characters a broader, dual role in their respective communities – they either become admired as so-called trickster figures (e.g. Dorson 1973: 278–288) or they are portrayed as a negative example, only to fulfill an educational purpose in the process.

But you know, there was that one story, from one X,^[20] who was an enormous urban legend at our grammar school. When he was […] he didn’t know maths, like at all. And he had a maths test and he went to take the test in a jacket in the middle of the heat wave. But he allegedly had a VHF radio in his jacket. And then he went to the toilet and he threw the test out of the window. And his friend picked it up on a bike and took it to the library, where another friend solved it. And then the first guy came back to the school and was talking to X through the VHF radio about the correct answers. And they had like hand gestures and signs and everything. And that is how X, the urban legend that he was, passed the exam.^[21]

Since urban legend as a metonymy (or as a nickname, rather) highlights unconventional or controversial episodes in an individual’s life, it could also be understood in this role as a semantic parallel to the Slovenian idiom vaški posebnež (village idiot), corresponding to a similar idiom in other languages. This idea is very intriguing, as it also indirectly points to the ideological dichotomy of urban/rural – and consequently even allows for the hypothesis that the former phrase has somewhat replaced the latter in our contemporary society. However, this idea can be neither tested nor confirmed, as there is not yet enough (mainly performative) fieldwork data for a proper comparative analysis.

4.4 Urban legend as a marker of identity

The fourth vernacular (emic) conceptualization of the term urban legend highlights the intersection of narrative folklore and the processes of identity construction. Furthermore, all three of the other conceptualizations listed above are infused with it. People come to know, understand, and make sense of their identity through storytelling (Bird 2002: 521), although storytelling and narrative materials are not the substantive basis for identification, but rather a by-product of it. The key point here is that identity is first and foremost a form of an essentialist ideology, and that it always seeks its material existence (Althusser 2000: 91). This existence is found, among other things, in narrative folklore. Thus, when the ideology of urbanity is at the forefront of identity creation, the identity will seek its material existence in urban folklore. “From the point of view of folklore, the city is ‘us’ – you and I and all the rest; what people say, especially what they say about themselves in their own way with their own words […] and what they find worth remembering.” (Botkin 1954: 1) – “The tales themselves also become part of the city and its performances.” (Cody 2005: 220) So, finally, the urban legend is also an articulation and manifestation of urban identity as its signifier, and is therefore an ontological category, whose articulation designates people as members of ‘the urban’. In this way, urban legend has a clear political and sociological dimension, from which we can also discern the emic dichotomy between the essentialist categories of urbanity and rurality.

Thus, urban legends is a collective name for the narratives created, used and appropriated, and created by a community that in one way or another (self-)identifies with urbanity. It is therefore a direct consequence of processes of collective identity creation, characterized by seeking and emphasizing similarities (Jenkins cf. Visočnik 2011: 48), common elements of association, and identification with imagined urbanity. The selected narratives to fulfill this role is arbitrary, and the people – whether they be ideological authority or everyday storytellers – form it by (mostly unconsciously and unintentionally) picking out and emphasizing, contextualizing and localizing elements of their experiential reality. The urban legend as an (emic) marker of identity is thus in the service of the community and is: “socially situated and geographically sited […]” (cf. Cody 2005: 219), as it exploits (urban) space as its central representational element by means of folklore localization in urbanity. These processes and their (narrative) results are clearly visible with the efforts of forming a new identity of urbanity^[22] and in retrospective or manifestative events of older, already established urban communities.

In Slovenia, urban legends in the function of identity creation were very apparent in 2012, when the city of Maribor took over the organization of the large-scale European Capital of Culture (ECC) project. This was a yearlong international political ritual, during which the so-called urban stories and urban legends were placed virtually at the center of the city’s external presentation through a series of cultural, protocolar, and tourism events. This was already evident during the preparation phase, when the program managers highlighted these narratives as one of the cornerstones of the project:

We are thinking a lot and we are going to rely on what looks simple, but then all ECOC avoid this: the story of the city as a specific organism, with its own core, its own centre, its own symbolic centre, its own peripheries, its own points where it opens up to the future.[…]

There is a legend about Maribor, stating that a little tailor man (or was it a little shoemaker?) had saved the city from the Turks. What do you do with a story like that? On the one hand, you can create a picture book for children, you can make a game as an animation on an internet portal. But if you think about the urban mythology that forms the identity of a city, you can ultimately [sic] connect with a fashion store and its ideas, bring in an artist, for example Andraž Vogrinčič, who dresses houses, etc., and out of all this an unexpected story develops, which was initially based on an urban legend. (Zemljič 2010; emphasis A.K.)

The concrete application of urban legends in the context of identity creation is most evident when observing the products made for tourist consumption. Tourism is a dynamic and complex dialogue (Nogués 2008: 228), and an arena where identities are continuously formed, as it provides local communities with all sorts of affirmation (Lanfant 1995: 6). Contemporary local (urban) communities are burdened with their image – their representation – but also with the scope of this representation in a supra-local (if not global) context (Kozorog 2009: 31). That is why locals^[23] and their representatives initiate tourism not only for economic motives, but also (and sometimes above all) for motives of local self-identification (Kozorog 2009: 17). Thus, the emphasis on tourism is increasingly becoming a way of understanding the self, as its elements give meanings to identity labels (Nogués 2008: 222), such as urbana legenda. In addition to representing it externally, this emphasis also helps create and consolidate an imagined community of (urban) space (cf. Anderson 1998). Thus, the manifestation of urban legends through narrative and ostensive practices in tourism and tourist products is a means by which local communities dialectically manifest their urbanity outward, presenting it as a positive attribute or even as their highest value. In this way, urban legend becomes, time and again, a means of reproducing the identity of urbanity, as they are burdened with the symbolic presence of the dominant ideology of the desired urbanity (after Nogués 2008: 228).

Today, urban legends as markers of identity are commonly instrumentalized by various projects of identity creation. Another Slovenian example, parallel to the Maribor ECC one, can be found in Celje. There stands the MCC Hostel, accommodation and youth activity infrastructure, which operates in conjunction with the Celje Youth Centre and opened in 2010. It has a particularly interesting conceptual design. When thinking about added value beyond its primary service, the hostel’s management came up with the idea of furnishing each room based on one of the local (urban) legends. Thus, the rooms visualize elements of the repertoire of localized Celje legends, as well as anecdotes from the lives of Celje residents and other people connected with Celje. The choice of narratives was left to the young local artists who were selected to carry out the project – each artist decorated one room. Each room of the MCC Hostel also includes applied design and interactive elements related to the specific story of each room. Beyond individual rooms, the hostel’s conceptual design foresaw that the content in each room would be linked to a specific part of the already existing tourist offer of Celje. The hostel’s marketing campaign invites guests stating that their rooms: “[…] take you into a parallel world of Celje’s myths and legends from the past” (MC Celje 2012).

At the entrance to each room, a small plaque is placed with a text telling the story that inspired its design. Some of the stories are presented as a narrative, while others are merely summarized. Some of the descriptions refer to the original story with the self-reflexive term urban legend or urban story:

The ‘Celje Ninja’ room: One calm morning a shuriken flies in, a black shadow is briefly seen, and the city gets a new urban legend. This is the true story of a masked, ninja-clad, armed-to-the-teeth man in black who wanted to right any and all wrongs.^[24]

The ‘Mr K.’ room: How to chase after and catch yourself? This is a question that has echoed through the city streets for decades. This is an urban story about a policeman searching for the perpetrator of a crime that he himself has committed.^[25]