Author Archives: Michelle Lim

Nuggeting

Nationality: American; caucasian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Duluth, Georgia
Performance Date: 4/18/12
Primary Language: English

[my own comments marked by square brackets]

Informant: “Nuggeting is when you take somebody’s bookbag and empty all the contents and turn it completely inside out and then put all the stuff back in and zip it back closed so that it’s just like a useless lump, or a nugget, that you have to like carry around until you can fix it all. And then we also would zip-tie people’s bookbags through random really tall things, I don’t know, so that if it was like a freshman they wouldn’t be able to reach it, they’d have to like go get a teacher to help them. Or just like zip-tie people’s lockers closed, random little pranks like that, that were pretty harmless, cause my school was all, mostly like really good kids. So we had to have these really silly ways of getting out like our inner aggressions.”

[It was a Christian high school right?]

“Mhmm, yeah it was a Christian school.”

[So no Freshman Friday.]

“No major hazing or anything like that, just like random silly pranks that were really inconveniencing, but not harmful.”

[So how did a nuggetee react? Did people get upset or think it was funny?]

“It was like a mixture of anger and hilarity, I guess. If you got nuggeted quite a few times, you would be rather angry at that point but I would imagine that most people kinda thought it was funny on their first nugget.

[Was it done among friends?]

“It was done among friends and just to random victims that happened to leave their bookbags in the hallway.”

[Would people become friends as a result of being nuggeted?]

“*laughs* No. I mean it’s just like a really harmless thing that got out all the teenage malice and aggression, cause we couldn’t really like fight or anything in our school, we would probably get expelled for something like that, so we had to do a lot of these silly little harmless things to get all the fighting aggression out.”

[Were there any repeat targets, like people who were always getting nuggeted?]

“Um, our school was mostly very accepting of people, except there was a couple of really odd people that would get targeted a lot more than others. [What made them odd?] Being like extremely nerdy and pretentious and, I don’t know, things like, there’s this one nerd who wore like fifty disgusting looking bracelets on his arm and was utterly pretentious and we all just kind of hated him. He was the target of nuggeting and even like impersonations. He had some friends but I think he considered himself too smart for everybody.”

[But he was never like physically taunted.]

“No, no, it was always just silly things.”

[What was your school’s demographic like?]

“Middle and upper class kids. And it was a private school.”

 

I went to a public school so I don’t really know if the stereotypes about private schools are true. This private school in particular is in a very suburban area of greater Atlanta and has a nice campus that isn’t too excessive. My informant and her friends from high school are very grounded individuals who were never big into teenage rebellion of the illegal or deviant variety, which I know runs rampant at other private schools, especially the extremely wealthy urban ones. Nuggeting seems like such an innocent, childish prank whose only malice is preventing access to school books. It also seems to punish those who aren’t keeping careful track of their things. This leads me to believe that preparedness and personal order are generally valued by the student body, and that people are expected to be pretty conducted–pretty normal. Those who aren’t, either by wearing too many bracelets or being aggressively knowledgeable (both of which probably would have been embraced as quirky and intriguing at my school), are treated with disdain. That is usually the kind of environment encouraged by a Christian school, and instead of lashing out against those principles, the students seem to have genuinely adopted the moral aspects of that influence even if not the religious aspects.

Cyberlore: 4chan, porn, and the internet at large

Nationality: American; ethnicity self-identified as "half Filipino, half mutt-Caucasian"
Age: 23
Occupation: recent USC Archaeology grad; now works part-time for a CRM firm
Residence: Altadena, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, Japanese

[my own comments marked by square brackets]

Informant: “I was just thinking about this the other day where, you know, I was just surfing the internet and I came across some like forum talking about just really grotesque porn, and I was like completely unfazed. Cause I feel like I’ve always grown up knowing about 4chan, and 4chan has become this like weird underbelly of like not only the internet but everybody’s imagination, it’s like–well the internet is basically the distilled version of people’s thoughts because like, you don’t have to interface with anybody, there’s no body language, you can create images from whatever you think–it’s like 4chan is kind of this cesspool for everyone’s imagination and then influencing everyone else’s cesspool, um, so I’ve always known about 4chan.”

[Can you describe what it is, in a little more detail?]

“4chan is, uh, it’s a message board that is more or less unregulated–I think they do have moderators that are silent, you just never know who they are. And moderators are mostly there for one reason, and that’s to make sure there’s no child pornography, and that’s it. That’s the only thing that’s off-limits on the internet–child pornography. So it’s just a message board that’s mostly unregulated but there is a particular board, like within them, called the b-board. And that’s just where everything goes, it’s the random board where people just say really foul shit, post really foul images, like just things that you would never think of. And you’re like, okay, I didn’t need to see that, that’s enough internet for the day, I’m done *laughs* I need to like walk away right now–and so I’ve always grown up with that and like, I’ve never really ventured over there, cause the few times that I have, I’m like, pfff, I really don’t need to see this right now. But knowing that it exists, I think, I’m like what am I going to tell my kids–like when my kids get on the internet, like, what am I going to tell them? Like, they’re gonna grow up with that shit everywhere, and how do I protect my kids from the internet? I like how I’m already thinking about this *hah* but like, it’s terrifying! I feel like because I wasn’t introduced to it until I was like 12, and very gently kind of like got into–the internet didn’t become this like massive machine that it is now.”

[I’ve heard it be described in terms of “internet natives,” which is like the generation that grew up with it already there, and we’re like the ‘immigrants,’ but we’re like the first-generation immigrants whose parents didn’t have it until we did–like you have people who ‘immigrated’ when they were really really young, and then you have the much older internet immigrants who have a harder time adjusting. In a lot of ways, like culture.]

“Yeah, that’s interesting, I like that immigration analogy.”

[I remember you saying to Seth that time on our hike, he mentioned something from 4chan and you were like, ‘That says so much about you.’ What did you mean by that? What does it say?]

“It’s like, um, it’s the same as you can infer when someone’s like, ‘I like Coldplay.’ And I feel like, wow, you must be a 30-something year old soft-rock loving, working in an office or you’re a graphic designer, and you think–well like, it has so many implications that may not even be true, but they do have a kernel–a lot of stereotypes have a kernel of truth. And the thing about 4chan, when people say ‘I saw it on 4chan,’ I’m like ohhhkay, if you frequent it enough, to where you say ‘I saw it on 4chan’–like none of my friends even if they do go on 4chan ever say that they go on 4chan. Because it is something that is like, it’s foul, and it’s like, why?”

[But everyone secretly has a 4chan in their minds.]

“Yeah, I mean the internet is kind of the–less so now than it was when I had dial-up, or I wanna say 2005/2006 is when things started cleaning up, so to speak–before that I feel like it was the wild wild West, where it’s like anything goes. [Lemon party. Meatspin.] Yeah, like Blue Waffles–what? All this random shit just happened and most of the internet to me was like forums. Run basically like, people wanted to interact in chat rooms and forums. Forums still do exist, like mostly in the comment sections of publications that have all moved online now. Um so basically with the movement of like the material world onto the internet, there’s becoming a framework for how the internet is working, but before that it was all forums and chat rooms which is like very free-form–it’s not Facebook, where you’re limited to messages, chats, and wall posts, there’s poking. [And every option has a very specific function that frames what you’re saying.] Yeah, it all has its own implications. [Everything is interfaced for us and the interface governs the experience of using it. Almost like passive consumption of the internet.] Yeah it’s a lot more interfaced than it used to be, and I just think that the way 4chan is, is it still kind of hearkens back to that old wild wild West theme–like if you go to 4chan, it’s the most simple looking HTML website. It’s just like the logo and the letters for each of the boards. It goes like A through Y or something like that, and none of the letters have anything to do with–I think it’s like M is the video game board and it has nothing to do with the actual content–B is random, B is random, and I don’t know why instead of R for random.

[And that’s something you just figure out by navigating the website?]

“Yeah, I still don’t know why it is that way or how it works, um, but I know the founder of 4chan was like, yeah, the internet shouldn’t be regulated. And that’s just what 4chan is. It just exists. And that’s like the only thing that’s impressive about 4chan is that it exists and it’s a forum. You never log in, and everyone is anonymous. You’re all anonymous, and the post is assigned like a number, and every reply to that post has a number. And the B-board generates so quickly because everyone’s on it and everyone’s moving that content through so quickly. But it’s like, because people can post whatever they want and expect to be unregulated, you’re hiding behind a mask of anonymity, and also because of that you just end up finding the sickest shit. Like I said, the only thing that’s off-limits is child pornography. You can put whatever you want on there. 4chan made up ‘Rules of the Internet’–the most memorable one being like Rule #34 which is, ‘If you can think of it, there’s porn of it.’ And then Rule #35 which is kind of a corollary of Rule #34, but shouldn’t really exist if Rule #34 is true, but Rule #35 is, um, ‘If there is no porn of it, you have to make it.’ Like it’s your duty to make it and put it on the internet. So like that’s the 4chan rule, is just like anything goes, really, and then there’s gonna be porn of it. It’s really sexualized and fetishized. It’s like the dark side of the internet. You can put the gross shit on there and you don’t have to pretend to be kind to anybody.”

 

The internet operates according to similar divisions of official/unofficial culture that we see in the world. Even though almost anyone can publish on it, there are online “institutions” that set the standard for the way we interface, or, in terms of content, are recognized as more credible than others. The lines are much blurrier on the web, however, and boundaries much more fluid.

Thinking about the web in terms of folklore presents several challenges. First off, everything on the internet is “published” as text and image, so new lines have to be drawn about the defining role of performance in folklore and its resistance to authored literature. A key difference is that literature on the web is not held to the same obsession with authorship that books and movies are–something can get out there on the internet without a designated author–so there have to be different ways of determining “official” content, and this is no simple task. And it is also difficult to identify traditionalized forms on the internet because there is such a diverse and ever-increasing pool of content. I would argue, however, that an online message board is a traditionalized form at this point. Its use sees great multiplicity and variation, but the general purpose is always the same. There’s no standard way a message board can be structured, and it develops according to the people who are posting on it. It’s like a log cabin.

On it, people share and pick up ideas from each other, generating phrases and visual motifs that are widely repeated for a while (memes) and then replaced with new ones. 4chan, in particular, is a message board that represents marginalized sensibilities–“the sick shit”–in an unregulated and anonymous space. It enables the strangest and filthiest recesses of the imagination to be indulged in a rather direct way, which is something even the most clever joke, which has the capacity to express sinister sentiments in a masked way, can’t provide.

An Arsenal of Holy Water

Nationality: American; ethnicity self-identified as "half Filipino, half mutt-Caucasian"
Age: 23
Occupation: recent USC Archaeology grad; now works part-time for a CRM firm
Residence: Altadena, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, Japanese

Informant: “Oh god, my mom has an arsenal of holy water. She baptizes our cars. And our bikes. She like blesses ’em, and sometimes throws it on us, it’s like really weird *laughs* She has just like all this water, from the uh–they have a special name–but when you walk into a church there’s holy water right there and you have to like bless yourself when you walk in. She has water from the Vatican, and she has water from Jacob’s well in Israel, she has um–that’s why I was like ‘oh man I wish I had a vial’ when we were in Turkey at the St. Jude cathedral, I think Kristen had brought her some though. She had stuff from like Westminster Abbey, she has stuff from like–for a while there she just had a bunch of like stuff–and even though she’s kinda run out of it, she still keeps them and you can find them in the top drawer of her dresser.”

[What makes holy water holy?]

“It’s just blessed–it’s like kosher water, it’s blessed by a priest. They just–I don’t know how it works–I just know that it’s blessed water, and it just sits there, it’s in a church, in a holy space. And the reason why is that my mom always blessed her cars and the one she didn’t bless always got into accidents–like backed up into a wall, someone rear-ended her, someone like knocked off the front fender–and she just blesses everything now. She blessed all of our cars, she blessed my bike, she blesses us–”

[When would she bless you?]

“If we’re gonna like leave. [To a foreign country?] Exactly–I think it has a lot to do with traveling, more than anything. But yeah she’s really big on blessing the car, like traveling type things. Cause there’s just a lot of things that can go wrong. [It’s something you can’t really control]. Yeah, and my mom is a control freak. It’s not even just our cars, like she blessed my ex-boyfriend’s car. She’s not crazy about it, it’s always just like ‘No no no, you can’t drive it yet, I haven’t blessed it, don’t go too far!’ And she plays it off like a joke, but I do think that there is a kernel of seriousness that goes along with it.”

[And what’s her ethnicity?]

“She’s Filipino. And she’s very superstitious about things.”

[Are your other Filipino family members also superstitious about things?]

Yells over to her sister: “Kris–Would you say that mom’s siblings are superstitious?”

Kris: “Yeah.”

“Yeah, my aunts especially. My uncles less so. I don’t think it has anything to do with their Filipino-ness specifically, only because a lot of the Filipino thought comes from the Catholic church at this point, like when you eat Filipino food it’s usually Spanish food or something you’d find in Mexico, like flan is a thing in the Philippines, but it’s a thing in like Guatemala too. So it’s just deeply rooted in Catholic traditions as well. They’re just very Catholic. And even though not a lot of them are super hardcore Catholic, they’re all a little bit Catholic. I have a Seventh-Day Adventist aunt who’s just batshit insane and I don’t even wanna talk about her because her whole perception of reality is like based on superstition, like, you know, about the rapture coming, so, you know.”

 

Holy water is officialized by the Catholic church but they way in which it’s adapted is wholly unofficial. The informant’s mother created a superstition around holy water which she has affirmed to herself through trial–the one vehicle she didn’t bless seems to be cursed with bad luck. It’s not up to me to say that perhaps her trust of holy water and resultant anticipation somehow primed the car for disaster. The objects and circumstances of her holy water blessings are directly linked to travel, an inherently chaotic and potentially anxiety-inducing activity. Agonizing over what can’t be controlled is largely inhibitive and unproductive, so a belief like this which provides the illusion of control can be a liberating system which frees one’s mind to focus on other things. Of course, it can also have the opposite effect of instilling arguably irrational fears.

Some thoughts on Confirmation, Catholicism, and organized religion

Nationality: American; ethnicity self-identified as "half Filipino, half mutt-Caucasian"
Age: 23
Occupation: recent USC Archaeology grad; now works part-time for a CRM firm
Residence: Altadena, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, Japanese

[my own comments marked by square brackets]

Informant: “Well, not just because we’re Filipino, but because I was raised Catholic, rites of passage being like–um we’re not just a little bit Catholic… everyone in my family is really Catholic, like super Catholic, my mom goes to church every Sunday at 6:30 in the morning and walks there and it’s like a whole process for her–but I guess like a rite of passage for me would have been my confirmation… um which I resisted every step of the way *chuckle* because it’s like catechisms, you just have to learn a bunch of stuff and confirm being Catholic…”

[Walk me through a confirmation, I don’t really know what goes on during one besides a vague idea of what it is.]

Informant: “It’s kind of like, it’s basically the Catholic version of a mitzvah, so you have to learn, you go to Catholic school–sunday school–and you just learn stories from the Bible, and the confirmation, all it is is that at the very end of it you… So when you’re born, you’re baptized, which was like in the ancient times to keep your child, who would most likely not last a few months, from lining the way to hell with their skull after they die from infant mortality. So in baptism you have like a godmother saying like, oh, I’m their Christian guardian–Catholic guardian–and I baptize them and I’m their spiritual guardian [so don’t worry, it’s all good, the baby can be let into heaven]. Yeah, and then up until you’re like between twelve and fourteen, maybe even fifteen, you’re confirmed. And that’s when you’re like a reasonably conscious human being to make that confirmation…”

[What are the events involved? Do you go to a church?]

“You go to a church, you’re dressed up all fancy–it’s kind of just like a very fancy mass. And you stand up in front of everybody and recite a bunch of passages and stuff like that.”

[Is there a party afterwards?]

“No. It’s not… a joyous occasion. I mean it is, everyone’s glad that you’re Catholic *hah* but it’s not like–I’m sure you’ve been mitzvahs before where there is a somber part where you’re reading from the Torah and then afterwards you just like rage [as in party, for those who are not sure what that means]. But no, it’s not like that–you’re just like alright, well, let’s go out to lunch now and everyone’s dressed up all fancy, but there’s no like singing or dancing, there’s nothing that really goes on… It’s a very like somber experience.”

[Would you say that reflects the character of Catholicism?]

“Oh yeah. Catholicism is very ritualized. I wasn’t allowed to take… [the wafer?] um, what’s it called… shit, what’s it called… I’m sitting in a room full of Religion majors and I don’t wanna ask any of them. Um, communion. I wasn’t able to take communion. My mom left me in the pew because I wasn’t confirmed so I wasn’t allowed to take communion. But after confirmation you can. But when you’re not a confirmed Christian you’re not allowed to take part in that ritual. I mean there was one part when I was like, ‘Mom, I’m super hungry, please let me go!’ and she was like, ‘Fine…’ but it was obvious I was the youngest person out there and they were just like whatever, I don’t care.”

[Did you go to church consistently in that time of your life? Every Sunday?]

“Uhh… there’s a time in our life when our parents just kind of like gave up on us [When was that?] Uh it was just kind of like after–we went to Catholic school for a long time, and then after that it was like well, whatever… they didn’t care for structuring our religion or anything like that.”

[So after you were confirmed did you have the distinct experience of going to church that Sunday and suddenly being officially allowed to take communion as a confirmed Christian?]

“Yeah, it really is like being accepted into a group, you really–I mean that’s like the most ritualized example I could think of in my life of being like, growing up in a specific culture but not really being part of it, and you become part of it after a certain period of like… I don’t wanna say liminality, but of learning about it and then going through a ritualized process, and now you can take communion and now you can drink the wine–the blood–no, the wine–to wash it down.”

[Did that actually mean anything to you?]

“I think that’s the problem with a lot of religion, actually, is that it’s really–and even my stepmom, she’s not religious, but I have two very young siblings and she wanted to take them to church because like it creates a community, a structured environment–and so it’s less about the religion and more about you interacting with a structured group with an obvious morale, and there’s no like drugs, sex or anything going on that’s like funny [ahem?] and everyone knows each other so it really is more about the community than the religion. And I remember I had a lot of Presbyterian friends, cause there’s a big Presbyterian church in my town, and they would have like Sunday school groups and they would always hang out–and you do feel left out *smirk* when you’re not part of the Sunday school group. Whatever, they would go to some crazy Christian camps–not Jesus camps, they were more like retreats.”

 

The informant is not religious but she acknowledges the religious system that she has been initiated into. To her it is a supplementary piece of her identity, a shared experience that helped to shape her understanding of the world but not definitely inform it. In some ways, this non-literal conception of religion is folkloric in itself–the Catholic Church doesn’t tell you that its inherent value as an institution comes from the structure or community it provides. It’s supposed to tell you that it exists because that’s what God wants. Yet many people don’t necessarily believe that, and choose to suspend their disbelief for the sake of belonging to a tradition. Rituals such as confirmation delineate stages of faith that are further supported by rituals specific to each stage (communion, for example, for after you have been confirmed). They are visible proclamations of faith, but even more so, of identity within the culture of the faith. Confirmation also seems to set an arbitrary age at which a person is supposedly ready to make up his or her own mind about what s/he believes. In this way it can be a coming-of-age ritual more than it is a faith-based ritual.