Abstract
In their new book, Gary Alan Fine and Bill Ellis argue that globalization has generally produced new conditions of insecurity involving issues such as trade, employment, and terrorism. As a result, rumors, which they define as ‘expression[s] of belief about a specific event that is supposed to have happened or is about to happen,’ have developed, which serve as a reflection of these insecurities as well as a way to make sense of an illegible world (p. 4). Similar to WI Thomas’s classic observation, the authors justify their focus by asserting that because rumors ‘are so much a part of our daily routine, they have real impact. What we think determines how we see the world around us and invisibly influences our political and personal choices’ (pp. 1–2). From a Gramscian perspective, the authors would agree that for many people rumors become a sort of common sense that informs them about how the world seems to work. In addition, they argue that besides allowing individuals to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world, rumors also allow individuals to participate in a shared community of alleged knowledge and limit their anxieties.
The authors assert that for some individuals some rumors are too good to be false. That is, they argue that rumors contain a politics of plausibility that often aligns with some groups’ existing belief systems. For example, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the authors point out how some anti-Semitic groups seized upon rumors that alleged that Jewish individuals had not attended the World Trade Center the day of the attacks. For these individuals, these rumors provided proof that Jewish individuals were somehow behind the attacks. In addition, the authors observe that some groups and organizations have even utilized rumors to assist them in their own endeavors, as, for example, when the Kuwaiti government paid US public relations firms to disseminate false stories that Iraqi military forces were kidnapping babies from Kuwaiti hospitals during their conflict with Iraq.
The empirical chapters focus on rumors surrounding four phenomena: terrorism, immigration, tourism, and international trade. In Chapters 1 and 2, the authors trace several rumors surrounding the 9/11 attacks, including viral images that purported to show Satan’s face within the billowing clouds of smoke emanating from the World Trade Center. Although some evangelical groups attested to how this illustrated that evil forces were behind the attack, other groups alleged that these images attested to how the World Trade Center was itself a place of evil. In Chapter 3, Fine and Ellis supply an interesting cultural history of rumors surrounding an array of immigrant groups throughout US history. For example, they show how many individuals blamed the Chicago Fire of 1871 on the moral impurities of recent Irish immigrants, who were supposedly busy imbibing while their housing establishments caught fire.
Chapter 4 provides perhaps the most interesting and consequential empirical case study involving rumors surrounding immigration. In it, the authors trace the recent history of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, a town that had been racked by depopulation for the last several decades but has witnessed a recent influx of Latin American immigrants. After an immigrant was found dead in the town, rumors circulated that Dominican and other Latin American gangs were developing in the area. In response, several long-time residents began harassing the recent immigrant community and demanding that they leave. Anti-immigrant sentiment culminated in the beating to death of an immigrant teenager, whom several local white teenagers mistakenly labeled as a gang member, while he was walking home with his girlfriend’s younger sister. This chapter illustrates how the presence and acceptance of rumors can lead to grave results within some communities.
Chapter 5 deals with the issue of tourism and humorously illustrates a popular story involving US tourists bringing home what they had initially believed to be a dog, but which turns out to be an overgrown Mexican sewer rat. The authors argue that the story illustrates both the gullibility and misplaced compassion that US tourists often possess as well as the anxiety surrounding recent immigrants in the United States whom US citizens are not sure whether to trust. Finally, Chapters 6 and 7 investigate rumors surrounding several articles of trade, including, for example, Chinese produced outerwear that allegedly contains snakes and Central American banana crates that allegedly contain poisonous spiders, and rumors surrounding organ and human trafficking.
This work is continually thought-provoking, insightful, and, at times, humorous. The authors illustrate how crises, such as terrorist attacks, and uncertainties, such as anxiety concerning the manufacture of consumables, provide fertile ground for the development of rumors. Yet, although filled with recurrently interesting anecdotes, the work does not provide a coherent theory of rumors and precisely when they matter most. In several places throughout the book, the authors suggest important implications – for example, depicting how xenophobia in Hazelton led to a young man’s death as well as illustrating how rumors surrounding Chinese organ trafficking, for example, led to a US congressional hearing on the matter during the 1990s. However, the book does not provide much in the way of a robust theory of rumors and their implications beyond showing how crises and uncertainty often generate them.
As a descriptive study of the presence of rumors and several contexts that support the development of rumors, the work succeeds; however, the study is rather light on predictive power. In addition, although the authors often supply convincing explanations of the origins of some rumors (e.g., the economic insecurities that surround imported items), the authors often impute explanations to individuals that pass on or believe in rumors that fail to convince. For example, the authors suggest that the humorous story involving US tourists bringing sewer rats home with them actually illustrates US citizens’ anxieties concerning whether they should trust recent Mexican immigrants. Although this is certainly a possibility for some individuals who hear or pass on this story, far less intellectualized and subconscious motivations might also prevail. In another passage, the authors suggest that concern with imported bananas might indicate an underlying sexual anxiety with the male organ. Again, although this is surely a possibility, less intellectualized and mundane reasons might motivate individuals to tell these stories. Without interview or survey data, it might be best not to speculate on the psychological origins of the popularity of these rumors and the reasons why individuals continually relay them.
Fine and Ellis provide us with an entertaining look into the world of rumors. Of course, rumors and their origins are not easy social phenomena to track down, because individuals often spread them in a surreptitious manner. The authors, however, do nudge us forward in making sense of them. As a predictive and fully explanatory work, this book falls short, but it certainly provides us with much to start with.