Conspiracy theories are like folk tales, says expert
There are many conspiracy theories about the assassination of J. F. Kennedy or the death of Princess Diana, but these are not the stories that would be used in political discourse during election campaigns in Slovakia or Poland, says Elżbieta Drążkiewicz, social anthropologist and ethnologist. Her research focuses on conspiracy theories and their connection with culture and history in various European countries. Why can even centuries-old conspiracy tropes still resonate in current political discourse? And does the spreading of conspiracy theories have any positive effects? Dr. Drążkiewicz, ERC Grant recipient, was a speaker at the QAK Conference organized at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of Comenius University and she also spoke at the ENLIGHT Fake News Winter School which took place at the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Faculty of Comenius University.
How does a social anthropologist approach the study of conspiracy theories? Is the approach different than that of, say, political scientists?
There are quite a number of shared interests. We all begin with some form of concern about the impact of conspiracy theories in the public space. But then we take different paths. Ethnologists are more interested in looking at the narrative forms of conspiracy theories. They try to understand conspiracy theories as the kind of narrative that is quite common among people, that tells stories about the world and gives them meaning. In that it is similar to folklore, storytelling, myths. There are anthropologists who look at conspiracy theories through the lens of cosmology and through the way in which people make sense of how things work in the world, and how they explain a universal order. What is the invisible power? Why do bad things happen? People use magic, religion, but also conspiracy theories to explain all this. It has a lot in common with studying beliefs, religion, magic, witchcraft. In anthropology and ethnology, we have recently began seeing a contextualisation of conspiracy theories in terms of the post-colonial theory. Looking at them as a weapon, as a whip. This is where we see a connection with political scientists, because now it is about political power.
How is a conspiracy theory similar to a folk tale?
The similarity is in the structure. In folk tales, you always have a villain and a hero. The hero needs to save the situation, and there are things that happen in the process. The pattern is similar in conspiracy theories, certain elements are told like in a folk tale. In current conspiracy theories circulating in Slovakia the villain is usually the U.S. or the NATO, and there is a hero, a certain politician, who will come and save the nation.
You study the connection between conspiracy theories and culture. Which conspiracy theories are really widespread in Europe throughout cultures? Are there some that can be found in, for example, Scandinavia as well as in Slovakia, or Poland?
Theories that are particularly common are antisemitic conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, this is quite a common European thread which we can find everywhere. In recent years, theories connected to the concerns about migration have also become common – anti-Muslim or anti-Arab conspiracy theories. These can take different names and shapes, for example the Great Replacement or the Great Reset.
What does that mean?
This particular conspiracy theory spreads the fear that someone is trying to replace the European population. According to it, there is a plan to erase the European culture, the European version of Christianity. The goal is supposedly to bring in people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe so they take over and Europeans as we know them cease to exist.
The term „Great Replacement“ is not very common in Slovak discourse.
It is a very well-known term in the world of conspiracy theorists, but only when you google it in English. If you try to find it in Polish or Slovak, the search engines will not always point you to theories about migrants, but offer advice on replacing eggs in your cooking or replacing certain car parts!
That doesn't mean this sentiment is absent here in Eastern Central Europe. It is present but people do not always use this euphemism, they are much more straightforward. It is still more accepted here to hold such views, and people allow themselves to express them much more freely, not needing to hide them in a figure of speech. Anti-immigration views are quite normalised in our part of the world and are not questioned so widely, they are not branded as a conspiracy theory. Some Slovak and Polish politicians even spread them explicitly, are open about it and feel no shame about it, no embarrassment at all. It is considered a fully acceptable way of thinking. However, in the Western world this would create uproar. But it does not mean people do not hold those views, they just hide them in code. Nowadays, we see a growing acceptance of those views in politics even in Western Europe.
There is a belief that social networks and digital media are responsible for the spreading of conspiracy theories. In your lecture at the Fake News Winter School you actually showed that some of them are very old and have been captivating people long before the invention of the social media.
The invention of new technologies does not automatically mean that completely new theories are created. Of course, technologies can give rise to new theories – there are new conspiracy theories about AI or 5G. But they always echo the bigger stories, bigger concerns and older national tropes. In my research in Poland it was interesting to see there seems to be a 'repertoire' of fears and concerns that have always been present. Like cars parked in a parking lot. If the need arises, we just go there and take one of the vehicles to communicate something very contemporary.
Can you give an example?
For instance, one of the theories that is really very popular now is to compare the current geopolitical situation in Poland and in Europe to the 18th century partitions of Poland: the so-called Targowica treason, that led to the First Partition of Poland. Or to the 1938 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. It echoes the fears that Putin might attack Poland or that the Russians might have a deal with Germany. Sometimes we think that these old stories are gone. But they are only partly forgotten and suddenly someone brings them up and people respond to them.
Why?
Because the way our national myths and our national identity are constructed always involves those stories. It is easy to bring up Targowica because it is something that has constantly been a part of our culture, the arts, theatre. Children learn about it at school. There is a famous painting by the renowned Polish painter Jan Matejko called Rejtan. It depicts the nobleman Rejtan, a historical figure, who throws himself on the floor and blocks a door to the Senate to prevent the partition of Poland. It is a very dramatic image of someone who must fight and save the nation. Those who endorse conspiracy theories see themselves as such heroes. They think it is a good thing to be dramatic and to make such huge gestures, because that will save the nation.
Your research of the 2023 Polish election campaign revealed that it is impossible to distinguish between the "good side" and the "bad side" when it comes to using conspiracy theories, because all parties use them.
I was monitoring the social media before the Polish elections. I found it interesting to discover that it was not just the „usual suspects“ – highly conservative or right wing parties that were spreading theories of suspicion, but also the supporters of Donald Tusk and Platforma Obywatelska. In Poland, these suspicions are framed so that someone is accused of being a traitor and selling Poland to the external enemies – those enemies being Putin, the Germans, Brussels or Ukraine. For the past eight years, Kaczyński has been spreading theories about Tusk being the traitor – that Tusk had a grandpa in the Nazi army, that he was the one who orchestrated the Smoleńsk disaster (the crash of a Polish government plane in 2010 near Smoleńsk in Russia, in which a number of Polish state representatives were killed, including president Lech Kaczyński) together with Putin, that Tusk was selling Poland to Brussels or to Germany. The new element was to see theories come from Tusk supporters, saying that Kaczynski was the traitor – that he was plotting with Russia, that his government might be using Russian secret agents, even that he himself was in a way responsible for the Smoleńsk disaster. We collected data from Facebook during the campaign, and about 40% of the „traitor“ conspiracy theories were being spread by the supporters of Tusk, and 60% by the supporters of Kaczyński.
So even the supporters of democratic parties are not immune to using and spreading these fake news and theories?
Yes. For me it poses an interesting quandary that I still need to process. If democracy is at stake, are all tricks allowed? Can both sides use conspiracy theories? When does it become legitimate?
What, then, is the difference between normal political discourse and conspiracy theories?
In the U.S., when Hillary Clinton was running for president, she would say: When they go low, we go high. In Poland, it was more like: When they go low, we go lower. But on the other hand, Tusk won, and Hillary Clinton did not.
What is it like, doing research in the online space?
We have an expert on harvesting data who uses technology that allows him to find the discourse which is relevant for us using keywords, like the word „traitor.“ He then sends me thousands of posts that I filter using another software to get rid of false positives. There are also ethical issues. Digital space is like any other space. We cannot just collect data from people´s posts and use it without their knowledge or consent. There are many restrictions. For instance, we do not go into private groups or focus on specific individuals, but rather on the narratives. We are also aware that the data we collect is only a snapshot of what is available publicly and much, much more is hidden in the closed groups. Today, research is also made difficult by the fact that people constantly migrate between different social platforms. For instance, Facebook is still popular in Poland or Slovakia, but it's almost dead in the UK. There, everybody was on Twitter until Twitter died, and now people are looking for other channels. They tend to migrate to platforms that are more aligned with their political views like Telegram or Signal. But we don't just focus on the technologies, we also have cultural scientists, psychologists, political scientists. We all try to find common ground without fighting too much and look for methods that work for all of us.
| Elżbieta Drążkiewicz is a social anthropologist and ethnologist. She studied at Warsaw University and received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She was an assistant professor and Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and Associate Professor at Lund University in Sweden. In her current research she focuses on conspiracy theories, political trust and global and local governance. In 2022 she received the prestigious ERC Starting Grant for her project entitled Conflicts due to conspiracy theories. It focuses on analysing the growing tension related to conspiracy theories across Europe. Its aim is to understand how these conflicts are influenced by social contexts and how they develop in different European environments. She is also the principal investigator of the CHASE REDACT project, which analyses how digitization shapes the form, content and consequences of conspiracy theories, and the head of the APVV PanTruth project, analysing the conspiracy environment in the Visegrád Group countries. |
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Does that mean that research in ethnology and social anthropology is mostly computer work nowadays?
In anthropology, there is some fetishization of field research. Field work is extremely important and I still do it. But we have to recognise the fact that a large part of people's lives moved to the digital space and digital space is just another space. Just like we do research in churches and in schools or in the forest, we can do research there. Earlier, you would interview people in a village. Now you have to go to Facebook or WhatsApp groups to hear them talk.
Have you encountered any positive effects of conspiracy theories?
The definition of positive depends on where I stand as a scholar. Where are we in this? In the 2023 Polish elections both sides used suspicious claims, and the turnout in the election was very high. That can be viewed as an overall positive effect. The other positive example could be in the form of good investigative journalism, which led some journalists to fact-check conspiracy tropes in a military context. A colleague of mine studied Greek environmentalists and she concluded that they often use conspiracy tropes when they fight for more action on climate change. They employ the typical plot of big companies who want to maximise profits and so they block all climate action. Both sides use the same manipulative techniques, headlines and unproven accusations. But if those theories motivate the society to act more against climate change, we tend to give them a pass. No one is debunking them. If it is done for good, then it should be good.
But who defines good?
It is an extremely complicated issue. Those who work in political science need to study how we perceive successful political mobilisation and what role fears, ceremony, suspicion and mistrust play in it.
What is the role of culture in this discourse involving fake news and conspiracy theories?
I think culture is extremely important. In order for a conspiracy theory to gain traction, it needs to resonate with something, a cultural trope, a sentiment, a philosophy, worldview. For instance, there might be many conspiracy theories concerning the death of Princess Diana or President Kennedy. Both are stories of tragic deaths, of power and elites, but it is not something that people in Poland or Slovakia will post a lot or worry about. It is pleasant to watch The Crown, but that's it, we move on. It doesn't resonate with us, it is not our story, our politics. The theories that are important for Poland will include the Smoleńsk disaster or who is plotting with Putin. But do people in Spain care about Smoleńsk? They do not and need not. It is culture and history that decide which conspiracy theories resonate with people. Slovakia is a young state and in such new countries with a short history of statehood it is often very natural to discuss who supports the nation and who is against it. The important questions are: 'Who are we?' and 'What makes us 'us'?', 'Who is included?', 'Who is excluded?'. There is a fear of others, of those that are different. Reasonable fears that people sometimes have might take the form of a conspiracy theory.
I think it is the job of the state to be aware of this and to try and find other ways to unite people. So that what makes us "us" in Slovakia is not based on a fear of others, of foreigners or people who have a different way of living, but on something else.
Barbora Tancerová