Tok Thompson’s Posthuman Folklore is a wonderfully provocative collection of essays that, as a whole, asks us to reposition our thinking about the underlying assumptions of what it means to be human and, by extension, the dynamics of folklore. The book is broken into three sections. In the first, Thompson explores whether other sentient beings—particularly animals—also produce folklore or engage in co-performances with humans. For the remaining two sections of the book, Thompson pivots to the implications for folklore of the revolution in artificial intelligence, the Internet, and the web, exploring the epistemic impact of the digital on human ontological thinking. This compendium is comprised of six previously published essays, along with three new ones. Introductory and concluding remarks provide a brief, but helpful, framework within which to understand the interrelationships between the essays and the book’s sections. The three new essays are perhaps the most intellectually engaging, as the earlier published essays, particularly those in the second half of the book, have been outpaced by rapid changes in the ways in which people interact on the web and the ways in which artificial intelligence is being incorporated into our daily lives.
The book’s first section, The Conscious Planet, delves deeply into the field of ethology, the science of animal behavior, and dares us to consider whether animals also produce folklore. Thompson dances around the definition of folklore, but provides a series of interesting examples of both human-animal and purely animal interactions that have many of the hallmarks of informal cultural expressive forms circulating on and across social networks. The largest challenge, of course, is to provide a model of animal culture that is clear and verifiable. There is no reason to think that animal groups cannot have a form of culture, but there is little to suggest that these animal forms of culture are the same as human culture.
In his reading of culture, Thompson emphasizes the aesthetics of performance, and follows this through in the three chapters comprising this section. One of the most productive discussions in this section comes in chapter 2 during a discussion of “the story of the story,” where Thompson explores the implications of episodic memory and the group, and the rise of “story memory” (35). Chapter 3 brings the discussion back to the well-trodden realm of learning about human-nature relations from the thick exploration of various cultures. Here, Thompson rightfully suggests that, “science may learn a great deal from examining traditional Native American traditions, not only about the rest of Native American culture, but also of larger questions of our relation to the rest of the natural world” (55). This echoes, many engagements with indigenous cultures on their own terms, such as the ethnobotanical and anthropological work of Mark Plotkin, and provides an important direction for future folkloristic work as well. The fourth and last chapter is perhaps the most challenging of this first section as it brings to the fore questions of human and animal sexuality. The discussion is particularly relevant in the context of the current brouhaha in the world of fan fiction that has created an entire “omegaverse” of animalistic sex in a post-apocalyptic landscape of alphas, betas, and omegas (Alter 2020).
The book’s second section, Becoming Cyborg, shifts away from the study of the strictly natural world of plants, animals, and humans’ position in this world, to the realm of the digitally mediated world of the current age. The first chapter in this section provides an intriguing reading of the informal cultural expressive forms of beat boxing (a capella singing that mimics the music of hip hop and rap) and mash-ups (an integration of video/music in a novel and creative manner), and the role of Internet platforms, such as YouTube, for propagating them. The role of social media provides the backdrop for this and the following chapters, with Thompson proposing a need for a “Folklore 2.0” that moves away from the earlier insistence on face-to-face communication as a primary characteristic of folklore. The following chapter on “netizens” and revolutionaries, and the potential for web-based communities to move beyond the national has been largely undermined by developments of the Drumpf era, including the reemergence of populist nationalism across a broad swath of the world, the rise in tribalism and polarization enabled by forums such as Reddit and 4chan, and the economic shock of the Covid-19 pandemic. Given Thompson’s critical eye, it would be interesting to read an update of the general optimism he espouses in this chapter in the context of these global events.
Part three of the book, Us and Them: Re-imagining Ontology in the Cyborg Age, is perhaps the most speculative, as it tries to imagine the human response to the future integration of broad-based artificial intelligence in daily life, and the potential informal cultural responses to these interactions. The persistent question of this section is, “What does it mean to be human?” with Thompson asking us time and again to consider the ontologies of being that we live by. The first chapter in this section explores the contours of a “posthuman ethics.” Here, Thompson proposes that ghost stories evince the “shadow side of ethical behavior,” and thereby provide us with “important emic understandings of ethical thought” (132). In the penultimate chapter, Thompson turns to what he labels “new myths for modern times.” These stories delineate the category of the other in contemporary societies and follow a “trajectory from trolls, witches and fairies to the rise of extraterrestrial aliens” (133).
Currently, artificial intelligence is a poorly delineated concept, and is generally used to characterize the use of “deep learning” based on the implementation of neural networks for what are, in essence, classification tasks. These classifiers have failed spectacularly in recent years. One of the best-known failures is the Google Photo algorithmic failure that classified photographs of African Americans as “gorillas” (Garcia 2016). Another failure in the application of artificial intelligence to human classification tasks was a Twitter bot that was trained by Microsoft researchers to learn from users, with the result that, within a few hours, it had become one of the vilest racists in the “Twittersphere” (Garcia 2016). These two profound failures would provide an intriguing addendum to Thompson’s brief concluding chapter on AI and folklore.
Thompson’s book is an interesting engagement of folklore beyond the human. His writing is clear and accessible, while challenging the reader with difficult questions. Although some of the essays seem dated or, as in the case of discussions of AI, not deeply informed by the voluminous literature and developments in that field, they raise intriguing questions nonetheless. The anthology should be a welcome addition to folklore courses at the undergraduate level, as it provides examples of folk expressive culture, such as mash-ups, that lie close to students’ own experiences. Similarly, any student who has ever owned a pet, or spent time with animals, will be intrigued by the explorations of ethology. Thompson’s essays provide an excellent jumping off point for graduate seminars, or avenues for future research, offering clear signposts for more substantive inquiries, particularly into the changing role of folklore in the current information age. The excellent index offers useful inroads into this vast intellectual territory. As with all other volumes produced by the University Press of Mississippi, Posthuman Folklore arrives in a handsome package and is attractively priced. It should find a place on even the most crowded bookshelf.
Works Cited
Alter, Alexandra. “A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question,” New York Times, 23 May 2020.
Garcia, Megan. "Racist in the Machine: The Disturbing Implications of Algorithmic Bias," World Policy Journal 33, no. 4 (2016): 111-117.
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[Review length: 1273 words • Review posted on May 28, 2020]