Ordinary Banana

it’s one way folklorists distinguish legends from fairytales - legends are told as if true, meant to be believed (like news stories)

Ah so "told for true" is a sort of term of art for an assumed folkloric consensus that everybody politely pretends to buy? No that does not sound nihilist to me. More like a sort of "don't think too much" faith.

Is that in reference to participating in "told for true" stories themselves, or to taking an ethnomethodologically emic stance toward said "told for true" items. The former seems non-nihilistic. The latter maybe non-nihilistic at a meta-level, and mostly pragmatic at story level

I could answer that better if I felt like it was an available option to not participate in them!

Sure it is. When foreigners intrude on a local told-for-true culture, they easily switch to explaining it in more explicitly symbolic/fictional terms. The suspension of disbelief is shallow and kinda instrumental. Like Huizenga’s play.

so the goal is to become a universal foreigner

like “anthropologist from mars”

Or alternatively universal believer who can become true insider of anything. Like Electric monk https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.urbandictionary.com/define.php%3fterm=Electric%2bmonk&amp=true … “Go believe in Christianity for me”