Turkish mosques are staffed by state-appointed imams and callers to prayer whose practices are regulated through a complex bureaucratic network operating on an internet-based data-management and communication infrastructure. A centralized mosque loudspeaker network enables the broadcast of calls to prayer and other Islamic recitations across the country. During an attempted takeover, as coup plotters moved to seize major infrastructural arteries and telecommunications, the conservative government responded with an unprecedented deployment of government-run mosques and their centralized loudspeaker system. By broadcasting an Islamic recitation known as the salâ nationwide, this audible infrastructure helped mobilize certain members of the religious majority against the attempted takeover, generating pious affects and cultivating religiously inflected nationalist sentiments through a shared, sensate experience. Embedded within broader technical and administrative assemblages, Turkey's centralized mosque loudspeaker network demonstrates how religion is entwined with infrastructure and state power and illuminates the making of technologically mediated institutional modes of religious governance in the contemporary era. In anthropology, infrastructure is often conceptualized as a “secular” techno-political domain. The political deployment of an Islamic recitation through a centralized loudspeaker network, however, problematizes the presumed secularity of infrastructure and suggests that religious institutions, their technical systems, and even religious recitations can be enlisted as infrastructures for mass mobilization by an incumbent regime.

This article argues that folklore (orally transmitted group knowledge) shapes far-right voting by inculcating feeling rules that resonate with nativist and autocratic ideas. Drawing on recently rediscovered archives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists, we pair a dataset of local support for the far-right in all Reichstag elections in Germany’s Weimar period, with unique information on the prevalence of ethnic bogeymen in local folktales. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find a robust and considerable effect of the presence of fearful folktales on radical right voting. These effects are particularly strong for localities where citizens face political and economic threats. We use an instrumental variable analysis drawing on folklore data from the 1860s to establish the long-term roots of this pattern, disentangle the effect of folktales from contemporary political influences, and establish causal order. Our findings suggest that folklore plays a key role in aligning the supply and demand for far-right movements by shaping how citizens see and feel the world around them. In addition, we illustrate that folklore archives provide a unique opportunity to unpack affective-discursive canons across space and time.