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Author Topic: The witchhunt as metaphor
skdadl
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Babbler # 478

posted 03 March 2002 12:45 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).

This is a model work of social history. I'm sure that a good deal has been written since in response to it, and that much more primary research has come along to supplement it, but I doubt that has affected its status as a wee classic.

I thought it would be interesting to many people because the witchhunt as metaphor has become so common, so familiar, has in fact a distinguished literary history and a recent political one -- whose reality or importance I don't mean to diminish at all.

But what do we think we know about witchhunts? One group of associations has to do with superstition and scapegoats. If "simple" people become fearful of ... whatever ..., they may project their fears on to others, the Other, the outsider, or the eccentric in their own society, whose vulnerability seems to suggest that something is less than perfect in their own world or themselves.

Another group of associations has to do with establishments exercising social and political control cynically and opportunistically by inspiring and/or encouraging people to think of (what may be real) problems in irrational, melodramatic, or superstitious ways. We have seen this happen in North America, most spectacularly during the early fifties in the U.S. but in milder forms elsewhere, then and, well, maybe constantly.

Specifically of Salem, Mass., in 1692: Nathaniel Hawthorne (of, to me, sainted memory) turned the Salem witchhunt into a meditation on Puritanism -- in itself and as a continuing strand of American culture (see the opening to The Scarlet Letter (1850) -- one of Hawthorne's ancestors was a judge in the Salem trials). In his (wonderful) play The Crucible (1952), Arthur Miller understandably read Salem as a direct metaphor for his own and his friends' persecution during the early 1950s -- the accusers represented extensions of power; the accused = victims/dissenters.

Yes, but. Or yes, but only partly.

What follows is the briefest, most overgeneral, oversimplified summary of Boyer & Nissenbaum's research. But maybe it will inspire some thoughts, both about the politics of witchhunts -- or more generally, the sources of defensive, reactionary populism -- and about the potential of a certain kind of historical narrative.

Boyer & Nissenbaum did what good social historians are supposed to do: they started with the tax rolls, the church rolls, the legal documents, the archives, the maps. In other words, they started off by being good monks. (In my view, all good scholarship begins by honouring the monkish function: Preserve! even when you don't understand it. Especially when you don't understand it.)

They explain that Salem in 1692 was two places, the port that was about to become one of the major east-coast trading centres of the C18, and Salem Village to the west and north, a semi-rural centre whose prosperity was based entirely on the land. Salem Village is today the separate town of Danvers, Mass.; the "afflicted girls" (the accusers) and the first of the accused witches all resided in Salem Village.

B&N can locate just about every family living in Salem Village at the time on their map; they can describe all the land-holdings of the major families, the history of those acquisitions and of their division through three generations; the business and political connections to Salem Town of the major players in Salem Village; the church affiliations of same; and the locations of support for the accused and the accusers throughout the village. They draw all this history out on maps. I love a good map. It never hurts a good book to come with family trees and good maps.

And then they run through the histories of two powerful (intermarried) local families, the Porters and the Putnams, and one pathetic preacher, the weak and self-pitying and dangerous Samuel Parris. And those histories are gripping, if profoundly sad.

Both families appeared still immensely prosperous in the early 1690s. But the Porters had succeeded on three counts where the Putnams had failed: in acquiring the right land, in keeping their land-holdings undivided, and in capitalizing on their wealth by connecting themselves more and more to the business of Salem Town. The Putnams also sniffed the future promise of mercantile capitalism and pursued connections and influence in Salem Town; when they were frustrated, they withdrew increasingly into the paranoid world of Samuel Parris's village congregation (still treated as a colonial outpost of the town church, much to Parris's grimy chagrin).

The "afflicted girls" were, first, Samual Parris's adolescent daughters and then the young Putnam women. Their first targets were indeed eccentrics and victims: people who represented instability locally. But their accusations very quickly began mounting the social ladder: they never quite dared to accuse the senior Porter of witchcraft, but they circled about his family, his in-laws, his tenants ... And then, after only nine months from the first "afflictions," as the accusations spun out of control to touch, finally, the wife of the governor of Massachusetts, administrative and church authorities stepped in to halt the trials and executions (although not the incarcerations: some accused witches remained imprisoned for up to two years following).

There is no suggestion in any of the records that any of the actors involved was less than sincere in believing that they faced Evil. The afflicted girls truly were afflicted; they weren't faking the seizures they went into. The governor of the colony and legal and church scholars -- Increase and Cotton Mather, eg -- sound truly, deeply puzzled and distressed in their public and private interventions and memoirs of the episode.

But a generation later, the families of the accusers had vanished from Salem -- as, according to B&N, they would have anyway, given their economic vulnerability. The families of many of the accused "witches" remained to prosper through Salem's heyday as a great C18 port and centre of mercantile capitalism.

What did religion, or Puritanism, have to do with the witchhunts of 1692? Well, not nothing, for sure. The trials and the executions (in all, 24 died as a direct result of their arrests) would not have been able to go forward if everyone in all classes in the colony had not taken the language of C17 Puritanism seriously.

It seems so clear to us, though, that the source of the hysteria was anything but spectral. If the illness was spiritual, the cause was a very immediate, material threat.

And yet, truly: no one knew that at the time -- or at least, those most threatened in the long term (the accusers) were incapable of articulating the threat they sensed, except by conjuring up witches and the Devil. Even those most threatened immediately (the accused witches) were unable to imagine the source of their accusers' hatred for them. No one was able to describe his/her own motives in the terms that now seem so obvious to us.

Religions are languages, and in the Massachusetts colony in 1692, religion was the only language, the only conceptual system that most people, including governors, lawyers, and scholars, had to work with. There have always been machiavels, of course, but it's hard to find one in this setting.
We live, I confess I think, at the end of an economic era that was just beginning in Salem. I do believe that we exhausted all its beneficent, optimistic metaphors some time ago, and I would have a hard time accepting that our governors and other worthies were as sincerely puzzled by manifestations of "evil" in our times as were Increase and Cotton Mather in theirs.

But at a popular level, the metaphors are still shaking out, in puzzling and distressing ways. Now: how do I end this? I think I'll just stop for now, and see whether anyone's bothered to follow.


From: gone | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
DrConway
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Babbler # 490

posted 03 March 2002 05:40 PM      Profile for DrConway     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I haven't read the book, but I think I shall take a gander at it now.

I may be accused of overstepping here, but it seems to me that Salem can be compared to the modern-day landscape of the Religious Right, in that religion is often used as a substitute for rational thought when peoples' fears are played upon by those with political objectives.

Fear of what? The "Other" (someone who is not you), or of economic dislocation, or perceived declining moral values. Anything that seems a simple enough substitute which works for people like Pat Robertson, who have very real material and political objectives.


From: You shall not side with the great against the powerless. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Trespasser
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Babbler # 1204

posted 03 March 2002 06:52 PM      Profile for Trespasser   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Several things came to mind while I was reading this.

Various schools of psychoanalytic thought have much to say about hate through othering. Consider Jung's concept of the Shadow, for instance. (He does owe much to Freud of course but putting the operation of the unconscious in those specific terms is extremely fruitful.) According to Jungians, what we unreservedly hate or are being irritated by is actually the part of ourselves that we reject to recognize, the part that if highlighted for a tiny bit would devastate our notion of our own identity.

quote:
That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves

is one of the Jung's most quoted passages. And this is the Shadow popularly explained (I googled this): "We have all had experiences with other people that really irritate us. Whenever we feel ourselves over-reacting emotionally to a quality or characteristic in someone else that pushes all of our buttons (and there will be a repulsive element to it), we can be sure that we are seeing a part of our own Shadow.

We will not be able to stand this other person or be around them at all. The reaction is usually extreme distaste as these characteristics or qualities that we despise or hate in others are our own and they are usually operating outside of our awareness. They are in our unconscious and usually they will be the exact opposite of what we believe to be true about ourselves."

And a word about projection: "We all project onto other people parts of ourselves that we disown, that we deny. We will usually not identify with the projected quality or characteristic at all. It’s them. It’s not us. We will feel highly uncomfortable when we are around someone that is carrying a part of our Shadow." And: "whatever we are highly identified with in our character, the opposite extreme will be in our unconscious."
(I remember there was a book/collection of essays Romancing the Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of the Soul but I think it chooses not to take the social view of the Shadow; oh yeah, I remember reading Political Psyche written by a Jungian analyst and social theorist, that one is much more relevant, the author's last name could have been Samuels)

I hate to admit this, but for all my social constructivism, I remain somewhat frustrated by social sciences and social thought explanation of hate that functions through othering. There's a dimension to all public and private witchhunts that only theorists of psychoanalysis can have a hope on earth of illuminating. Another work that is appropriate here to mention is Jacques Bril's Lilith, ou, La Mère Obscure. Bril does religious and historical studies, with a lot of help from psychoanalysis -- in this case, he researches some recurring characteristics of female monsters from world mythologies and mythopoetics, and connects them with primal fears of the newly born in relations to his (by rule female) caregiver. The fear of falling; the fear of pain; of unknown sights and sounds; the fear that the mother will not come back this time around when I call her, all may have something fundamental to do with the way female figures have been 'archetyped' in written and oral cultural and religious products. Fascinating study of the witchhunt avant la lettre, or perhaps of the witchhunt that is constitutive of our cultures.

Last reference for now: Bryan Palmer (from what I hear, an ex-Trotskyist who made life miserable to many an imaginative student of social thought in Canada but who, it seems, changes gear drastically with his last book in which Foucault's shadow is surprisingly big) recently published The Cultures of Darkness and there's an interesting chapter on the history of witchhunts on both sides of the Atlantic. If I remember (or double-check) some of the points, I'll share.

[ March 03, 2002: Message edited by: Trespasser ]


From: maritimes | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged
Tommy_Paine
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Babbler # 214

posted 03 March 2002 09:28 PM      Profile for Tommy_Paine     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I think the term "witchhunt" has accidentally taken up the idea that a witchhunt has a machiavellian thrust.

Many in the feminist movement contend that the witchhunts in Europe were as often as not aimed at moneyed or landed women, and the hunt was used as a tool by the church or others to obtain their material goods.

Mackay, in "Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" tends to point to the eccentric women being most often victims, and it's this view that has dominated when the actual and not metaphorical witch hunts are discussed.

When using witch hunt as a metaphor, I think it's a mistake to limit it to the religious field. Surely, academia is suseptable to the "witch hunt"
psychosis. Witness the attacks on those who decry "recovered memory syndrome". Instead of listening to the facts debunkers present, they are labeled deffenders of pedophiles and other sexual abusers.

Only a witch deffends a witch.

So it's dangerous to think it's a religious phenomena as opposed to a human phenomena.

All of the fallacious thinking that went to support the witch hunts can be found in politics, and in academia, let alone coursing through society at large. Perhaps specifics of the witch hunts can be laid at the altar of religion, but the phenomena itself is not a hallmark of religion.

This is who we are.


From: The Alley, Behind Montgomery's Tavern | Registered: Apr 2001  |  IP: Logged
Trespasser
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Babbler # 1204

posted 19 March 2002 09:23 PM      Profile for Trespasser   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I was shopping around, looking for the right place to post the link, and thought the witchhunt subject would be somewhat appropriate. Another episode of this long and sad story.
From: maritimes | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged
skdadl
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 478

posted 20 March 2002 10:14 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I do keep meaning to come back to this thread. People have replied with such interesting further reflections and sources. But I need my wits about me more than I've had 'em lately, so for now, just thanks.
From: gone | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged

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