UBC: Salem Possessed

[truepenny]

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. 1974. New York: MJF Books, n.d.

This actually isn't an unread book, since I read it when I was in eleventh grade. But that was over fifteen years ago, and all I remembered about it was getting badly confused by the economic and geographic analysis of the pro- and anti- Parris factions. A reaction which was, btw, confirmed by this reading. Boyer and Nissenbaum have an excellent point, but they could have used another pass for clarity.

In essence, the argument of Salem Possessed is that witchcraft isn't about witchcraft. They say it themselves:

The feeling that Mather articulated in [his] 1689 sermon was one shared by many people in Salem Village three years later: the social order was being profoundly shaken by a superhuman force which had lured all too many into active complicity with it. We have chosen to construe this force as emergent mercantile capitalism. Mather, and Salem Village, called it witchcraft.
(209)

I don't agree entirely with this stance, but let me get back to that in a moment. What Boyer and Nissenbaum do exceptionally well is demonstrate and elucidate (even if they are at times confusing) the social and economic conflicts which lay behind the witchcraft accusations. They offer compelling, if sometimes over-simplified, reasons why the people who were accused of witchcraft were accused: why those people, and not others.

Where they fall down is why that accusation, and not another. They treat the accusers (insofar as they talk about them at all, which since the accusers were mostly teenage girls and not a full part of the social and economic webs in which Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested, they don't; they give more attention to the senior Ann Putnam, with her adult load of resentments and failures, than they do to any of the girls) as if their accusations of witchcraft could be read as transparent vehicles for economic and social concerns. Transparent to us, that is, since they do at least pay lip service to the idea that both accused and accusers were sincere in their beliefs.

And I think that there's a problem in assuming transparency like that. I don't argue that the reasons Boyer and Nissenbaum give are there, because I think they are. But I think that isn't the whole story and can't be the whole story.

I've just started Frances Hill's A Delusion of Satan. (Although I recommend strongly that you skip the introduction by Karen Armstrong, which includes such unexamined sentences as: "What Frances Hill's book shows so clearly is that bad religion can be as destructive as the most virulent atheism.") Since she's started with trying to present the experiences of Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Parris, I know that at least her intentions are to address the gap in Boyer and Nissenbaum's argument. We'll see how well she does.

Comments

[ombriel.livejournal.com]

You may not be in need of other suggestions, but Salem Witchcraft by Enders A. Robinson may look at the "why witchcraft" question more than the folks you cited. For instance: "A closer look, however shows that witch hunting was a means for the educated elite to impose its values and standards of behavior on the lower classes. Elite groups...were the very ones who most vigorously asserted the reality of cults devoted to the Devil" (7). So economics and belief as intertwined, the elite mobilizing their belief to maintain power structures. There's a chapter on how Puritan dogma produced the witchcraft accusations.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing or reading about the economic and class issues in passing somewhere; thanks for supplying a lead on a title to pursue (someday).

Are you still pursuing Donner Party material? Because This (http://www.amazon.com/Desperate-Passage-Donner-Perilous-Journey/dp/0195305027/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201630193&sr=1-2) was listed in a book club selection mailer I got yesterday.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That does look interesting.

I really quite like the Boyer and Nissenbaum. Its flaw is more that they get a little Key-to-All-Mythologies about their thesis, not that the thesis itself is wrong. And they give good research.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Key-to-all-mythologies--yeah, right. As if it was as easy as lock- bumping (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007825.html).

But giving good research is always hott.

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

Programmed response by the puritan patriarchy to remove any feminist threat.

The first victim, Bridget Bishop. (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_BBIS.HTM) A few pages of reading about her tell me she was a model feminist, way ahead of her time. (http://www.google.com/search?q=Bridget+Bishop+&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLH)

The Salem witch trials started as a measure to control and manipulate women that didn't fit into Puritanical society (Bishop, Tituba, others) and I have no doubts that many of the men brought to trial were either victims of homosexual acts or simply suspected of being gay.

(it is also interesting to note that Mr. Bishop married his wife's accuser not barely a year(?) after her trial--- no, no that wasn't a planned event. Not at all.)

I disagree with the idea that "Witch Hunts" have been organized solely for the purposes of the educated elite. The Malleus speaks way too specifically about the "sins of women": women who would have sex with any convenient demon, kill babies, and even steal penises .

Odd how this reference and many,many more within the Malleus hearken to tales of Lilith, Adam's first wife.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The situation in Salem isn't actually that straightforward. Certainly women were accused, tried, and hanged, but so were men. John Proctor, Giles Cory, George Jacobs: they were all respectable farmers. Proctor and Cory were in their 60s; Jacobs was in his 80s. And several of the women--Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Howe, Mary Easty, to name three--were not unruly or disruptive or in any way alarming to the (admittedly patriarchal) structure and hierarchy of Puritan society. And while men as well as women accused people of being witches, those who were "afflicted" (that being the term they used), those, in other words, on whom the entire enterprise of accusation, trial, and execution depended, were all female, save for one West Indian slave named John Indian (Tituba's husband). And what's quite clear is the tremendous amount of power these girls and women were given by their fathers and husbands, ministers and magistrates, the very men who in the natural order of things considered it their sacred duty and right to hold power over these same girls.

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

I did about a month long research rave about this time last year regarding historical witch hunts. I went in looking for specific "zero event" that triggered panic, mass accusations, and hysteria (for lack of a better term). I did after awhile give up; finding that I wasn't uncovering anything new that someone smarter and better pedigreed already hadn't.

What I did find is that Judeo/Christian/Muslim societies ubiquitously used "witchcraft" accusations whenever a local patriarchy was being threatened/challenged by a woman or women.

In many of the zero events surrounding witch hunts it was not surprising that victim zero's description (we are also reading history from the "victor's POV"...be that as it may) held ideological similarities to that of a feminist mindset.

With all that said. I agree that the Salem Witch Trials can not be bottlenecked into a single straighforward modality for victim selection. However, I stand by my statement that Bishop was a feminist, a strong willed woman who defied the patriarchy (both in her own home and in the community) and that of all crimes to be accused of, witchcraft was both dehumanizing and defeminizing. It was this specific act of defiminization by use of the word "witch," a word that had been specifically socially reprogrammed to represent something other than what it truely was---that marked the zero event of the Salem Witch Trials as wholly misogynistic in nature.

For the rest of the trials I'd like to defer to moral panic and the Milgram Experiment...

...and apologies if I am totally off topic. I tend to wander.