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Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of
Witchcraft
Isaac Reed
Cultural Sociology 2007; 1; 209
DOI: 10.1177/1749975507078188
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Cultural Sociology
Copyright 2007
BSA Publications Ltd
Volume 1(2): 209234
[DOI: 10.1177/1749975507078188]
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore
Isaac Reed
University of Colorado, USA
ABSTRACT
Sociological explanations of the Salem witch trials, and of witch-hunts in the West
more generally, have focused on economic transition, political instability, and the functional aspects of witchcraft belief. A more interpretive approach to the explanation
of Salem is proposed: an analysis of the intersection of the gendered symbolization
of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts and the larger tensions within Puritan culture
at the close of the 17th century. A broad theoretical implication of this interpretive
shift is also proposed: that a cultural-sociological approach to witch-hunting as symbolic action can bring together feminist theorizations of witch-hunting as an exercise
in patriarchal power with the social history of the broad, structural causes of witchhunting in pre-modern Europe and New England.
KEY WORDS
Introduction
n The Crucible, Arthur Miller (2003[1952]) recreated the Salem witch trials
to attack McCarthyism in mid-twentieth century America, and since then they
have become a common metaphor for conspiracy and the political use of fear.
Miller used a historical event to provide perspective on contemporary events, a
venerable interpretive device in literature and the arts. Here, however, I am concerned with the inverse hermeneutic problem, namely, how to comprehend
and explain what happened in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692. What
motivated the people who made the trials happen? In other words, what structured
their social action? In working towards a sociological explanation of the trials,
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and soul. What Salem put at stake was not only the self-conscious collective
identity of the Puritans as Gods chosen people, but also the nature and place
of men and women, and their relationship to the invisible world of God and the
Devil. It was the understanding of gender inside Puritan culture that enabled
husbands to turn on their wives, good women to accuse bad ones, and highminded judges to believe them. Such were the structures of the social imagination, in other words, by which male power could, in the Puritan case, imagine
itself into existence, and into legal legitimacy.
2)
3)
4)
5)
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I cannot claim to address why those girls, in that house, became afflicted, or
other contingencies of this nature such as the testimony of Abigail Hobbs, who,
at a key moment in the pre-trial hearings, agreed with the court that she was a
witch, and did have familiarity with the Devil, perhaps thus helping the judges
along in their doubt about the veracity of the statements of Sarah Good, who had
vigorously denied the accusations. But I do want to address the specificity of this
moment in American history, in terms of the social conditions that made these
actions possible. I would, however, like to bring a somewhat different perspective
to the study and theorization of these social conditions than that which is usually
applied in the sociological and historical study of witchcraft.
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surprising, given the extent to which the social history of witchcraft is now
so often written from below. She writes:
Gender is clearly central in some way to the witch-hunts Yet the questions why
were witches women or its converse, why were women witches have received
short shrift While virtually every other aspect of the hunts has been debated, the
central element that witches were believed to be women, has remained, for most
scholars, unproblematic. Explicitly or implicitly it is assumed that a sort of timeless,
natural misogyny present in Western culture can adequately explain why the collective image of the witch was that of an ill-tempered, older woman. Conversely, it
is argued that misogyny has been such a permanent characteristic of Western culture that it cannot be considered the cause of so specific an event as the witch-hunts.
Yet leaving the question there in fact does little to explain why women were
attacked in this way at this time. Nor does it help to illuminate the specific nature
of witch beliefs and witch practices, even paradoxically the oft-repeated observation
that some witches were male. (Whitney, 1995: 778)
Whitney focuses her attention on the historiography of the European witchhunts, but we can easily see how the same dynamic is operating in the three
sociological frames for explaining witchcraft that criss-cross the literature.
Gender is at best incidental to these sociological explanations, considered perhaps as a facet of the empirical phenomenon, but not as a deep cause. In the
sociology of witchcraft, whether we consider the root cause of witch persecution to be capitalism and the disruption of village norms, a project of an elite
attempting to consolidate power, or a useful way to keep social life on track,
witchcraft becomes an institution and a discourse reached for in a pinch so
as to make the poor and the socially outcast undeserving, or to eliminate the
unchristian tendencies of pagan villagers, or to smooth over feuds and consolidate and pacify a collective. Who knew murdering women was so useful?
Many efforts have been made to remedy this problem as the scope and
capacity of the study of witchcraft and the European witch-hunts has expanded.
And though studies of witchcraft and gender are now common, the chasm
which Whitney identifies between mainstream and feminist accounts of
witchcraft remains. I would like to suggest a specifically theoretical route that
might be taken in trying to come to terms with this problem, and which will
offer new insights into Salem in particular. By making the symbolic dimension
of social life not just fodder for ideographic narrative, but rather the subject of
systematic sociological theory, we can bring gender into not only the study of
witchcraft but also its explanation. For witchcraft was, first and foremost, a
fantastical social imaginary of gender relations a perversion of the authority
relations and behaviors that were expected to hold, an inverted model of and
for reality (Clark 1980, 1997, 2001).
Both the political and economic explanations of Salem cannot help, in the end,
but point to the moral dimension of the conflict. I mentioned above Weismans
conclusion that Salem was a process of collective expiation, while Boyer and
Nissenbaum admit that the intensity of economic animosity in Salem Village can
only really be understood in terms that are simultaneously economic and moral:
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To understand this intensity, we must recognize the fact self-evident to the men
and women of Salem Village that what was going on was not simply a personal
quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict
involving the very nature of the community itself. The fundamental issue was not
who was to control the Village, but what its essential character was to be. To the
Puritans of seventeenth-century New England, no social or political issue was without its moral dimension as well. (Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1974: 103)
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Thus the first fundamental structure of meaning in Puritan New England was coexistence and coupling of the invisible and visible worlds (see Hansen, 1969: 78).
Both involved complex teleologies, moralities, and cognitive frames, and both were
highly gendered. The invisible world was sometimes an idealized model for the visible one, sometimes a gross and distorted mirror of its problems. But it was most
of all a set of explanatory tools by which individual Puritans elite and non-elite
comprehended fate and accident, hard work and reward, and sin and repentance.
This (to us) bizarre epistemology of memorable providences and evil imps, Gods
grace and malicious consorts of the Devil, was used to explain both individual lives
and the direction and destiny of the collective, variously understood.
By 1692 this invisible world in which everyone believed was in crisis.
The tensions surrounding it are perhaps best described under the rubric of
Webers sociology of religion. Puritan religion, despite its reputation as austere,
ritual-less, and conducive to rational economics, had not, in 1692, been entirely
transcendentalized, and thus the world was not disenchanted. And yet, what
might be called the Atlantic Enlightenment or at least the scientific revolution
was very much on hand, at least for the elites educated at Harvard. This
included writings of the English empiricist philosophers. Thus the Mathers,
their colleagues, and their eventual debating partners concerning the trials (such
as Robert Calef) were reading Newton and Boyle (Jeske, 1986; Solberg, 1987).
But they were putting this to odd use, or what we would think of as odd use.
To them, for example, the new empiricism presented a reason to accept the
existence of specters, devils, and imps, since it testified to the accuracy of individual perception (Weisman, 1984: 312, 557 and 150; see also Merton,
1970). The debates about empiricism were ultimately folded into the ongoing
discourse of interpretation surrounding the scriptures, and in this the Puritans
were ultimately deductive thinkers, who debated the way evidence should be
interpreted in terms of the truth of the Word. And thus the standing position of
the clergy when it came to trying witchcraft was that spectral evidence should
not be accepted, not because specters might not exist (everyone knew that they
did), but because the Devil might have not only the capability of, but also an
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interest in making innocent persons appear guilty (Weisman, 1984: 334 and
104). Being collectively on guard against such trickery was an essential aspect
of the Puritan errand in the wilderness (Miller, 1984).
Not everyone in Massachusetts was reading Boyle. But it is worth noting,
in this regard, that the populace not educated at Harvard but quite capable
of reading and discussing the Bible was aware of, and participated in, the
tension over where specters came from, and why. Several of the accused, during the trials, argued quite coherently that the Devil might take their shape
without their permission, and indeed that, as the father of all lies, he would
do just that to get poor hardworking folks like themselves into trouble. The
historiography of early New England has shown that it is hermeneutically dishonest to imagine that this culture split neatly along the lines of class or status. This is partly for religious reasons namely, Puritan conceptions of
individualism in relationship to God but also for economic ones. New
England was founded by folks of a middling sort that rarely had more than
one or two servants, and thus was distinctly different in the social distributions of patterns of meaning than a colony like Virginia, which was based on
a plantation system of immensely rich owners using the labor of masses of
indentured servants (Taylor, 2001: 15887). Indeed, the Puritan household
was strikingly middle class, and the social distance between the villagers and
their ministers was relatively small, perhaps another reason their fierce
sermons were so effective.
Starting in about 1670 these sermons had turned more pessimistic and apocalyptic, and Samuel Parris, as well as Cotton Mather, were experts in this regard
(Bercovitch, 1978: 7392). Increase Mather opened his diary of January 1681
with the entry This year begins awfully, and spent the rest of the decade repudiating the newest generation of New Englanders (Foster, 1991: 231). Certainly, the
claim that the world was in decline, and that Gods children were straying from
Him, was a rhetorical trope possessed by Puritan ministers before 1670. However,
that year marked a turning point, as the discourse of declension became the central cognitive and moral frame of the clerical elite. William Stoughtons NewEnglands True Interest; Not to Lie (preached in 1668, published in 1670),
worked up the various pieces of the jeremiad into a single unified literary form
(Foster, 1991: 214). Ironically, this launched Stoughtons political career, leading
eventually to his role as chief judge of the Salem witchcraft court in 1692 (Foster,
1991: 21516). Increase Mather was even more effective in this regard because of
his access to the Dorchester pulpit and his unprecedented influence with the printers and booksellers of Boston and Cambridge in the decades when the production
of the colonial presses was finally about to move into high gear (Foster, 1991:
21718). In 1674 he brought a concreteness to his grim predictions, which were
then borne out to much fanfare:
Early in 1674, in The Day of Trouble is Near, he announced on no particular evidence
that it is a very solemn providence, that the Lord should seem at this day to be numbering many of the Rising Generation for the Sword; as if the Lord should say, I will
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being a Sword to avenge the quarrel of the neglected Covenant. King Philips War4
the next year accidentally turned him into an instant prophet, a mantle he was quick
to claim, but otherwise the awful conflict with the Indians of 16756 was a distinct
disappointment, over too quickly and not universally convincing as a judgment on an
unreformed people. (Foster, 1991: 21920)
Mather and his followers wanted, and sensed, the arrival of judgment in concrete form. When the colonys charter was revoked in 1684, it was interpreted
in these terms; New England had failed to show England that the new life they
were carving out of the wilderness was the righteous one.
More generally, then, we can say that the tensions in Puritan discourse and
in Puritan life between spirituality and worldliness, between transcendental and concrete understandings of the divine, between declension and the desire
for renewal were augmented in the latter decades of the 17th century. The
Halfway Covenant, a compromise reached in 1662 that allowed the children of
partial members of the church to receive baptism, had marked the beginning of
escalated internal conflict among the Congregationalists, not its end (Miller,
1953). And, beyond Increase Mathers popularity, the sense of conflict and
impending judgment filled the popular press. David Hall comments tellingly
that:
The contradictions that engulfed [the Puritan imagination of wonder] were sustained, not resolved, by the printers and booksellers who manufactured newssheets,
chapbooks, and broadside ballads that conveyed the lore of wonders to so many
people. Their allies were writers who specialized in tales of preternatural events.
Well versed in all the themes that made the wonder story so appealing, these writers produced tales of judgment that rivaled any jeremiad. They took on the guise of
prophet and offered up a heady mixture of apocalyptism and astrology. The repertory of these writers was limited only by their powers of imagination and the constraints of the literary form at hand. (Hall, 1990: 111)
It is in this unstable context (for more, see Butler, 1979) that the specifics
of witchcraft must be understood, and it is the gendered aspects of this symbol
system that would prove to be particularly inflammable. Witchcraft in New
England participated in and formed a connection point of three symbolic
formations:
1)
2)
3)
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understanding of the body, intention, and action and the meaning of sin and
repentance was different for men and women (Reis, 1999). In particular,
women were more vulnerable to both bewitchment and being saved more
likely to sign over their essence to either God or the Devil. Elizabeth Reis concludes from reading womens confessions that women were much more likely
to become convinced that they had sold their souls and made a grave mistake,
almost without knowing it. They were also, as Carol Karlsen shows, held in
deep suspicion as descendents of Eve, liable to fall from grace and attempt to
gain both economic advantage and sexual gratification though these suspicions were not the central, public attestation of Puritan religion so much as a
set of unspoken assumptions among men, connotations of sermons rather than
denotations, and the imagery common to talk in the tavern (Karlsen, 1998:
17381).
Today, the metaphor of the witch in fantasy TV shows and horror movies
provides a seat for ongoing prejudice about womens natures and intentions.
But then, witchcraft was a direct and real extension of womens supposed
tendency towards greed and sexual depravity. For the Puritans, witchcraft
was not a fictional way of thematizing misogyny, it was a real aspect of the
world, the worst of womens inherent tendencies carried to an extreme and
expressed via unholy intervention into the invisible world. If the individual
womans relation to God was a model of and for the relation of a woman to
her father and her husband, imagining and defining the specifics of the patriarchal relation for New Englanders, the witchs relation to the Devil was the
perverted inversion of this relation. Monogamy became polygamy as the Devil
or one of his ministers led a coven of witches, natural sex acts were replaced
by unnatural ones, the Bible was replaced by the Devils red book, and a
womans appropriate humility gave way to her greedy desire for material possessions (see, for example, Deodat Lawsons recounting in Burr 2002:
14562).
And in this part of the meaning system we find a notorious representational instability, with rather nefarious consequences. In terms of both body
and soul, women accusers, or women inspectors (brought in to examine the
bodies of accused witches), were always at risk of becoming accused. They
could become the accused for the same reasons, culturally speaking, that sometimes they became themselves convinced of their own guilt. One of the classic
Catch-22s of witch trials throughout the century was the inspection of
womens bodies and in particular their breasts, genitals, and underarms for
witches teats. For proprietys sake, women had to be entrusted with the
examination. And those assigned to this task could easily be accused of being
in league with the witches. Richard Weisman addresses this point in a two-part
argument. First, he points out that the women so entrusted, almost entirely
matrons and midwives, would not have had formal medical education, and
therefore could not challenge the validity of the test on medical grounds, or
make fine-grained distinctions between natural and unnatural marks on
womens bodies that would be convincing to the court. Furthermore:
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there were more profound reasons for silence than mere lack of technical expertise
Even more unfavorable for the female critic was that the positions of examiner and
suspect were so easily reversible The folk healer or midwife who protested too
strongly against an affirmative finding might soon discover herself transposed from
the investigator in a search to the subject of a search. (Weisman, 1984: 1023)
A category mistake was also possible with womens souls. Puritan culture made
a distinction between possession and obsession by the Devil (Harley, 1996).
In the former, the soul and the body were taken over and controlled by evil, in
the later, only the body was. Lurking behind the accusations of the girls and
their adult advocates that, via bewitchment, they were being tormented bodily
or obsessed indirectly by the Devil (through his intermediaries, the accused
witches), was the possibility that the accusing girls were themselves possessed
by the Devil and thus guilty of internal sins of the soul of the highest order.
The discursive work done by the accusers to keep this possibility at bay cannot
be underestimated, and it explains why those who suggested offhand that the
girls were possessed, or in error, or committing fraud, were so quickly attacked
as themselves witches.
The larger point is that the strategies of individuals in the midst of the trials were dictated by these (to us) bizarre categorizations, dichotomies, and
threats of recategorization. If there was an incentive structure at the trials, it
was one set by the religious understanding of womens souls and bodies as sinful in a particularly Puritan manner. The ultimate evidence for this at Salem is
the case of Mary Warren. Warren, a servant in the Proctor house, initially
appeared in court as an afflicted accuser. However, on April 19, she stood trial
as accused of witchcraft. Why? Because she had dared to assert that some of the
girls afflictions might be fraudulent. Confronted now as a potential witch, she
reacted to the reading of her deposition that the girls were fraudulent by falling
into a fit, presumably induced by witchcraft! Then, having admitted to signing
the Devils book, she returned to her role as an accuser. As Ann Kibbey has
written perceptively, although Warren seems nearly unintelligible as an individual subject, she makes much more sense from a cultural perspective
(Kibbey, 1982: 126).
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given up their names and souls to the Devil; who by covenant, explicit or
implicit, have bound themselves to be his slaves and drudges, consenting to be
instruments in whose shapes he may torment and afflict their fellow creatures
(Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1993: 126). Terror indeed, for those found to be in
this relation to the Devil would be punished in the visible world as well.
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Anne Kibbey (1982) has noticed that some of the very same accidents and
misfortunes that were attributed on occasion to witches maleficium were at
other times attributed to the divinity. But the logic here was different; it was not
a matter of a mans practical expertise that is, a concrete ability to meddle in
natural events, a sort of techne or skill with the invisible world when God
wreaked havoc on his life. It was, rather, a sign of the sinful nature of his internal soul. And, given that good fortune was interpreted with the same logic
luck came to pious men, who had established a clean soul we might even say,
as these men were on the brink of modernity, that they had a pure self.
In this context, the supposed ability of witches to interfere in nature without reference to transcendental divinity, but through mere cunning, must have
been disturbing indeed. Even if the judges showed almost no fear that their
cows would die or their daughters would be tormented, the capacity of such
women to affect the lives of the colonials in this fashion revealed exactly the
problem with the world as it existed for the Puritans in 1692. And it rendered
the whole cosmic schema problematic, because it suggested that one could
interfere unnaturally in nature and in the lives of others without the development of an internal relationship with God. The unbalanced nature of this system in the face of a suspected witch good fortune coming from a clean soul,
bad fortune coming from black magic was particularly hard on witchcraft victims and their families, because ministers demanded that they respond to direct
attacks upon the afflicted with prayer, and not with counter-magic. For Deodat
Lawson, a military metaphor was close at hand, when on March 24, 1692, he
specifically discouraged the burning of hair and the boiling of urine to hurt a
witch, and recommended prayer and trust in God, urging the Salem congregation that to ARM! ARM! ARM! against Satan meant to PRAY! PRAY!
PRAY! (Lawson, in Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1993: 1278).
The gendered implication should be made clear here as well: the causal
capacity to affect ones fate through God was reserved for men, and in particular, patriarchs. In fact, anything important or unusual that happened to anyone or anything in the household (cows, children, wife ) was, if thought to
be supernaturally caused, attributed to the moral quality of the father:
Men interpreted their personal histories in the same way they understood the history of the Puritan community as a whole. Unusual events disrupting their personal
lives were similarly interpreted as signs of the Puritan deitys disposition towards
them as individuals in a Puritan mans life the death of his wife or child became
one more index of the state of his soul. (Kibbey, 1982: 140)
Unless, of course, it was the woman across town, the malefic witch. She, apparently, did not have to bother with God to do her deeds.
Thus the cognitive and moral problem was that, in this understanding,
malefic witches required no relation to an authoritative transcendental force to
accomplish their dirty deeds. But to this problem, the mythology of the Devil
and his female instruments offered a solution that could work for a religious
mindset on the brink of giving up a belief in magic and cunning folk, yet still
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deeply invested in the existence and ultimate importance of the invisible world.
As Lawson and Parris never ceased to affirm, the witches were in fact taking
orders from the Devil, or even a male minister of the Devil (specifically, former
Salem minister George Burroughs, see Norton, 2003: 12332).
This then brings us to the great controversy of the trials, namely, the acceptance of spectral evidence testimony by the afflicted of being tormented by
apparitions that only they could see. Generally, in trials in Massachusetts before
1692, the main evidence brought against witches was evidence of maleficium,
which is to say, the meddling by the witch in unnatural causation and thus the
bringing about of misfortune (dead cows, thumbs hit with hammers, sickness,
etc.) (Weisman, 1984: 13). But at Salem, the question was mostly one of
bewitchment/torment the traveling of the witches in spectral form to visit bodily pain upon these girls, and a corresponding ability spontaneously to torment
them in the courtroom itself (from across the room). Maleficium required little
or no direct relation to the Devil, while bewitchment, many clergymen insisted,
required the accused to sign the Devils book.
In accepting spectral evidence of bewitchment and torment, the judges were
going against precedent but making a move congruent with the cultural logic of
the time. In this logic, the efficacy of the invisible world on the visible had to be
assured by a transcendent male authority figure for upstanding patriarchs,
God, for nefarious witches, the Devil. From this perspective, we can see the trials as a crisis of the metaphysics of male authority. And the social meaning of
the two male witches hanged who were not married to female witches is also
made clear they were hanged because they also enacted this inverted, Devilish
form of male authority. George Burroughs, former minister of Salem, was
accused of killing his previous wives and leading the witches and said to have
claimed to be not only a witch but also a conjurer. John Willard was tried and
hanged because his wifes family accused him of beating her. These two completed the terrible solution to the cosmic problem at hand, by robbing the
female witches of any agency in the invisible world outside of the command of
men. Every woman had to sign one book or another.
Conclusion
Since Perry Millers 1953 treatise The New England Mind, discussions of a crisis or decline in Puritan culture and society have formed a constant thread of
discussion in the historiography of colonial New England (Foster, 1991;
Knight, 1994; Middlekauff, 1999; Vaughan, 1997). Miller, however, famously
dismissed the Salem witch trials, claiming that the intellectual history of New
England up to 1720 can be written as if no such thing ever happened. It does
not figure, he insisted, in the institutional or ideological development of New
England (Miller, 1953: 191). Here, I have argued to the contrary that that the
trials thematized in a sharp way a crisis of representation in Puritan culture,
conceived of as a complex set of interwoven symbols and stories, cosmic
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like red threads through this drapery. In particular, I see one fault line that
appears whenever the Puritans dealt with witchcraft: a morally loaded metaphysics of gender and authority. This, more than economics and politics, was
what the accusers, accused, judges, and onlookers were working out skillfully
and horribly when they hanged nineteen of their own.
Ultimately, I wish to challenge the sense that we have, as sociologists, that
social structure is something external and thus real and forceful, and culture is
something more evanescent, which only matters at certain times and places. I
suspect that this distinction is the result of countless sociological appropriations
of the philosophical distinction between subject and object, which is so central to
our own modern Western culture that it is not easily overcome. Nonetheless, we
should try, because in interpreting the actions of someone like Samuel Parris
who was utterly convinced that the Devils female servants among his congregation were as dangerous as the French soldiers on the front we have to realize
that the problem was not a lack of reality but too much of it.
Notes
1 There were two indictments but not executions for witchcraft in 1697, the
only official articulation of witchcraft in New England after Salem (Demos,
2004: 386). As Demos writes, The official record of witchcraft in New
England belongs entirely to the 17th century. The greatest and most destructive
of the trial proceedings was also virtually the last (Demos, 2004: 387). While
the private belief in and perhaps practice of witchcraft continued into the 18th
century, its public affirmation and legal instantiation stopped almost immediately following the trials.
2 The full pattern that occurred is: Person B requests financial or other forms of
aid from Person A. Person A refuses. (Person B expresses ill will, perhaps
through a muttered curse) or (Person A assumes Person B harbors ill will). An
unfortunate accident occurs. Person A accuses person B of witchcraft.
3 For another account of different sociological theories of witchcraft, and specifically of the European witch hunts, see Smith (1992).
4 King Philips War, named after the English name for the Indian leader
Metacom, was fought in 1675 and 1676. Many New England towns were
attacked, including Andover, Massachusetts, which became involved in the
witch crisis of 1692. For the relationship between the trauma of the war and
American identity, see Lepore (1999). For an argument that the war was not a
clash of civilizations or ways of life, but rather the devolution into conflict of
two societies that had been covalent (see Drake 1999).
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Reed
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Isaac Reed
Isaac Reed is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder
who works in culture, historical sociology and social theory. His current research
concerns the theoretical logic of interpretive sociology, and aims to provide a new
epistemic framework for qualitative work in the social sciences, exemplified through a
case study of the Salem Witch Trials. He is the co-editor of Culture, Society and
Democracy: The Interpretive Approach.
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, CO,
80309, USA.
E-mail: isaac.reed@colorado.edu