Voicelessness and the Limits of Agency in Early Modern Finnish Narratives on Magic and the Supernatural

Abstract

Introduction: Self, Narrative, and VoicelessnessGiven that research has shown narration to be an innate trait human species (Abbott; see also Barthes; Nussbaum 230), concept culture encompasses vast domain. Here I define it as system conventions1 for representing temporally ordered events, conventions that are shared by group. Such groups tend to be coterminous with linguistic communities. This definition implies that conventions given culture that are intelligible to one group may not necessarily be intelligible to another. Narrative culture is historically transmitted and inherited and can change over time. According to Cliffford Geertz (93), culture acts as in two senses, being both of and for. In similar fashion, culture gives meaning or conceptual form to our social and psychological experience reality by both reflecting way in which its users understand themselves and world around them and by shaping that understanding in first place. This article is specifically concerned with role culture in social construction self2 and agency through narrative, what theorist Martin Kreiswirth (309) calls inquiry into narrative identity: how we use to construct our sense ourselves as developing moral agents, with pasts, presents, and futures.Narrative-by which I mean a representation or series events (Abbott 12), is our only tool for understanding ourselves as agents operating through time (Abbott 3, 123). Conceptualizing our lives in terms thus facilitates experience self-continuity through time and explains why people have tendency to perceive themselves as living out their lives in temporally ordered with beginning, middle, and end. Referring to this need for self-continuity, Anthony Giddens (54) portrays self-identity as the capacity to keep particular going.However, if we want to express and describe our experiences to others and ourselves through language, we cannot do it in any fashion whatsoever. We use our cultural conventions narration to convey our identities, our personal histories, more intelligibly to others, thereby constructing coherent social reality. People also use characters they encounter in narratives as means to express their selfhood. These characters are always flattened and typecast, in contrast to fully rounded, constantly changeable and phenomenologically complex persons encountered in real life, because characters are functions cultural norms used to tell stories. Norms for what is internally possible in story are in turn shaped by kinds agencies seen to be possible, probable, and acceptable in real life. Such on-the-ground theories personhood encapsulated in are not just ways expressing reality, they also shape how we experience it (Harre 22, 193). We seek to model ourselves after kinds characters narratively possible in our culture, since these will be stereotypes and storylines others recognize. The limits our traditions are thus limits our identity, as sociologist Nikolas Rose (237-78) explains:3We use stories self that our culture makes available to us, with their scenarios emotions, their repertoires motives, their cast-list characters, to plan out our lives, to account for and give them significance, to accord ourselves an identity as hero or victim, survivor or casualty within plot our own life, to shape our conduct and understand that others. . . . Rules this grammar individuals-language games-produce or induce moral repertoire relatively enduring features personhood in inhabitants particular cultures, and one that has morally constraining quality: we are obliged to be individuals certain sort. …