Concept of Self

"Are you one of us?"
"Who are you now?"


How do you identify yourself in a torn world?
How do you decide what's right when your personal feelings don't account for anything?
How do you have a personality or voice for yourself when individual expression of self is not an option?

Where is identity in all of this...





In response to the readings:
In looking at the captivity narratives and the film showing the Native American perspective vs. the Puritan perspective.....

If I lived during this time I think I would find it tempting to explore the Native American culture, their ways are projected as connected, a true sense of familial love, a community bonded by the worship of many gods and a deep sense of spirituality. There seems to be a true sense of fellowship and communal love that is almost what the Puritans strive for but will never attain due to the distance that exists amongst a divided people. I am at a loss when I try to imagine what it must have felt like...

To imagine the individual and social psychology of trauma that these people faced upon experiencing a change in identity, the way that they had to respond to themselves and this foreign environment; to imagine the freedom of the wilderness a horrifying space of uncertainty, is terrifying. To be a woman taken captive and welcomed by her captives on account of her bounty, to be worth something and to know that worth when you are being starved to death. The unmatched pain of losing a child, while another one dies helplessly in your arms, then to hold it through the night knowing that in another time and place you would have never conceived this as a possibility. To know that when you do eat you are eating something that you would never deem edible because it is a matter of life and death.

And after all this you have to return to the old life you once knew, one that is far removed from this wild place of cooked horse legs and dead babies. You return to that life with uncertainty only to face the scrutiny of old friends and neighbors.

Is that you Mary? Beneath that estranged face and tainted soul they search for something, they want to accuse you but approach you with caution. You are no longer one of them, you are no longer a simple face in the crowd, you are CHANGED. You will not continue living in this place with the same identity internally or externally. No matter who you are, who you once were or who you have become, you are no longer just Mary but you are another, you have been CHANGED by interacting with a different sort of people, by eating animals parts that would otherwise not be accepted for food. By holding your baby as it died with no means to help it. By sharing wigwams and nuts with THEM. Sitting at their fire side and smoking their pipes, you are no longer YOU but someone else.

This is not a time of acceptance or understanding, everything and everyone must fit into a category, no in-between, no gray area, no diversity...and when you get a glimpse of that there is no returning to your original state of mind.

____________-From a Historical approach-__________________
The people that came to settle in the Wampanoag lands were those who wanted to find separation from the Church of England in hopes to form a "New World" which would more ideally be self governed. In some ways I think these settlers left the oppression they faced and transferred it to a different part of the world in which they could essentially become the oppressors. Nearly 70 or so years later this same group got so encumbered by power struggle that turned the lands of the Native American tribes into battle ground between France in England in hopes to obtain power of North America. Before that even, King Phillips war occurred in 1675 which ended in immense bloodshed and terror.

How do we put blame on one group or another, clearly, I have stated an argument here along with evidence of historical findings... but how do we place blame or should it be blame that we are looking for?




In response to the facilitation:

I think the world today and the world then would be very different if we went back to that first Thanksgiving and continued creating a common ground between these two very different worlds of the wilderness and the settled lands...

I think we would see a very different world and a very different level of acceptance for diversity in America...

This is debatable depending on which approach or discipline we might apply it to

In looking at Mather: On Witchcraft and Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown I keep thinking of the concept of the psychology of evil. What would it mean to believe in a Devil embodied, like Hawthorne describes; one who is, "bearing a considerable resemblance to him" as if they "might have been taken for father and son". Imagine walking through the forest with the Devil, put yourself in Goodman Brown's shoes. How terrifying it must have been to see the Devil as a likeness to himself, to stare into the eyes of evil and think this man could be my father.

This was an time period of subjective realities. A place where people feared evil lurking around every corner. Where evil could be conniving and convincing ever so close, but distant.

The subject of psychology also bring me to the idea of somatic-ally induced pain, emotion or instability. To have somatic-ally induced pain to have a physical symptom that is created by the emotion connected to it. We have all been really sad or upset about something and felt a pain in our stomach or had a stomach ache. This is exactly the phenomena I am describing. Another example of this many of us have felt or feel on a daily basis is fear, when you are truly afraid of something you being to experience physical symptoms as your nervous system becomes engaged in the fear along with your psyche. This is a fascinating detail when considering the fact that "Soma" means body and the Puritans were very focused on the mental and moral control over the body. Interesting when considering the fear that these people must have felt on a daily basis, never knowing where evil might be. Who might have the "disease" constantly in question, who is the afflicted one?

This brings me to my next idea related to psychology and that is based in relational aggression. So many lines could be crossed, so many boundaries were set up in the minds and in the lives of the Puritans. Relationship stress could be found in every relationship as illustrated by both Mather and Hawthorne, it could be seen in the husband wife relationship, the mother child relationship, sibling relationships even relationships with neighbors and friends. How could any one develop trust in this time of psychological pandemic? How could any one person depend on another without fear of deception?

Witchy Witch

I am not sure we can totally understand the prospects of living in the Puritan era. To actually place ourselves in the subjective reality in which they lived would take an incredible amount of imagination. To actually adopt the psychology of a Puritan mindset would be fascinating and frightening. Imagine, living in a world where there is such a fine line between good and evil and you never know which side has claimed your soul. Imagine Satan as a real character that you may be in contact with daily or spending your whole existence avoiding his intentional and cunning attempts to destroy you. The truth is I am not sure I can.

Mather takes us on a theological tour of theory and perspective in his commentary On Witchcraft that exposes the nature of good and evil in the life of a Puritan. Before reading this the only knowledge I had of this time period came from reading The Crucible and watching the film along with the various references of the Salem Witch Trials from earlier education history texts. Mather presents a new perspective that speaks of the Puritans as God's People and creates a terrifying image of Satan as an embodied figure.


Watch this video to see clips about what I am describing.