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Majority and the girls’ stupor and unconsciousness is seen as a natural condition accessible to medical treatment, as in Reverend Parris’ inquiry about the doctor’s diagnosis: PARRIS: What does the doctor say, child? SUSANNA: He bid me come and tell you, Reverend sir, that he cannot discover no medicine for it in his books. PARRIS: Then he must search on. (Miller 1990, p. 19) People’s conversations are mixed, however, in the sense that many people outspokenly reject the idea of unnatural causes while others, including the doctor, consider it a possibility.

63f) The above expressed authority of Hale’s profession and scriptures, with the help of others’ accusations makes the slave Tituba fall victim to the procedures when she is identified as the initiator of the girls’ rituals and dances in the woods. As a result of being beaten, she alludes to various potential sources of witchcraft. This procedure has effects upon the Salem community and Hale summons several formerly critical people, such as Proctor, to question them in an institutional setting. The discourse in the village ever so slowly turns from informal and consensual to expressing tactical interests in the attempt to deflect accusations of witchcraft from oneself.

10). Moscovici’s original study on psychoanalysis was equally concerned with how social representations change in processes of communication. The second part of his book, which unfortunately tends to receive less attention than the first, tackles the analysis of the communicative genres typical of each one of the social milieus Moscovici studied. Linking the first and the second parts of the book is crucial to understand the overall project of social representations, for what the study makes clear is the centrality of communication in the production of representations and how different communicative genres produce different representational systems (Moscovici 1976).