Between Structural Breakdown and Crisis Action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials

Abstract

Between institutional degradations and structural sources of breakdown, on the one hand, and actions that emerge within times of uncertainty, on the other, lies an essential but undertheorized dimension of political crisis: the struggle over interpretation. This article provides some conceptual tools to think about such struggle and its implications for understanding political crisis. The article examines the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) with reference to the Salem Witch Trials (1692) and, in particular, struggles between interpretations of the events that emerged as they unfolded. A crisis comes to have focus and meaning when interpretations construe the boundaries of a crisis, select certain key elements of social struggle, and develop specific speech genres that actors use to talk about a crisis. These findings suggest a distinction between interpretations of crisis that thematize central structural tensions and interpretations that displace anxieties created by those tensions on to a fetishized interpretation of crisis.