Bibliographic record
Abstract
Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells. By Barbara Rieti. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. Pp. xx + 149, coda, notes, index, ISBN 978-0-7735-3360-8) Years in the making, Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells delves into archives and memories to explore an underrepresented aspect of Newfoundland folklore. As the title implies, Rieti sees witches as being made, having that designation applied by others when circumstances and behavioral anomalies leave them marginalized and thus open to suspicion within the community. She problematises the term by recognizing that the quintessentially dyadic scenario of witch and victim is in actuality one person affair (3) wherein the victim/accuser asserts the power of the mainstream over the marginalized witch, resulting in alterations to perceptions and treatment of the within the community. While the witches themselves do not generally seek the appellation, they may embrace it once so labeled because with it comes the power to alleviate circumstances of poverty in a community that offers little in the way of social services. Throughout the text, Rieti is sensitive to her own uncertain role in this tradition as she amasses narratives about witches, but is able to include the voice of just one individual who self-identifies as a witch. The book is divided into three parts, each successive section more tightly focused than the previous. It begins with Witchful Thinking: An Overview of Patterns and Themes, which surveys various aspects of witch-related narratives and traditions in Newfoundland. These include economic factors within isolated communities having limited resources, the influence of seers and prophesying for those who make an uncertain living from the sea, as well as accounts of male witches and unlucky jinkers who bring misfortune in their wake. She also addresses social and gendered aspects of witchcraft manifestations, some of the psychological implications of spells and measures for retaliating, and the wariness of European settlers regarding the potential for magical consequences should they offend native traders. Citing primarily Mi'kmaq examples in the latter subsection, Rieti is careful to emphasize that settlers are the source of almost all the available material (54) and that Mi'kmaq accounts have yet to be examined. This section also looks at the supernatural traveling abilities of Jerseymen wishing to visit their homes in the British Isles, the black heart or black art books thought to convey power to their owners, and touches briefly on the intersection of witchcraft and religion, concluding that among the she interviewed and the evidence she examined, Narrative and experience, not theology, supply the best evidence for most people and that she sees witching as essentially an a religious phenomenon (71). Rieti groups these diverse examples together because the various individuals discussed draw their identity as wielders of supernatural power from the around them, who used templates of proven utility to produce stories that were malleable according to need, belief, and desire usually in response to breach of social accord (78). This exploration provides solid groundwork for understanding her more detailed investigations of witches and their communities. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".