The Genre of Trolls - Doria

y regulated practices (senses two and three in Foucault’s usage, see chapter
1.2; Foucault 1999: 106). This conception of discourse is intimately associated
with a concern with power and the power relations entailed in the
constitution and use of discourse, and the meaning of these terms in the
present context ought to be explicated. Power is manifested in power relations,
by which I understand, in line with Michel Foucault, the multiplicity
of relations of force which are immanent in the domain in which
they function. Accordingly, power is disseminated from innumerable
points, and exercised in the play of inegalitarian and mobile relationships.
Power relations are always already present in other types of relations, such
as economic processes, and because of this immanency, they are not only
repressive, but also productive. Therefore, power must be analyzed “from
below”, since it is not merely an imposition from above (Foucault 2002: 121–
124). The consequence of this notion of power is that the individual is both
an effect and a vehicle of power; individuals are subjected to as well as exercise
power (Foucault 1980: 98). Finally, power presupposes resistance and
vice versa. Power relations cannot exist without a multitude of points of
resistance, and these can persist solely within the field of power relations
(Foucault 2002: 125–127). In other words, the force that might challenge or
overthrow a power relation is contained within it (Mills 2002: 42). Some of
the folklore texts discussed in these two chapters constitute such points of
resistance.
If we re-examine the link between folklore and religion in this light, it
might be possible to come to terms with some of the more puzzling aspects
of their relationship. Why did the folklore texts not adopt the distinct language
of the Bible in its Swedish translation, for instance? This question
brings us to the exclusions of discourse, on both sides (Foucault 1999: 40,
89; Foucault 2001: 11). Religious discourse obviously excludes the notion of
Paradise on earth, while the folk or popular discourse excludes the religious
discourse precisely as a discourse with its distinctive register, i.e., major
speech styles related to recurrent types of situations (Hymes 1989: 440); instead
the performers of folklore have translated the religious discourse into
their own idiom. A similar translation has been treated by Carlo Ginzburg
in his study of the conceptual world of the 16-century miller Menocchio
(Ginzburg 1988: 169). Although the contexts are different—the Italy of the
Renaissance is far removed from the Ostrobothnian countryside of the 19th
century, after all—the mechanism of translation is virtually the same. For
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Intertextuality as Social Critique