| Abstract: | As advertisements for escaped slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show, structurally vulnerable individuals experience status transformation which is governed by larger collective forces as well as by intentional states of the individuals involved. When the status transformation is, in addition, culturally unanticipated, construction of such accounts can be seen to be emergent from interaction across a variety of levels within the society of the times. Far from sustaining the moral careers of the vulnerable they establish destructive trajectories for them. Runaway advertisements allow us to examine the role of contradictory background expectancies in the production of the threatened identity associated with this status transformation. This paper elaborates the patterning of motives in the colonial Virginia community as it dealt with social change, individual rights and scions of appropriateness in handling runaway slaves. |
