4 Ethnographers in New France

 Introduction: the renaissance IN NEW FRANCE

Within a year of the return of Columbus from his first voyage – the Vatican issued a decree, known as the Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement effectively divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. Spain was given the right to colonize the Americas (save the Atlantic edge of Brazil) and Portugal was granted Africa, India, and China. Despite being left out of the agreement, the French, English, and Dutch quickly moved forward with their own efforts to establish settlements and land claims, particularly in the Americas. In later chapters we will explore English anthropology in depth. For now we will focus primarily on Renaissance France and French Canada, although it is often difficult to cleanly separate the actions of the colonizing powers from each other, as our vignette will show.

The French started harassing Spanish ships in 1497. By 1504 they were attempting to establish outposts in Brazil, relying on Protestant colonists.  Jacques Cartier claimed Canada for France in 1535, and a brief effort was made to settle Florida in 1560. In the end the most durable and successful French colony was Saint-Domingue. From its founding in 1659 to the Haitian revolution of 1804, the economy was based on slave labor.

Each of these efforts had significance for the development of French anthropology. The Brazilian adventure led to Michel Montaigne’s interviews with Brazilians in Rouen, French Florida was documented by the engraver Theodor de Bry; and Canada became the center of New France, where the sustained work of Jesuits produced one of the first ethnographic compendia extending over decades. Although it is often overlooked, contemporary scholars point to the significance of Haiti to the Black Atlantic Counter-Enlightenment.

Vignette: Indigenous Cosmopolitans

Almost every American elementary student learns about Squanto (Tisquantum) and how he helped the Pilgrims make it through their first winter at Plymouth. A more complex story has long been available (Page, 2011). Decades ago, the New England historian Frank Shuffleton observed that:

Squanto … was one of the most widely traveled men in the New England of his time, having visited Spain, England, and Newfoundland as well as a

large expanse of … [the Northeast]. (Shuffleton, 1976)

Tisquantum was certainly much better traveled than most of the Pilgrims, whose worldliness prior to landing at Plymouth was quite minimal. His visits to England were voluntary, his trip to Spain was not, but Tisquantum spent enough years in both countries to become fluent in English and Spanish and well aware of the cultural differences between them, as well as the divide between Europe and Native New England.

Although it goes against stereotypes, Tisquantum was not unique in his wide travels and cross-cultural experiences. Harald Prins, an anthropologist and ethnohistorian whose expertise focuses on the northeastern United States and Canadian maritimes, studied the passenger lists from 55 early Atlantic voyages from North America to Europe. He noted wryly that by 1620, when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, over “2,000 Indians … had landed in Portugal, Spain, France, and England” (Prins, 1993). And while most historical accounts focus on kidnappings, Prins determined that roughly one third of the trips were voluntary – and voluntary voyages outnumbered kidnappings after 1500.

MI’KMAQ’s DISCOVER EUROPE

Prins has focused his research on the Mi’kmaq, whose early interactions with Europeans contravene stereotypes. The Mi’kmaq are an ocean facing people whose territory embraces much of the area that settler colonists would claim and rename as Maine and the Canadian maritimes. Their pre-contact travel mostly involved seasonal movements between the coast and inland areas in order to make strategic use of seasonal resources. But that changed after 1504, when Mi’kmaq oral traditions report a European ship hovered on the water off the coastline. The next year, and each year after, Basque fishermen arrived in growing numbers, sailing in an arc across the north Atlantic which allowed them to arrive off the coast of Newfoundland in as little as 20 days. The fishermen set up camps onshore, fishing the rich Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and then smoking and drying their catch before returning to France and Spain.

Prins notes that “by 1520, hundreds of fishermen were summering on the shores” of Newfoundland, during the same season when the Mi’kmaq were gathering in large settlements on the coast (Prins, 1996). And that was just the beginning. The cod industry grew quickly. By 1578, a multinational fleet of 20,000 European fishermen on 350 vessels were catching, processing, and returning to Europe with over 30 million cod annually, enough to greatly increase the protein in the diet of Atlantic Europe. Interactions between the fishing fleets and the Mi’kmaq led to a growing trade in furs, and soon the Mi’kmaq acquired and were sailing their own Basque shallops up and down the coast. 17th century journals reported that Mi’kmaq sailors spoke a rich pidgin blending their Algonkian language with phrases and words from English, Dutch, French, and Spanish. Europeans who encountered Mi’kmaq crews commented that their ability to communicate across languages greatly exceeded their own.

Their influence on Canadian history is often overlooked, but the involvement of Mi’kmaq people in seafaring was long lived. In the 16th century, Mi’kmaq guides helped Jacques Cartier find his way into the Saint Laurence, and in the 17th century a Mi’kmaq leader named Messomoet guided Samuel de Champlain in his “discovery” of Canada. Ironically, Champlain is remembered as the “Father of New France” – but his success depended on Messomoet, who had lived abroad for two years in the Basque seaport of Bayonne and was an experienced captain of his own shallop long before his encounter with Champlain (Prins, 1996: 50-52). His independence troubled the Jesuit missionaries, and his name made its way into their reports, known as the Jesuit relations.

Messomoet was not unique. Because of their value as middlemen, “European entrepreneurs sponsored friendship exchange trips” and a growing number of Mi’kmaq spent a winter abroad building their capacity to serve as cultural intermediaries (Prins, 1996). The Mi’kmaq were not alone in this. Europeans were hosting individuals from up and down the Atlantic coastline in hopes of gaining commercial advantage. But the visits declined as the hosts realized that their guests had their own agendas (Dickason, 1997: 205-229). Existing evidence also suggests that people from the New World who traveled to Europe were not long awed by what they observed. In particular, they were disturbed by the great disparities in wealth and power, as between the French court and beggars on the streets of French cities. If they escaped death from the poor sanitation and numerous diseases that Europeans of that era were afflicted with, almost without exception they returned to their own communities and their prior lives at the first opportunity.

On Historical Agency and Ethnographic Authority

Why is the vignette above significant to the history of anthropology?

My prior subheading is borrowed from Harold Prins, who labeled a section of his book “Mi’kmaqs Discover Europe.”  Most readers will grasp the irony. There is an unspoken assumption in most historical accounts that Europeans had a monopoly on historical agency – they brought change to peoples around the globe who were otherwise isolated and unchanging. This assumption was broadly shared by European philosophers before and during the Enlightenment. The German philosopher Hegel, for example, distinguished between historical peoples – peoples moved by the World Spirit to transform their way of life – and peoples without history (Wolf, 1982). Karl Marx likewise counterpoised the dynamic, capitalist West to the despotic and unchanging Orient, and most economic historians have followed his lead (Goody, 1996, 2004).

In addition to lacking a history other than the one imposed by colonists, the peoples anthropologists have studied have often been assumed to lack reciprocal curiosity and anthropological knowledge of theoretical import. Put differently, anthropologists have been assumed to be Europeans, and the history of anthropology is thus effectively a sub field of European intellectual history. Anthropology has long been about “us” studying “them” and it has rarely been necessary to state explicitly who counts as “us” and who is obviously “them.” These assumptions come most strongly to the foreground when deeply held presuppositions are challenged. For example, in 2010 an indigenous anthropologist named Jack Forbes published research  that challenged ingrained assumptions: he sought evidence that Native Americans had discovered Europe prior to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. His book is appropriately titled The American Discovery of Europe (Forbes, 2010). By 2010, it was widely recognized and accepted that Europeans had been kidnapping indigenous peoples around the world and bringing them to Europe to either display as curiosities or sell into servitude. But the idea that Native people had their own curiosities and knowledge that went beyond small, highly localized worlds was new, as was the idea that many journeys to Europe had been voluntary and driven by intellectual interest and practical value.

One of the very few works that seriously endeavored to reverse the gaze was a highly original work by the German anthropologist Julius Lips (Lips, 1937). Lips focused his attention on art and material culture, creating museum displays that jarred German sensibilities. He made a concerted effort over four years (1929-1932) to collect, document, and display representations of “the white man” created by people around the world, but especially in sub Saharan Africa. Lips created a kind of reverse anthropology (Villar, 2021) that gave an anthropological twist to the Scottish poet Robert Burns’s injunction “to see ourselves as others see us.” In 1933, as Lips prepared his work for publication and display, Hitler and the Nazi party seized power in Germany, and Lips – who was of Jewish descent and leaned far to the left – was forced into exile in Canada. Colleagues assisted Lips in getting funding to do research in a Montagnais community in Labrador. His hosts included village elders who had served in the Canadian military and fought against the Germans in World War One; ironically, Lips had served in the German army on the Western front, fighting Canadians.

It should not be imagined, then, that interests in exploration and cosmopolitan worldviews are a novelty introduced into the world at large by Europeans. Not only is there archaeological evidence for extensive contacts over wide areas of the traditional world (Turnbaugh, 1976), but in many cases modern colonialism actually reduced the possibility for travel and created highly insular communities.

As the Dakota scholar Philip Deloria has argued, stereotypes of what “Indians” should be like – especially if they are to be recognized as “traditional” – often conflict with reality. Deep assumptions about the unequal distribution of worldly, cosmopolitan experience frequently produce telling moments when Indians appear in unexpected contexts (Deloria, 2004). It produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to shift from historical narratives detailing Sitting Bull and his warriors defeating General George Armstrong Custer at the Little BigHorn in 1876, to the participation of Sitting Bull and over 50 Lakota on tour in Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show a decade later, in 1885 (Warren, 2007).

Montaigne and the First Stirrings of Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism is generally taken to be one of the signal accomplishments of 20th century sociocultural anthropology. The word relativism dates to 1942, and the first formulations of the concept are usually attributed to Franz Boas and his students in the United States. But as many have noted, there are earlier expressions that anticipate the Boasian concept. It should not surprise us that those earlier expressions are imperfect, because a similar uncertainty haunts contemporary discussions. Indeed, the strongest support Clifford Geertz could muster was an argument that he opposed the arguments of opponents of cultural relativism more than he opposed relativism itself (Geertz, 1984). Among the first thinkers Geertz mentioned – if only in passing – was the sixteenth century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Given the importance of the cod fishery to the history of New France, is it worth remarking that Montaigne’s family made their fortune in processings and selling salted herring, allowing him leisure to reflect. Similar to cod fishing, herring harvests grew as fisheries developed along the Atlantic coast of North America.

As Richard Handler noted, Montaigne found his voice in the essay, and wrote two essays of continuing interest to anthropologists: Of Custom and Of Cannibals (Handler, 1986). His core arguments can be stated thus: Our opinions are not our own, nor are they the product of reflection and reason. They are, rather, the product of the community we grow up in and the customs we adapt. All peoples everywhere adhere to the habits and customs of their own community, and for that reason all traditions are equal: “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice” (Hazlitt, 1877).

Montaigne never journeyed to the New World, but he hosted and interviewed both a Portuguese sailor who lived for a decade in an indigenous community in Brazil, and also interviewed a group of native Brazilians who were visiting the French port city of Rouen, the center of France’s Brazilian trade. In his essay summarizing his inquiry, Montaigne noted that “I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country” (Hazlitt, 1877).

Does this differ from the ethnographers of New Spain? If so, how?

There was an element of relativism in the work of Las Casas, but Montaigne walked the position forward. Las Casas held that any individual person, and any human community, could degenerate into barbarism. In this all humans are equal. By the same token, any individual, and any community, could choose salvation instead, and join the Christian community. And in this too, Spaniards and Indios were equal. However, Las Casas never doubted that there was one true religion, nor that Christianity involved a civilizing mission centered on cultural conversion. As Anthony Pagden has commented, the Romans bequeathed to the Spanish crown a radical universalism: what was true anywhere, was true everywhere and for everyone. There could be only one Monarch, only one God, and only one currency: Conquest, Conversion, and Commerce were singular, and variation away from those truths required correction (Pagden, 1995).

Unlike Las Casas, Montaigne did not champion universalism, nor argue that “cannibals” needed to convert to Christianity and join the one true religion. At the time when his essay “On Cannibals” was written, France was wracked by religious violence pitting the Catholic majority against the Protestant (Huguenot) minority. Montaigne sought to negotiate peace between these factions with limited success (Wimmer, no date). Thus, Montaigne’s position on what would later be called cultural diversity was more radical than that taken by Las Casas. Montaigne was closer to the 20th century. Dickason argues that Montaigne, and a few other French thinkers, came “to appreciate that Amerindians had a civilization of their own.” This perspective is well captured by a report from 1800 written by an anonymous Indian commissioner serving in French Canada, who noted the following:

Native people “have a society and live in families … their village is their city … they have … usages and customs … carefully observed … they have knowledge and the industry necessary for their social existence … and [they] are gentle, hospitable, and inoffensive” (Dickason, 1997: 277).

The Lexicon of Prejudice in New France

Given the incipient relativism of Montaigne and a few compatriots, it is  disappointing that the dominant ethnonyms in use in New France were pejorative and offensive. Yet here too there was variation and complexity, as French thinkers during the Renaissance struggled to reconcile their inherited lexicon of prejudice with their on the ground experiences. We have noted accounts of Barbarians and monstrous peoples in Ancient Greece, and cannibals in New Spain. In New France the most prevalent pejorative was sauvage, which was likely derived from ancient ideas about wildmen and barbarians (Loejoy and Boas, 1935).

From early on, the word savage carried both a positive and negative sense in both French and English usages. This is not unusual. In part it reflected differences between Greco-Roman and Germanic thought. An important strand of Greco-Roman thought viewed nature as good, normal, and correct (Lovejoy and Boas, 1935). This sharply contrasted with the Germanic concept of the wilderness as fearful, inhospitable, and requiring subjugation. So it is not surprising that the concept of savagery was polarized. Dickason notes that in 1680, a dictionary by the French thinker Sainte-Palaye listed multiple meanings of sauvage, including (in English equivalents): untamed, extraordinary, solitary, uncivilized, ferocious, demented, and foreign (Dickeson, 1997: 64).

This wide range of meanings is also evidenced in writings on New France. For example, the word savage appears a dozen times in Marc Lecarbot’s 17th century work A History of New France, but in all cases it is used in the context of stories about specific events in the intertwined lives of individuals. The lives of Mi’kmaq cultural brokers, Jesuit missionaries, aspiring settlers, and visiting sailors open up together. Thus, these narratives lack a strong pejorative tone.

Le bon sauvage

For this reason Lescarbot has been credited with inventing the concept of le bon sauvage – literally the “good savage” (an expression usually translated into English as ‘the noble savage”). Lescarbot, for his part, seems to have been remarking on the fact that in Europe only the nobility went hunting: they owned vast private forests, had weapons and horses and dogs, and time. But in New France everyone was a hunter.

But Lescarbot is one of many candidates. Some scholars focus on the use of the phrase, others argue that the idea exists wherever and whenever the lives of indigenous peoples are presented in a favorable light. In this sense, le bon sauvage is a political idea aligned with what Lovejoy and Boas called cultural primitivism (Lovejoy and Boas, 1935). But there is an additional twist in most Renaissance European usages: descriptions of le bon sauvage have an element of the farcicality built into them. To speak favorably of the lives of people who make their living hunting, collecting, and gardening is a kind of double-speak, hiding an insult in a compliment.

As Ter Ellingson points out, writings that actually use the phrase  le bon sauvage were in fact rare prior to the 1860s. During the run up to the civil war, as detachments of soldiers and volunteers were massacring Native people, and as racial slavery was expanding into the American West, anthropologists in London divided into two camps: one faction supported racial slavery and genocide, the other sought to end slavery and replace extermination with assimilation and integration. It was in the contexts of these political disputes that references to le bon sauvage increased in number, and the phrase was used by the supporters of slavery and ethnic cleansing to call out and discredit their opponents. Very often, Jean Jaques Rousseau, and frequently, Michel de Montaigne were named as the originators of misguided benevolence (Ellingson, 2001).

To be of the land, of the woods

Ellingson makes a solid case for the reinvention of the phrase, but it is important to note that the word savage grew out of a Latin root – silvaticus – meaning “of the woods.” It came into use in English (as savage) and French (as sauvage) almost simultaneously in the 14th century, prior to the voyages of Columbus. To be sauvage was to be a child of nature, and as we have discussed, from the Greeks forward that life has often been celebrated. But the pejorative sense was also evident very early.

Theodor Allen has argued that the establishment of English plantations in Ireland strongly influenced the later English colonies in North America (Allen, 1994). Hence, the Irish were the first savages. Alden Vaughan, however, argues with equal persuasion that the English largely emulated the Spanish, and the invasion of Ireland was not an influential forerunner (Vaughan, 1995). While it is certainly true that by the 19th century, Irish immigrants in both England and America were stigmatized as savages (Kenny, 2007), that appears to involve an effort to draw parallels and establish equivalences between well established hate terms for Native people and newly arriving immigrants.

But this is very late. If the Americas were not the source, where did it originate?

One answer might be the idea of the Wildman. The Wildman has deep roots in Western thought. It has multiple, conflicting strands. In early Christianity, the Wildman can be either an animal with a human soul, or a human who has no soul, but instead the heart of an animal. In either case, wildmen were terrifying, threatening, and unable to live in communities.

French Ethnology: Monogenism and Universal History

We have noted that proto-anthropological research in New Spain was dominated by Dominicans and Franciscans. In New France, Jesuits were most prominent. Jesuits were highly educated, with extensive knowledge not only of biblical texts but classic and contemporary humanists classics. Unsurprisingly, the record of the activity of Jesuit missionaries in New France contains the most substantial collection of historical and ethnological observations produced in New France. The Jesuit Relations were published between 1610 and 1791, initially biannually and then annually (Thwaites, 1901).

Among the Jesuits who worked in New France during the late Renaissance, later students of anthropology call out one – Joseph Francois Lafitau (1681-1746) – above all others (e.g., Tax, 1955; Fenton and Moore, 1969). Lafitau spent six years (1712-1717) in New France. His mission was on the southern side of the Saint Lawrence river, in the vicinity of what today is Montreal, where he worked with Iroquoian peoples.  But time spent in a place in itself offers no guarantee of knowledge of the people. Lafitau was a missionary, certainly, but he also had a gift for and a bent toward ethnography and ethnology.

If we define ethnography as the description of peoples and cultures, as an ethnographer, Lafitau is remembered for his dispassionate eye for detail. One way to recognize this quality is to compare his writings to those of his contemporaries. Father Biard, for example, was in New France at roughly the same time – but had his visit cut short by the English. In Biard’s 1616 report in the Jesuit Relations, he described the people he worked with thus:

The nation is savage, wandering and full of bad habits;  the people are few and isolated. They are, I say, savage, haunting the woods, ignorant, lawless and rude … with nothing to attach them to a place, neither homes nor relationships, neither possessions nor love of country (Ellingson, 2001: 51).

Compare this to Lafitau’s description of what social anthropologist would later call an Iroquois kinship system:

All the children of a Cabin regard their mother’s sisters as their mothers, and their mother’s brothers as their uncles ….  They give the name of father to their father’s brother, that of aunt to their father’s sister (Tax, 1955: 446).

The close description – without disparaging commentary – precisely anticipates what later ethnographers would report regarding Iroquois kinship systems. The careful detail was not accidental. Lafitau insisted that characterizations of other peoples should be based on concrete evidence, and that the evidence should be detailed and knowledgeable.

But Lafitau’s work went beyond descriptive ethnography, and beyond the Jesuit Relations. His monumental masterwork – Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Earliest Times (Lafitau, 1724) – is arguably the first genuinely comparative work anchored in ethnographic materials that were detailed and reliable. If we define ethnology as the use of cross-cultural comparisons to arrive at conclusions of general significance, Lafitau can be considered a major contributor to Renaissance ethnological theory.

All ethnology is motivated by conceptual premises that structured the synthesis it developed. Two major premises shaped Lafitau’s ethnological work. Taken together, they provided a foundation for much of what would follow in the 19th century. Neither premise was original to Lafitau, but his work gave them their strongest expression.

The Premise of Monogenesis

Lafitau’s first premise was that all peoples in the world are the product of one act of creation, and share common ancestry. Working within the framework of Christian theology, this premise meant that all people everywhere shared the ontogeny and history described in Biblical texts. In the 19th century, this position would be known as monogenesis, in contrast to polygenesis, which held that different human races had been created separately. You will recall that Las Casas, among others, also held a monogenist position.

The Premise of Degeneration

In order to explain why people around the world differed – in their beliefs and rituals, narratives, customs, and appearance – most monogenists took a position that later was called degenerationism. Degenerationists expanded on the theme that humanity had “fallen” after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. They often mixed two arguments. The first was that peoples beyond Europe had fallen farther, degrading into a barbarous or savage condition. The Christian mission was to salvage their souls and restore their salvation. But missionaries who set out for New Spain and New France had an additional hope: that peoples beyond the known Christian world had preserved something of the divinity of the Garden of Eden, and were thus primitive Christians who practiced Christian values without the discipline of the Church or the guidance of Biblical texts. These arguments tended to include statements excoriating the corruption of Old World peoples, Christians and infidels alike. Fallen peoples offered no illumination of the past, but primitive Christians did.

Differential Development and the Possibility of Time Travel

Lafitau integrated the framework of degenerationism with secular ideas about differential progress that were emerging, anticipating enlightenment and 19th century ethnology. According to these later secular views, technological change and economic differences explained variation among peoples. Humanity had started out as hunters and scavengers. Some peoples had then advanced to animal husbandry and farming, and quite recently, a few had developed commercial societies that were rapidly dominating trade and establishing settlements around the world.

A core feature of secular progressive approaches was the use of temporal stages to make sense of diversity: If some peoples remained in a primitive state of hunting, and all peoples – including Europeans – had once been hunters, then living hunting peoples provided a window into the common past of all peoples. John Locke seized on this insight in his Second Treatise on Government, published in 1689: “Thus in the beginning all the World was America, and more so than that is now” (Baltz, 1974). To understand the origins of money, property, and the state, one needed only to examine living hunting societies. As the French Enlightenment thinker Joseph-Marie Degerando would argue in 1800, the differential development of the world’s peoples made a kind of philosophical time travel possible: one could explore the universal history of humanity by exploring the peoples of the world.

Lafitau did not embrace the secular argument, but the premise of equivalence was fundamental to his goal of demonstrating the unity of humanity. If all of humanity was one, as Las Casas had asserted, and if human history involved differential progress, then there should be parallels between ancient Europe and contemporary peoples in New France.Providing evidence for these equivalences was the objective of his major work: Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Earliest Times.

Afternote: Roman hoes in French Acadia

An interesting observation on Lafitau’s comparative efforts was offered by the American archaeologist William Sturtevant in the 1960’s (Sturtevant, 1968). Sturtevant’s concern was to correct a misperception among some specialists in Northeastern archaeology that Iroquian peoples traditionally utilized triangular hoes that look remarkably similar to those used in France. The key evidence for triangular hoes comes from an engraved image in Lafitau’s richly illustrated comparative work (Library of Congress, 1724). Sturtevant found this surprising, as such implements were not present in the archaeological record of the eastern United States or Canada, and Lafitau’s work was otherwise generally very precise.

Sturtevant had the good fortune to work in the Smithsonian Institution, and his expertise was actually in the archaeology of Florida. Through a little detective work – much more difficult today than in 1968 –  Sturtevant was able to demonstrate three things.

First, the portion of the engraving displaying images of triangular hoes was an exact replica of an engraving produced by the famous French illustrator Theodor De Bry roughly 150 years prior to the publication of  Lafitau’s book. Secondly, the original 1591 engraving (Library of Congress, 1591) was printed by De Bry as an illustration for a report on the Timucua people – who had the misfortune to live in an area of Florida briefly colonized by the French, which led to their destruction at the hands of the Spanish and their allies. And thirdly, the hoes in De Bry’s illustration are in fact metal hoes long used in Roman and later in French agriculture. Presumably, De Bry used Roman hoes in his illustration because he had no descriptions of the implements (digging sticks) that the Timucua actually used in their gardens.

As shown below in Figure 1, in 1591 Theodor Debry produced an engraving, purportedly showing Timucua people planting corn in Florida, using triangular, metal Roman hoes. The Roman hoes were intrusive images that were not accurate. But in 1724 this image was amalgamated with a new engraving, showing Iroquois people harvesting maple syrup in Acadia, and published in Lafitau’s masterpiece as an illustration of how the customs of the Iroquois matched those of European antiquity.

EXCLUDED ANCESTORS IN NEW FRANCE

The most prominent ancestors to anthropology in New France were, like those in New Spain, largely Christian missionaries who belonged to religious orders. Las Casas, Sahagún, and Lafitau, tower over all others. But as in New Spain, this leaves many voices out – particularly those of the people being colonized and converted. In this chapter, we have tried to bring out the presence of Native people, even when their voices are silent and their words unrecorded, through discussing their cosmopolitan agency as their ways of living were harshly transformed.

French Canada, unlike New Spain, had no Las Casas. Whether this reflected a softer imperialism that provoked less ethical soul searching, or whether it reflects an exaggeration of the violence in New Spain (this is known as the Black Legend in the literature on Spanish history), is unclear. But it is certain that there was no advocate for Native rights with the stature of Las Casas, nor an ethnographer with who worked as collaboratively as Sahagún in Mexico. This does not mean that the issues at the heart of the debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda were absent in New Spain. It does reflect the fact that the French were fewer in number, and less oriented to what Jesuit missionaries in Mexico would in later centuries call the reductio of Native peoples, a forced assimilation through resettlement and cultural conversion of a particularly holistic sort. That said, New France, like New Spain was a product of colonial conquest, and the first stirrings of French anthropology, like Spanish anthropology, developed in a colonial context that made dialogue difficult.

It is equally true that New Spain, unlike New France, had no Montaigne. There is in Montaigne’s work a relativistic quality that anticipates later anthropological worldviews, however we may deny it. But Montaigne aside, it is as true of New France as New Spain that – so far as the history of anthropology has noted the Renaissance at all – early anthropology took shape around people from one tradition building knowledge about people from other traditions. The dialogue between them is largely erased. The ideas of primary concern to Latifau had to do with Christian theology, not Iroquois, and so far as the latter was noted, it was with an eye to providing evidence of the veracity of Christian worldviews or advancing the cause of conversion.

Additional Resources ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND NEW FRANCE

The readings and resources below are provided as optional sources if you have an interest in following up some of the content discussed.

Library of Congress. 1724. Native Americans collecting sap and cooking maple syrup in pots, tilling soil into raised humps, and sowing seeds, North America. , 1724. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/90705836/.

Thwaites, Reuben Gold. Translator. 2006 [1901]. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Cleveland, Ohio: Burrows. Available in the Internet Archive, 2006.

References Cited IN CHAPTER 4 NEW FRANCE

Allen, Theodore W. 1994. The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. Verso.

Batz, W. G. 1974. The Historical Anthropology of John Locke. Journal of the History of Ideas, 35(4), 663–670.

Degerando, Joseph-Marie. 2021 [1800]. The Observation of Savage Peoples. Translated with introduction by F.T.C. Moore. Reprint. University of California Press.

Deloria, Philip J. 2004. Indians in Unexpected Places. University Press of Kansas.

Dickason, Olive Patricia. 1997. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas. University of Alberta Press.

Ellingson, Ter. 2001. The Myth of the Noble Savage. University of California Press.

Fenton, William N., & Moore, E. L. 1969. J.-F. Lafitau (1681-1746), Precursor of Scientific Anthropology. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 25(2), 173–187.

Forbes, Jack D. 2010. The American Discovery of Europe. University of Illinois Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1984. Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism. American Anthropologist, 86(2): 263–278.

Goody, Jack. 1996. The East in the West. Cambridge University Press.

—– 2004. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Polity Press.

Hazlitt, William Carew. Editor. 1877 [1580]. “Of Cannibals.” The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Charles Cotton, translator. Project Gutenberg eBook (2021).

Kenny, Kevin. 2007. “Race, Violence, and Anti-Irish Sentiment in the Nineteenth Century.” In Lee, J. J., and Marion Casey. Editors. 2007. Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States. NYU Press.

Lafitau, Joseph Francois. 1974 [1724]. Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Earliest Times. Champlain Society

Launay, R. (2010). Lafitau Revisited: American ‘Savages’ and Universal History. Anthropologica, 52(2), 337–343.

Lips, Julius. 1937. The Savage Hits Back. Yale University Press.

Lovejoy, Arthur and George Boas. 1997 [1935]. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Malefijt, Annemarie de Waal. 1974. Images of Man: A History of Anthropological Thought. Knopf.

Page, Kently B. 2011. The Depiction of Squanto: Tisquantum’s Portrayal in Children’s Literature and the Connection to the American Civil Rights Movement. PhD Thesis, The Claremont Graduate University.

Prins, Harald E. 1993. “To the Land of the Mistigoches: American Indians Traveling to Europe in the Age of Exploration.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17 (1): 175–95.

Prins, Harald E. 1996. The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival. Harcourt Brace.

Schwartz, Stuart B. Editor. 1994. Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge University Press.

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