Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Relations des Jésuites, or Jesuit Relations, constitute a monumental cornerstone of early Canadian history.Between 1632 and 1673, this yearly chronicle was penned by the missionaries of the Society of Jesus working in New France and printed in Paris.Its readership, spanning centuries, has been broad indeed.Through the Relations, historians are allowed a precious glimpse at the encounter between French and Aboriginal peoples.Or, at any rate, they are offered the opportunity to grapple with the ways in which this intercultural encounter was framed in writing.Micah True considers what he terms "Jesuit mission ethnography" (3) from the literary angle.His Masters and Students offers a close analysis, informed by anthropological theory, of the Jesuit Relations' description of Aboriginal customs, practices, and beliefs.While the book does not go so far as to discount altogether the value of the Relations as an ethnohistorical source, the author takes historians gently to task for not being sufficiently mindful of how this literary corpus operates as text.His own objective is to understand the ways in which the missionaries' approach shaped their observations and their description of reality.The two chapters that follow the introduction situate the emergence of the Relations in the context of a struggle for dominance in New France.Here the author argues that Jesuits' accounts of their own efforts to learn Aboriginal languages were not merely descriptions of the realities of the field, insofar as these descriptions also served to assert the Jesuits' place within the colonial project and to position their work favourably against that of their Récollet competitors.By presenting themselves as students, the Jesuits deflected criticisms that might be levelled against them
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".