"We shall be one people" : early modern French perceptions of the Amerindian body
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French perceptions of the bodies of Indians in New France and Louisiana. It reveals that all French authors who visited New France in the early seventeenth century believed that human differences were mutable and, with instruction and land cultivation, Indians would physically and culturally assimilate into French colonial society---if Europeans did not degenerate from life in the wilderness first. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, missionary disillusionment, colonial projections of order and later Enlightenment concepts of natural rights and systems of nature prompted authors to reformulate these early perceptions. As Indians appeared unwilling or unable to adopt civilized manners, some authors concluded that natives did not possess the reason needed to do so. By the late eighteenth century, some colonial officials and European naturalists suggested that the physique and morals of North American Indians were not mutable but, instead, that Indians in French North America were permanently and essentially incapable of "improving" either their bodies or their minds. Historians studying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial perceptions of North American Indians have generally analyzed European depictions of Indians with twentieth-century understandings of human difference. By examining French perceptions of Indians with early modern understandings of the body, this thesis seeks to see natives through the eyes of the authors who described them. The sources for this study include French travelogues and missionary accounts from New France and Louisiana which were published contemporaneously, correspondence and memoirs which have since been published and archived letters from colonial administrators writing from Canada and Louisiana.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".