Lisa J. M. Poirier. Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Owing to the easy accessibility of the Jesuit Relations, the seventeenth-century missionary reports from New France that are available online and in a 73-volume print edition (Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents [1896–1901]), the encounter between French Jesuits and Canada’s indigenous people has been the subject of intense scholarly interest in recent years. New books on the topic must therefore work to distinguish themselves in a crowded field. Based on close readings of the Jesuit Relations, Lisa J. M. Poirier’s Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France offers numerous insightful analyses of the symbolic and religious importance of exchange in the colonial encounter. Poirier’s book as a whole, however, does not reach the full potential of those readings, largely because of inadequate framing both in individual chapters and in the introduction. Poirier examines seventeenth-century exchanges, both material and symbolic, between French colonists and the Wendats (Hurons) of what is now Ontario. The groups exchanged not only trade goods—mostly beaver pelts for French iron and cloth—but also humans. Following a pattern established in numerous sites of European-Indian encounter in the Americas, the French traded a young man named Étienne Brûlé for Savignon, a Wendat youth from a prominent family; both sides hoped to cultivate go-betweens skilled in intercultural dialogue (29–30). Other human encounters in New France were less literally “exchanges” in this sense, but Poirier helpfully analyzes them under the same rubric, because interactions between missionaries and potential converts involved the exchange of ideas, gifts, practices, and discourses.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
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".