“A Pious Sort of Cruelty”: St. Kateri Tekakwitha and the Interculturation of Torture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: St. Kateri Tekakwitha (c. 1656–1680), according to her Jesuit missionaries at Kahnawake near Montréal, rapidly attained Christian perfection through severe self-mortification. Her penances bear a striking resemblance to maltreatment suffered by captives in Native “mourning wars.” Several recent scholars have addressed the possible convergence of the indigenous torture ritual inflicted on war captives and Kateri’s penitential self-torture. However, these scholars have declined to admit that a religious syncretism took place between Native and Christian practice around torture. While addressing their well-founded objections, this article suggests that the evidence of Kateri’s self-mortification is best assessed using the framework of interculturation rather than the more restrictive model of syncretism. A rereading of the evidence shows that Kateri Tekakwitha carried out a genuine interculturation, which the Jesuits tacitly approved, of the Native torture ritual as an expression of Native agency in the construction of the new mission community.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".