Masters and students : Jesuit mission ethnography in seventeenth-century New France /

True (modern languages and cultural studies, Univ. of Alberta, Canada) makes the deceptively simple suggestion in this book that the study of Jesuit missionary work in 17th-century North America needs to explore not only how the Jesuits as "students" learned about indigenous peoples and customs and conveyed that knowledge to European consumers of print culture, but also how, in the role of "masters," they communicated their beliefs and worldview to Native American audiences. Critical of the tendency of recent scholarship to characterize the Jesuits as proto-ethnographers, True reminds readers that their texts need to be read as the record of two simultaneous missions (learning on the one hand, teaching on the other) in order to grasp their full significance. He invites readers to reconsider Jesuit mission ethnography as a practice of arranging content derived from Native peoples to suit the Jesuits' purposes, rather than an effort to transmit "accurate" representations of North American circumstances to European readers. For True, only renewed attention to the dualistic dynamics present in Jesuit mission ethnography can arrest what he identifies as a historical trend that has increasingly amplified the historical voice of the Jesuits while silencing that of Native peoples. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most academic levels/libraries. --Jon W. Parmenter, Cornell University