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Diario
29 gennaio 2012
indian north america - catholic
Tracy
Neal Leavelle
The
Catholic Calumet. Colonial
Conversions in French and Indian North America
Un.
of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 In
1730 a delegation of Illinois Indians arrived in the French colonial
capital of New Orleans. An Illinois leader presented two ceremonial
pipes, or calumets, to the governor. One calumet represented the
diplomatic alliance between the two men and the other symbolized
their shared attachment to Catholicism. The priest who documented
this exchange also reported with excitement how the Illinois recited
prayers and sang hymns in their Native language, a display that
astonished the residents of New Orleans. The "Catholic"
calumet and the Native-language prayers and hymns were the product of
long encounters between the Illinois and Jesuit missionaries, men who
were themselves transformed by these sometimes intense spiritual
experiences. The conversions of people, communities, and cultural
practices that led to this dramatic episode all occurred in a rapidly
evolving and always contested colonial context. In The Catholic
Calumet, historian Tracy Neal Leavelle examines interactions
between Jesuits and Algonquian-speaking peoples of the upper Great
Lakes and Illinois country, including the Illinois and Ottawas, in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leavelle abandons singular
definitions of conversion that depend on the idealized elevation of
colonial subjects from "savages" to "Christians"
for more dynamic concepts that explain the changes that all
participants experienced. A series of thematic chapters on topics
such as myth and historical memory, understandings of human nature,
the creation of colonial landscapes, translation of religious texts
into Native languages, and the influence of gender and generational
differences demonstrates that these encounters resulted in the
emergence of complicated and unstable cross-cultural religious
practices that opened new spaces for cultural creativity and mutual
adaptation.
| inviato da bub il 29/1/2012 alle 8:2 | | 
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