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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Roger M. Carpenter. The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Huron and the Iroquois, 1609–1650. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2004. Pp. xxii, 179. $27.95.
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| A "thought world," Roger M. Carpenter tells us approximately one-third of the way through this short book, "encompasses a culture's logic, ontology, epistemology, and values." In short, "it can be defined as a culturally adapted mode of thought" (p. 47). The term, but not the definition, comes from Calvin Martin. And like Martin—in books such as Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (1978) and The Way of the Human Being (1999)—Carpenter places great emphasis on thought worlds in explaining human behavior. The vastly different fates of the Five Nations Iroquois and the Hurons in the seventeenth century, he argues, may be traced to the ways in which their culturally determined modes of thinking allowed them to respond to the challenges of the European invasion. |
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The Five Nations and the Hurons were closely related leagues of northern Iroquoian-speaking peoples for whom themes of renewal were central cultural tropes. Iroquois and Hurons shared origin stories that were less about beginnings than about renewal. In their daily lives they renewed their landscapes by periodically relocating their villages and cornfields, renewed their communities by ritually killing or adopting war captives, and renewed their polities by requickening the traditional names of deceased chiefs. |
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