| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lafitau et l'émergence du discours ethnographique (Lafitau and the emergence of ethnographic discourse). By Andreas Motsch. (Sillery: Septentrion, 2001. 295 pp. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 2-84050-196-1.) In French.

Joseph-François Lafitau (1681-1746) was one of the most important European observers of North American Indians during the early contact period. As a Jesuit missionary Lafitau made his first visit to New France from 1712 to 1717 and had contact with Iroquois, Hurons, and other Indians in the region around Montreal; before returning to Canada in 1727 he wrote his masterpiece, Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Customs of the American Indians compared with the customs of primitive times), published in 1724 in Paris. Even though, according to Andreas Motsch, his influence on European thinkers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was modest, Lafitau was an acute analyst who anticipated Lewis Henry Morgan by analyzing the kinship system and the matriarchal dimensions of those Indian societies. . . .

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