Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France

The word "mission" can suggest a distant and dangerous attempt to obtain information for the benefit of the home left behind. However, the term also applies to the movement of information in the opposite direction, as the primary motivation of those on religious missions is not to learn about another culture, but rather to teach their own particular worldview.

In Masters and Students, Micah True considers the famous Jesuit Relations (1632-73) from New France as the product of two simultaneou...