Translators and converts: Religion, exchange, and orientation in colonial New France, 1608--1680

This dissertation argues that new religious orientations emerged as products of the material exchanges of human beings constitutive of French and Native encounters in seventeenth-century New France. The various discourses operating within the context of colonialism created disjunctive valuations and geographical displacements of the persons involved in these exchanges. Most visibly, translators and converts served as sites of religious contestation in that their newly constructed orientations highlighted differences between French and Native conceptions of the sacred. The persons being transformed into translators and converts articulated their values. The emergence of these new religious orientations contributed in a constitutive and essential fashion to the construction of modern subjectivities and collectivities.