Joseph François Lafitau
Joseph François Lafitau (born the 1681 with Bordeaux - died in 1746 in this same city) was a missionary Jésuite, a Ethnologue, Naturaliste and author French of the 18th century.
Resulting from a rich person family of Bordeaux, (her brother Pierre-François Lafitau will be bishop of Sisteron), it returns to the noviciate of the Jesuits in 1696, then studies the Philosophie and the Rhétorique with Pau, Poitiers, the Arrow, then Paris.
It enters the Society of Jesus in 1696 and leaves on mission to the Canada in 1711. It settles in Sault Saint-Louis (Kahnawake). With the assistance of an old Jesuit, the father Garnier, it initiates himself with the language and the culture of the Iroquois. He studies the habits and makes appear in 1724, Mœurs of the American Savages compared with manners of the first times . In his book, the author tries to show that manners of the Iroquois are not aberrant, by putting them in parallel with the companies of Antiquity. He also endeavors to prove the common origin of the Indians and the Westerners and to thus support the Christian dogma of the unit of creation. He discovers the system of relationship and the importance of the women in the company iroquoise.
Lafitau, in its research, fact proof of a great meticulousness and an unequalled precision for the time. Certain researchers make of it the precursor of the modern Ethnographie.
He discovers a local form of the Ginseng, luxury item hitherto exported of China. The report of Lafitau of 1718 on this root makes known with many people its existence and involves a general madness comparable with the fever of the gold of California. But this prosperity is dissipated quickly, the plant being of quality quite lower than that of Asia and whose conservation posed problem.
It returns in France in 1717 mainly to obtain the displacement of Iroquois and their protection of the traffics of alcohol. It cannot put at execution its wish to go back to Canada, it is devoted consequently to the writing and makes appear, in 1733, a Histoire of discovered and conquests of the Portuguese in the New-World .
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