FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE

ANTROPOLOGICHESKIJ FORUM
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Antropologicheskij forum, 2021, no. 51

 

A DISCUSSION BETWEEN QUEBECOIS SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND HISTORIANS

Denis Vorobiev

Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences
32-A Leninskiy Av., Moscow, Russia
pakamagan()rambler.ru

Abstract: The article examines the debate between Quebecois anthropologists and historians around the “disparationist” thesis. According to this thesis, first expressed in several 17th century texts, the Attikamegues and Montagnais peoples had completely disappeared by the end of that century due to epidemics and Iroquois raids, and the territories in which they lived were occupied by alien autochthonous groups. Therefore, the modern Innu and Atikamekw are implied not to be the direct descendants of the people who lived here before the arrival of Europeans. Anthropologists criticize this thesis, stressing intergenerational continuity. They see it as a political notion that denies the indigenous rights of the First Nations. The author examines the critical arguments of the anthropologists and tries to reveal the relationship between the political implications of the problem and its purely scientific component. From his point of view, the “disparationist” thesis does not take into account the mobility and the relatively amorphous social structure of taiga hunters, in which even the replacement of some groups by others does not imply a break in continuity.

Keywords: disparationism, Montagnais, Atikamekw, Attikamegues, Russel Bouchard, Nelson-Martin Dawson, Paul Charest.

To cite: Vorobiev D., ‘Ob odnoy diskussii mezhdu kvebekskimi sotsialnymi antropologami i istorikami’ [A Discussion between Quebecois Social Anthropologists and Historians], Antropologicheskij forum, 2021, no. 51, pp. 113–140.

doi: 10.31250/1815-8870-2021-17-51-113-140

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/051/vorobiev.pdf