Emma Anderson
Assistant Professor, Department of Classics and Religious Studies
Member of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and thereby authorized to supervise theses.
Office: ARTS 023
Telephone: 613-562-5800, ext. 1176
E-mail: Emma.Anderson@uOttawa.ca
To both my teaching and research I bring a consistent interest in “lived” religion in North America. How do individual devotees, whatever their faith, perceive their religious commitments, experiences, and identities? How do they interiorize the images, beliefs, and rituals of their religious culture in such a way that they become personally meaningful? In particular, how do people sustain or adjust their cultural and confessional identities during interludes of particularly intense inter-religious engagement and rapid social change?
These themes of cultural and religious contact and the personal turmoil they often engender are prominent in my forthcoming book (coming out in October, 2007) entitled The Betrayal of Faith: the Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert, which explores the collision of French Catholicism with traditional aboriginal religions through the intimate study of a single seventeenth-century Innu man, Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan. Pastedechouan’s life was irrevocably altered by the five years he spent as a boy at a Recollet convent in France. Following his repatriation, his inability to conform to Innu social expectations condemned him to a life-long struggle to reassert his original cultural identity. His desperate efforts, however, progressively alienated him from the European missionaries who had overseen his religious transformation. Pastedechouan died alone in 1636 of exposure and starvation, rejected both by the Innu, whose approval he had so assiduously courted, and the Church he had recurrently embraced and scorned. Though he lived almost four hundred years ago, Pastedechouan’s subjection to religious indoctrination and his consequent cultural alienation typifies aboriginal experiences in Canadian residential schools from his time to our own.
My current SSHRC-supported research project entitled The Revolving Door: De-conversion and Aboriginal Religious Self-Definition in Early Modern Canada grows out of the issues raised by Pastedechouan’s very personal struggle in the liminal religious space between conversion and apostasy. My project seeks to develop a sophisticated theoretical model of early modern aboriginal de-conversion which would recognize its complexity and variety, consider the historical circumstances of its emergence, quantify its frequency, and explore its connection with incidents of religious violence. Introduction of the marginalized voices of those aboriginal people who had complex, multi-faceted, or troubled relationships with Christianity will significantly broaden the parameters of current scholarly inquiry, which tends to privilege the extremes of passionate acceptance and vociferous rejection, and promises to reveal new facets of the complex relationship between aboriginal traditional beliefs and the early modern Christianity introduced by missionaries.
University degrees
2005 - PhD, Harvard University
1998 - MA, Harvard Divinity School
1993 - BA, Carleton University
Fields of interest
- European-Aboriginal Religious Contact in Colonial Canada
- North American Religious History
- Aboriginal Religions
- Post-Tridentine French Catholicism
- Conversion and De-conversion
- Miracles, Healings, and Marian Apparitions
- Material Culture and Religion, Popular Religion
- Religion in Contemporary Canada
Courses taught
- SRS1191 Religion, Culture, and Identity in Canada
- SRS1591 La religion, la culture, et l’identité au Canada
- SRS2386 Missionaries, Medicine Men, and Methodists: Selected Topics in the History of Religion in Canada
- SRS4907 Dialogue, Imposition, and Resistance: Aboriginal-EuroCanadian Religious Interactions, 1600-Present
- SRS3110 Religion, Spirituality, and Culture in Contemporary Western Society
- SRS3140 Divine Images and Sacred Stories: Art, Religion, and Mythology
- SRS6907 (Winter ’06) Miracles, Healings and Apparitions: Interpreting Extraordinary Religious Phenomena (Fall ’07) Aboriginal Peoples and Christianity
Selected publications
The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (forthcoming, 2007).
La Trahison de la foi: le voyage tragique d'un converti autochtone canadien. Québec: Les Presses de L’Université Laval (forthcoming, 2009).
“Blood, Fire, and ‘Baptism’: Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit ‘Martyr,’” in Joel Martin and Mark Nicholas, eds., Crossings: Re-Exploring European-Aboriginal Religious Interaction in Colonial North America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (forthcoming, 2008).
“Perceiving Presence: Marian Apparitions and Healings in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Sarah Coakley, ed., Spiritual Healing. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans (forthcoming, 2007).
« ‘Pleut à Dieu que je fusse mort en France.’ Le Destin Tragique de Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan, Autochtone du Canada en Anjou, » Archives d’Anjou (forthcoming, 2007).
« Les représentants naïfs: l’exhibition, le baptême, et l’éducation des ‘petites sauvages’ en France au dix-septième siècle, » in Hélène Cazes, ed.Histoires d’Enfants. Québec: Presses de L’Université Laval, (forthcoming, 2007)
“Between Conversion and Apostasy: The Religious Journey of Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan,” Anthropologica 49 (2007): 17-34.
“Do Not Send Me Back to Those Beasts Who Do Not Know God’: The Religious and Cultural Transformation of an Innu Child in Seventeenth-Century France,” (Part I of a two-part series) ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 32 (2004): 73-96.
“My Misfortune is That I Have Not a Mind Strong Enough to Remain Firm in My Determination:” The Fatal Ambivalence of a Seventeenth-Century Aboriginal Convert,” (Part II of a two-part series) in ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 34 (2006): 107-130.
“‘They Should be Ashamed to Eat, Who are Reluctant to Work:’ The Jesuit Agriculturalist Ethic on the Frontiers of Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” in C. Pullapilly et al, eds. Christianity and Native Cultures: Perspectives from Different Regions of the World. Notre Dame, IN: Cross Cultural Press, 2004, p. 306-351.
“Fatal Ambivalence: The Religious Journey of Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan, Seventeenth-Century Montagnais Amerindian,” in C. Pullapilly et al, eds. Christianity and Native Cultures: Perspectives from Different Regions of the World. Notre Dame, IN: Cross Cultural Press, 2004, p. 352-383.
“Changing Devotional Paradigms and Their Impact upon Nineteenth-Century Marian Apparitions: The Case of La Salette,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 52 (1998): 85-122.
