LAFITAU, JOSEPH-FRANÇOIS. - Jesuit, missionary and writer, b. at Bordeaux on 1 January 1681, d. there on 3 July 1746. Sent to Canada (1711), he exercised his ministry among the Iroquois Indians of the mission of Sault-St-Louis (Caughnawaga), studying their usages, customs and character attentively.
Having returned to France in 1617 to plead the cause of the mission and to obtain a decree prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages to the Indians, he took the opportunity to make known the qualities and the usefulness of a plant he had discovered in Canada: Mémoires... concernant la précieuse plante Ging-Seng de Tartarie (Paris 1718; cf. Mémoires de Trévoux, 1718, pp. 485-509); but despite the great stir raised around the discovery, as if it were a new vein of gold for commerce, nothing came of it in the end, both because of the scarcity of the production and because of the depreciation of the merchandise, prepared by too rapid drying processes. L. was to return to Canada (and he was much desired there for his knowledge of the Indians and of the language); but it was decided to keep him in France, as procurator of the mission.
He then composed an ethnological work of great value: Moeurs des sauvages américains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps (2 vols., ibid. 1724; cf. ibid., 1724, pp. 1565-1609; 2001-29; 1725, pp. 197-239). Availing himself of the ample information furnished to him by Fr. Julien Garnier, a missionary for 60 years among the Algonquins, the Hurons and the Iroquois, and adding to it the fruit of his own careful studies on the spot, he produced a work that makes him the true creator of the comparative ethnographic method, so fertile in results in the field of sociology. In it he maintains, in fact, for the first time that through the study of the customs and rites of present-day primitive peoples the rites and customs of classical antiquity are explained, because in the material collected one must distinguish what is common to all peoples, and must therefore be attributed to the primitive revelation of God to Adam, and what is instead more particular, more characteristic, which must be explained by the direct or indirect relations between the various peoples. Another work of value: Histoire des découvertes et conquêtes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde (2 vols., ibid. 1733, cf. ibid., 1734, pp. 197-225; 505-21).