Documents found
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144.More information
Upon their arrival, the French met with their first shock, winter. Taming winter, however, was nothing compared to the apprehension of the different cultures that made up a completely foreign civilisation in America. But who were these people of the “endless forest”? Almost animals? Reciprocal contact especially with missionaries quickly came to deconstruct this stereotype. Soon their soul was compared to good land lying fallow the occupants of which were left untouched by ambition and avarice. The “barbarian” was replaced by the “good savage”; simple folk still living in the childhood of humanity. Simple folk? The difference between cultures was so fundamental that it became difficult to imagine it even on questions as apparently trivial as: what is a body, nudity, a soul, a spirit, humanity? The work of the historian relies on sources but the art interpretation must not be confined to them alone. It is important to analyse such sources in conjunction with the work of anthropologists, especially that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Have Champlain's descendants finally accepted the legacy of America?
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145.More information
Professor Jean Gottmann has written Jour books in the past six or seven years which constitute his main contribution to geography, especially in the field of political and economic geography.Some of his ideas are and will be discussed ; they certainly bring forward new approaches to old problems and new techniques to old methods. His four books are analyzed and reviewed together : l'Amérique (1949), A Geography of Europe (1950), la Politique des États et leur géographie (1952), Virginia at mid-century (7955).
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146.More information
Eternity, so often mentioned by Saint-Exupéry, appears in the author's works under various guises. Sometimes limited to a simple reminder of the context, it is more often linked to the sensitivity or the introspection of the writer and inspires him to both fervour and poetry. However, despite all the attention devoted to the concept, eternity never receives the rigorous definition one would expect for such a subject of predeliction.