Ethnohistory

Ethnohistory's Beginnings

From its origins, ethnohistory has been an interdisciplinary endeavor. Anthropology and history are the primary contributors, both methodologically and theoretically, to the development of the field. From the perspective of history as a discipline, the interest of the Annales School in reconstructing social institutions, broadly speaking, prefigured the interest and development of ethnohistory within history departments. Within anthropology departments, a concern with historical analysis was evident, to a greater or lesser extent, in different kinds of anthropological research from early on(see below, particularly with respect to the Boasians).

Ethnohistory became a clearly demarcated field of inquiry in the1940s. Initially, ethnohistory was conceived as a way to supplement archaeological research through the use of documentary evidence. As a concern with acculturation processes became more prevalent in the sociocultural anthropology of the 1940s and 1950s, ethnohistory increasingly fell under the rubric of cultural anthropology. Ethnohistory became a truly recognized field of study after it was institutionalized in the form of the 1954 Ohio Valley Historic Indian Conference, which became the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1966, and through publication of the journal Ethnohistory.

The Historical Axis in Sociocultural Anthropology

It is, in general, a mistake to argue that “time” or “history” never existed as operational concepts in sociocultural anthropology. The earliest anthropologists in the United States, the Boasians, were quite concerned to trace the diffusion of cultural, linguistic, or other traits over time among native populations. In this respect, they share the legacy of the German diffusionists, who performed the same type of reconstruction in the Pacific, India, and Africa. In general, the Boasians were interested in the study of human pasts to the extent they were interested in the holistic reconstruction of human societies.

However, it is also clear that the Boasians were not engaged in the study of history for its own sake. They never fully reconstructed the past of a culture, and they did not use extensive documentary evidence to aid in their research on the recent past. Indeed, many Boasians, as well as structural functionalists, felt that the documentary evidence would not support research into the cultural phenomena they hoped to study. This thinking ignores the incipient ethnohistorical research present since the “discovery” of the New World, in the work of Landa, Sahagún, and Las Casas. This theoretically subservient use of history characterizes most of the ethnography before the 1950s and not an insignificant amount of it since.

Nor was history of great relevance to the neoevolutionists. Edward Tylor, like the American Lewis Henry Morgan before him, viewed culture in a unilinear evolutionary paradigm. A straightforwardly developmental model that placed Western civilization at the end point of an inexorable cultural movement, Tylor's anthropology and that of contemporary social anthropologists maintained little to no interest in the documentary evidence as a way into understanding the past of cultural groups. In contrast to Émile Durkheim's mechanical/organic typology, which in principle allowed for variation and erratic movement between its end points, the unilinear view held that development proceeded through a series of already well-defined stages.

...