Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and

indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various

ethnic group An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

s that may or may not still exist. The term is most commonly used in writing about the history of the Americas. Ethnohistory uses both historical and ethnographic data as its foundation. Its historical methods and materials go beyond the standard use of documents and manuscripts. Practitioners recognize the use of such source material as maps, music, paintings, photography, folklore, oral tradition, site exploration, archaeological materials, museum collections, enduring customs, language, and placenames.

Historical development

Scholars studying the history of

Mexico Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign states, country in the southern portion of North America. It is borders of Mexico, bordered to the north by the United States; to the so ...

's indigenous have a long tradition, dating back to the colonial era; they used alphabetic texts and other sources to write the history of Mexico's indigenous peoples. The '' Handbook of Middle American Indians'', edited by archeologist Robert Wauchope was involved with creating a multiple volumes on Mesoamerican ethnohistory, published as ''Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources'', appearing in 1973. At the time that the volumes were published, "both the term 'ethnohistory' and its concepts in the sense used here have entered the literature rather recently and are not fully agreed upon." The volumes were intended to be an inventory of sources "which in later hands could utilize to produce professionally acceptable ethnohistory." In the mid to late 20th century, a number of ethnohistorians of Mexico began to systematically publish many colonial alphabetic texts in indigenous Mexican languages, in a branch of ethnohistory currently known as the New Philology. That built on an earlier tradition of practitioners writing the history of Mexico that fully integrated the history of its indigenous peoples. In the United States, the field arose out of the study of American Indian communities required by the

Indian Claims Commission The Indian Claims Commission was a judicial relations arbiter between the United States federal government and Native American tribes. It was established under the Indian Claims Act of 1946 by the United States Congress to hear any longstanding cl ...

. It gained a pragmatic rather than a theoretical orientation, with practitioners testifying both for and against Indian claims. The emerging methodology used documentary historical sources and ethnographic methods. Among the scholars working on the cases was Latin Americanist

Howard F. Cline Howard F. Cline (June 12, 1915 – June 1, 1971) was an American government official and historian, specialising in Latin America. Cline served as Director of the Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress from 1952 until his death in June 19 ...

, who was commissioned to work on Florida Indians and Jicarilla Apache and Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, Director of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Research Project and founder of the American Society for Ethnohistory. The field has also reached into

Melanesia Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from Indonesia's New Guinea in the west to Fiji in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea. The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, V ...

, where recent European contact allowed researchers to observe the early postcontact period directly and to address important theoretical questions. Michael Harkin argues that ethnohistory was part of the general rapprochement between history and anthropology in the late 20th century. Ethnohistory grew organically thanks to external nonscholarly pressures, without an overarching figure or conscious plan; even so, it came to engage central issues in cultural and historical analysis. Ethnohistorians take pride in using their special knowledge of specific groups, their linguistic insights, and their interpretation of cultural phenomena. They claim to achieve a more in-depth analysis than the average historian is capable of doing based solely on written documents produced by and for one group. They try to understand culture on its own terms and according to its own cultural code. Ethnohistory differs from other historically-related methodologies in that it embraces

emic In anthropology, folkloristics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic () and etic () refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained. The "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs, values ...

perspectives as tools of analysis. The field and its techniques are well suited for writing histories of Native American peoples because of its holistic and inclusive framework. It is especially important because of its ability to bridge differing frameworks and access a more informed context for interpretations of the past. The definition of the field has become more refined over the years. Early on, ethnohistory differed from history proper in that it added a new dimension, specifically "the critical use of ethnological concepts and materials in the examination and use of historical source material," as described by

William N. Fenton William N. Fenton (December 15, 1908 – June 17, 2005) was an American scholar and writer known for his extensive studies of Iroquois history and culture. He started his studies of the Iroquois in the 1930s and published a number of significant w ...

. Later,

James Axtell James L. Axtell (born December 20, 1941 in Endicott, New York) is an American historian. He was a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Axtell, whose interests lie in American Indian history and th ...

described ethnohistory as "the use of historical and ethnological methods to gain knowledge of the nature and causes of change in a culture defined by ethnological concepts and categories." Others have focused this basic concept on previously ignored historical actors. Ed Schieffelin asserted, for example, that ethnohistory must fundamentally take into account the people's own sense of how events are constituted, and their ways of culturally constructing the past. Finally, Simmons formulated his understanding of ethnohistory as "a form of cultural biography that draws upon as many kinds of testimony as possible over as long a time period as the sources allow." He described ethnohistory as an endeavor based on a holistic, diachronic approach that is most rewarding when it can be "joined to the memories and voices of living people." Reflecting upon the history of ethnohistory as research field in the US, Harkin has situated it within the broader context of convergences and divergences of the fields of history and anthropology and the special circumstances of American Indian land claims and legal history in North American in the mid-20th century. Commenting on the possibilities for ethnohistory studies of traditional societies in Europe (such as Ireland), Guy Beiner observed that "pioneering figures in the development of ethnohistory … have argued that this approach could be fruitfully applied to the study of Western societies, but such initiatives have not picked up and very few explicitly designated ethnohistories of European communities have been written to date".Guy Beiner
Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018)
p.10.

References

External links

American Society for Ethnohistory
{{Authority control Fields of history Anthropology Ethnography Historiography Interdisciplinary historical research

Historical development

See also

References

Further reading

External links