45

ETHNOHISTORY:
A CHOICE BETWEEN BEING ANTHROPOLOGY OR BEING NOTHING

Thomas S. Abler
University of Waterloo

Abstract

Ethnohistory is not highly regarded within anthropology because of

two factors. The first is that anthropologists do not value library re-
search. The second, and more fundamental, factor is that ethnohistorians
have largely failed to deal with problems of broad anthropological interest.
Too often ethnohistorical studies deal not with culture but with chronolo-
gy. The work of some ethnohistorians shows this need not to be the case.
If more ethnohistorians were to pursue positivistic, scientific goals, they
might achieve a higher standing within anthropology.

INTRODUCTION

This paper follows in the long tradition of papers by anthropological

ethnohistorians lamenting the fact that other anthropologists have not paid
due respect and attention to ethnohistorical research [see Fenton 1952;
Lurie 1961; Fenton 1962, 1966; Spores 1978, 1980]. The lack of prestige
accrued by anthropologists for ethnohistorical activity results, in part,
from the fact that the vast majority of our colleagues attach greater impor-
tance to the glamorous role of field worker (albeit a role accompanied by
inconvenience, suffering, and occasionally danger) than to the decidedly
unglamorous role of ethnohistorian (involving highly tedious labor of
reading documents or sitting long hours before a microfilm reader). On
the other hand, ethnohistorians must also shoulder a considerable part of
the blame themselves, for all too seldom do they produce good
ethnohistorical studies which are also good anthropology.
The role of ethnohistory within the formal academic discipline of his-
tory is not discussed here. Like Schwerin [1976:32], I regret that his-
torians have not played a more important role in the American Society for
Ethnohistory, but the concern here is not with the impact of anthropology
(or history) on ethnohistory but rather with the lack of impact of
ethnohistory on anthropology.
The failure of most anthropologists to give proper recognition to ar-
chival research is to be lamented, but this brief paper will probably do
little to alter those attitudes. Anthropologists of such mind are most un-
likely to be reading these words. The purpose of this exposition, then is
to admonish ethnohistorians to find broader anthropological significance in
the facts and figures found in their beloved documents and to present
46

their data in a manner which their colleagues will view as interesting, in-
formative, and relevant to the field as a whole.
It would, of course, be difficult to demonstrate conclusively the unim-
portance of ethnohistory within anthropology. Indeed, one could argue
that the pursuit of ethnohistory is of late growing in recognition within
anthropology. Three of the past ten presidents of the American
Anthropological Association have extensively utilized ethnohistorical meth-
ods in their research (William C. Sturtevant, Edward H. Spicer, and
Anthony F. C. Wallace). However, only four percent (212 of 4,752) of the
scholars in the Fifth International Director of Anthropologists [Tax
1975:463] list ethnohistory as one of their specialities. 2 The 1980-81 Guide
to North American anthropology departments lists only four persons hold-
ing joint appointments in anthropology and history departments.** Such
statistical enumeration of the field provides some support for the argument
put forward that conclusions here are not based on quantifiable data, but
rather on personal experience as an ethnohistorian/anthropologist over the
past 15 years.
Unfortunately, an exhaustive critical survey of the literature pro-
duced by anthropologists as ethnohistorians has not yet been undertaken.
Such a survey would indeed be valuable, and its absence may well be re-
lated to the relatively low position ethnohistory occupies within the disci-
pline as a whole. This paper does not propose to provide a systematic
survey and evaluation of ethnohistorical studies. The judgements present-
ed here result instead from my work as a social anthropologist utilizing
ethnohistory as a research tool in the investigation of native peoples of
northeastern North America. Support for my convictions is found, how-
ever, in the published commentary from fellow ethnohistorical
anthropologists with distinctly different areas of specialization.
I am not alone in a pessimistic view of ethnohistory within anthropol-
ogy. Even the enthusiasm of Ronald Spores, who speaks of ethnohistory1 s
"enormous growth during the 1970s' and argues that ethnohistory "finally
came into its own as a recognizable and methodological sub field of the dis-
ciplines of anthropology and history" [Spores 1980:575], is tempered in his
concluding remarks. He notes that "formal programs are hard to find" and
that "large institutions with good academic capabilities and with access to
excellent documentary collections have done little to encourage the develop-
ment of ethnohistory in their programs or to facilitate the use of documen-
tary resources" [Spores 1980:589]. In a recent regional review, Wedel and
DeMallie [1980:111] echo this judgement, noting "inadequate" instruction in
ethnohistory by anthropology departments in the "Plains area." One could
well question if any advancement has been made since 1954 when Wheeler-
Voegelin [1954a:2] noted "documentary study of American Indian groups
has been tolerated, but not actively encouraged, in most anthropology de-
partments in the land."
The goal of this paper is to present a critical view of the position of
ethnohistory within anthropology. One aspect of the problem involves the
way anthropological colleagues view ethnohistorians. A more important
contributor to the problem lies in the nature of the published results and
findings which ethnohistorians offer to anthropology in general. Ethno-
 47

history could be an exciting and valuable part of social anthropology, but

it is up to ethnohistorians to make it so.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND ARCHIVAL RESEARCH

To understand the place of ethnohistory within anthropology, one

must understand the world view of the typical anthropologist.
Anthropologists are oriented toward the field rather than the library.
They are taught to obtain data through face-to-face interaction, through
participant observation. Anthropologists are inclined by nature to ask
someone when they have a question to be answered. Anthropologists want
to learn by talking and interacting, not by reading. Burling [1974:5] re-
ports anthropologists have "neither the training nor the temperament" to
use written material, "even if written records exists."
An anecdote reported by William N. Fenton reflects this. Fenton and
the late Margaret Mead participated in a panel discussion on the training of
anthropologists. Fenton's contribution [published as Fenton 1952] was a
sophisticated call for anthropologists to send their students to archives
where they could rub elbows with and learn from historians while mining
the documentary material for what it is worth. Mead apparently failed to
understand Fentonfs paper. She later recalled the content of the paper to
Fenton. "'You said that we should train anthropology graduate students
to use the library catalogue card!1" Fenton's view of anthropological
scholarship is such that he later somewhat facetiously confessed, "Indeed,
that would be a contribution" [Fenton 1962:2].
Further "evidence" of the low status accorded library and archival
research is the gossip which serves as part of the training of young
anthropologists [see Gluckman 1963]. Graduate anthropology students typ-
ically are told at some point in their careers about this or that famous
anthropologist who wrote a library thesis (the student is supposed to be
scandalized that a master has feet of clay). I would not deny the impor-
tance of field work to anthropology, but I feel we have very much
over-exaggerated our scorn of "arm-chair anthropology."
Bernard Conn, who has done "field work" among historians and com-
pared them to his native anthropological culture, contrasted the verbal ori-
entation of anthropologists with the library orientation of historians. In
contrast to historians, Cohen [1962:16, 24] found that anthropologists "are
inveterate talkers and hard listeners." Cohn [1962:24] feels that even
among "brilliant anthropologists," many are "illiterate in their fields."
I am certain this scorn of library research and, indeed, the unfamil-
iarity many anthropologists have with the written word have led these
anthropologists to underestimate the soundness of ethnohistorical research
and to undervalue those who participate in it. It is research involving
field work which receives greatest respect from the majority within the
discipline. This is despite the fact that anthropologists have long been
interested in questions that have proven best illuminated by solid
ethnohistorical research.
Given the concern of early North American anthropology with recap-
turing the "aboriginal" cultures of native North American, one might well
expect that anthropologists trained in the North American tradition would
48

have had more interest in archival research. Lurie in fact has argued
[1961:79] that ethnohistory is "as old as ethnology itself," while Baerreis
[1961:49] noted that Wissler even used the term "ethno history" in 1909.
From the first, American anthropology was immersed in studies of the
past, for its initial investigations in American reservation communities in-
volved "salvage" ethnography. It was felt the "native" culture would soon
die out and be lost to science. Attempts were made to delimit native cul-
tures as they existed prior to their being tainted by the culture of the
Whites. Basing their investigations almost entirely on field work, these
early students of Indian culture did not bother with the documentary evi-
dence which might have been of use. Thus, although they dealt with the
past, these investigations were not ethnohistoric studies in the sense that
term is used within contemporary anthropology.
In addition to recapturing the "aboriginal" past, early American an-
thropology was interested in problems of an historical nature, but again
there was little reference to historical documents. Bishop and Ray
[1976:118-199] have commented that "many anthropologists believe that his-
tory was concerned primarily with persons and events,. . .[so] the impor-
tance of documentary history was de-emphasized." Oscar Lewis [1942:2]
pointed out that Edward Sapir's [1916] Time Perspective in Aboriginal
American Culture... devotes but a single page (of a total of 86) to doc-
umentary evidence. Fenton [1952:329] had paid tribute to the "elaborate
methods. . .devised for inferring history, with occasionally quite brilliant
results," of these scholars, but notes these methods were used "in areas
and in problems on which historians have since brought considerable evi-
dence to light."
Cohn [1962:17] has observed that "research in history is based on
finding data; research in anthropology is based on creating data" (my em-
phasis). One can appreciate the need to "create" data in the first
half-century of American anthropology but the anthropologists engaged in
this task were under the erroneous impression that there were no data in
the historical record of use to them. The attitudes of professional anthro-
pology in this pre-ethnohistorical area was perhaps best summed up by
Lowie: "The historical ethnologists must largely dispense with documents
because they [the ethnologists] mainly deal with illiterate tribes whose past
is at best fitfully illuminated by written sources" [1937:156],

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ETHNOHISTORICAL VIEW

Not all anthropologists were ignorning documents before World War II,
however. John Reed Swanton has been given credit for having "developed
and refined the methods used in ethnohistory" [Fenton 1959:664], Two
younger colleagues of Swanton—William N. Fenton and John C. Ewers—
brought real sophistication to ethnohistorical method. The bulk of the
work of Fenton and Ewers was done after the war, but their use of docu-
ments for historical ethnography follows in the tradition Swanton estab-
lished at the Smithsonian and in the publications of the Bureau of Ameri-
can Ethnology.
While Swanton's pioneering efforts were of importance to the shape of
contemporary American ethnohistory, of greater significance was the pass-
 49

age of the United States Indian Claims Act of 1946 [Lurie 1957;
Sturtevant 1968; Cohn 1968]. Under this Act, native groups were allowed
to seek retribution for wrongs of omission and commission of the past.
Both the native groups and the Department of Justice hired
ethnohistorians as tfexpert witnesses" [see Manners 1956; Lurie 1956,
1957], Compared with previous ethnohistorical investigations; the research
generated by the claims cases was on an enormous scale [Eggan 1961:7].
The influence of claims research on the practice of ethnohistory was
profound. It has been pointed out that "Ethnohistory, the principal jour-
nal in the field (and, by extension, the American Society for
Ethnohistory), was founded in 1954 partly to provide an outlet for mate-
rials and interest developed by the Indian claims cases" [Cohn 1968:443].
Ethnohistory, then, has grown largely as an applied social science and the
type of problems it has considered has been clearly colored by this fact.
The purpose of the claims research was "to establish location, extent, and
nature of aboriginal control over various territories and the exact nature
of treaty obligations" [Cohn 1968:443].
The nature of claims research is reflected in the definition of
ethnohistory put forward by Erminine Wheeler-Voegelin [1954b: 168]. She
defined ethnohistory as "the study of identities, locations, contacts, move-
ments, numbers, and cultural activities of primitive peoples from the earli-
est written records concerning them, onward in point of time." This defi-
nition lends credence to the assertion of Bishop and Ray [1976:118-119]
that anthropologists saw history as simply people and events. Thus claims
research placed a premium on the historical investigation of names, dates,
and places—a kind of history almost everyone finds hopelessly dull. Far
too much ethnohistory continues to have this emphasis, or phrased in oth-
er words, far too much ethnohistory concerns itself not with culture but
with chronology.
Others have similarly indicted ethnohistory. Hickerson in a somewhat
intemperate book review8 makes this point:
Ethnologists who busily employ old documents to describe
culture persistence and change take on more of the character of
historians while losing some of their ethnological complexion.
They hibridize in such a way as to become as heedless of culture
as once they were naive about history. A quick look through
ethnohistorical journals will disclose that there is little culture in
them [Hickerson 1966:822],
The danger that the ethnohistorian will relinquish his proper role has
been emphasized by Hudson [1973:134-135]: "The social anthropologist
who undertakes extensive historical research, like the over-zealous field
worker, sometimes runs the risk of losing his identity as an
anthropologist."

THE ETHNOHISTORIAN AS ANTHROPOLOGIST

Not every anthropologist who has engaged in ethnohistorical research

has lost sight of the cultural reality of the people being studied. William
Fenton's work provides a major, early, and continuing, although not
unique, exception to Hickerson's assertion that ethnohistorians become
50

heedless of culture. Despite the zealousness which Fenton has exhibited

for the use of documentary evidence, Fenton has avoided the danger of
losing" one's identity as an anthropologist. It is perhaps significant in the
development of Fenton as ethnohistorian and anthropologist that he became
involved in documentary research because he was "naturally inclined to
history" [Fenton 1957:30], not because of involvement in research generat-
ed by the 1946 Indian Claims Act. Fenton's ethnohistorical studies have
not been dominated by questions of "location, extent, and nature of
aboriginal control over various territories and the exact nature of treaty
obligations," questions which have dominated research into native claims
[Conn 1968:443].
Fentonfs inclination to history led him to rebel against the attacks on
"conjectural history" current within anthropology in the 1930s and 1940.
As a graduate student, Fenton pursued conventional ethnographic field
work among the Seneca. His historical inclination led to his desire to
"give time depth to contemporary observations, and. . .to do real history
[which] relieved some of the frustration which then beset American
ethnographers who were under attack from the 'functionalists' for inferring
history mainly from distributions" [Fenton 1957:30, italics mine].
The documentary record concerning the Iroquois is indeed rich, al-
lowing the investigation of problems of cultural continuity and change over
the course of several centuries. Confronted by a substantial body of
written material relating to the history and culture of the Iroquois, Fenton
[1953:1] chose "to begin with the present [his field data] and work steadi-
ly backward."
Fenton calls this approach "upstreaming,'.' and he first used this
method in his 1941 paper on Iroquois suicide, although he did not actually
use the term until eight years later. In his suicide paper, Fenton began
with descriptions of suicides within the memories of living Iroquois in vari-
ous communities in the United States and Canada. Women, he found, com-
mitted suicide by eating a poisonous root after an unhappy marriage or
love affair. Men were more likely to kill themselves by violent means after
having committed some heinous crime such as murdering a relative. A
third type of suicide was that of children abused by parents. Fenton ex-
amined the historical evidence and found cases of similar Iroquois suicides
dating back to 1656 and to even earlier times for the Iroquoian-speaking
Huron.
Fenton has used a similar approach in discovering the origins of the
Seneca Eagle Dance [1953] and he traced the Iroquois Condolence Ritual
far back into the past [Fenton 1946, 1949, 1957]. In this latter study he
has made his most effective use of unpublished materials.
Fenton's ethnohistorical work avoids a failing reported to be common
in ethnohistorical writings—it seldom allows concern for "historical" matters
to supersede an interest in culture. However, if Fenton carries an
ethnologist's feeling for an appreciation of culture when he attacks histor-
ical evidence, his work still exhibits another fault which is unfortunately
characteristic of ethnohistory. Fenton's work demonstrates a lack of con-
cern for theoretical or comparative significance. Fenton's view of the
anthropologist's goal is limited to an extreme—"the task of ethnology is the
description of a given culture" [Fenton 1953:10]—and, impressive as his
 51

ethnohistorical investigations are, Fentonfs extensive publications are

largely descriptive. Fenton does report finding the writing of the neo-
evolutionist school of anthropology "fascinating, but I prefer to work with
more manageable data" [Fenton 1962:3-4].
I am convinced that many ethnohistorians utilized ethnohistory as a
research tool because they are more comfortable with data that are " manag-
eable." Unlike colleagues who, for example, are convinced that they can
uncover the psychological reality of cognitive systems or capture and con-
tain that amorphous entity, a social network, ethnohistorians deal with a
concrete and finite body of data, the documents which have survived to
speak of events and cultures of the past. To make these data manageable,
ethnohistorians draw strict boundaries in terms of time and space for the
problem being investigated. Having established parameters of time and
space, far too many ethnohistorians fail to look beyond those parameters
and see the theoretical importance of the problems they are investigating.
There are numerous examples which could be cited as representing
this genre of ethnohistorical research. Carmack has pointed out that
"the limited designs of most ethnohistoric studies" do not encompass "the
diachronic test of theory" [Carmack 1972:231] , 1 2 This is not to argue
that such work is without value. Indeed, one marvels at the labor, even
the brilliance, exhibited by authors in sifting through vast quantities of
conflicting and often contradictory evidence to arrive at a probable se-
quence of events. However, these essentially descriptive presentations,
useful to someone who wishes to know who, what, when, where, and how,
should not dominate the field of ethnohistoric writing to the extent that
they do presently. Surely the most important question, the question de-
scriptive studies leave unanswered, is "why?"—in other words, theoretical
consideration of causation and correlation of variables.
While I argue that most ethnohistorical writing is unduly
particularistic of descriptive and fails to provide explanations for the
events being described, there are instances where important
anthropological contributions have been made using Ethnohistorical method-
ology. One can cite, for example, Hickerson's [1965] approach to inter-
tribal relations in the upper Mississippi Valley which is a model of the way
in which an ethnohistorian, using standard ethnohistorical method, can
deal with a problem of general interest to Anthropology.
Hickersonfs work is far from conventional ethnohistory. A conven-
tional study would have done little more than present the chronology of
events, with periods of peace and war and with the figures prominent in
pursuing these alternative ends. Some attention might have been paid to
shifts in territory which resulted from these conflicts with possible re-
flection on the consequences of these shifts on the eventual transfer of the
lands from native hands to whites.
This was not Hickerson's approach, however. Instead he concentrat-
ed upon the ecological relationship which existed between the predators
(Chippewa and Sioux) and prey (Virginia Deer) in the area. He found the
condition of war between the two Indian groups created a buffer zone
which allowed the deer population to regenerate. This study has had an
impact even beyond anthropology, influencing the thought of ecologists on
"evolutionary strategy" in predator-prey systems [Mech 1977:321].
52

While I personally find ecological "explanations" of social and cultural

phenomena attractive, this is not the only theoretical, valid, or exciting
approach possible given the data available to Hickerson. The model of po-
litical behavior presented by Bailey [1969] could well have been tested to
see if it explained the actions of politicians of both the Chippewa and the
Sioux in the periods of war and peace in the years that Hickerson ex-
amined. Ethnohistorians seldom take such an approach. Spores [1980:590]
has pointed to the failings of ethnohistorical investigations of political ac-
tivities: "The ethnohistorical study of government and law is in the theo-
retical doldrums. Most studies are excellent from a descriptive standpoint,
but they are lacking in analyses of concepts of power and authority, deci-
sion making, differentiation of legal systems from general bodies of custom-
ary behavior, and conflict resolution." It is indeed unfortunate that
ethnohistorians seem to eschew the use of causal models when presenting
the data they have labored so hard to extract from the documents they
have digested.
Another example of theoretically important work with an ethnohistoric
base is that of Anthony F. C. Wallace on the new religion preached to the
Iroquois by the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake. Wallace's work on the
subject began in 1951 and reached fruition in 1970 with the publication of
his Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. From the first, Wallace kept a com-
parative perspective and placed his ethnohistoric data in the framework of
current theory. As a result he was able to produce a widely cited paper
on what he termed "revitalization movements" [Wallace 1956], which has
added an important theoretical construct to anthropological repetoire as
well as another lexical item to our anthropological vocabulary.
The work of both Hickerson and Wallace, along with that of Spicer,
has been justifiably recognized by Trigger [1976:20-21] as the "few major
studies of Indian tribes" produced using "the ethnohistorical approach."
Fenton [1978:927] points out that these three anthropologists subordinate
historical analysis to generalizations about cultural processes." I believe
that is precisely why the work of these three has proven to be significant.
It is, of course, not only North American Indians who serve as sub-
jects for ethnohistory. An example of ethnohistorical writing which has
had enormous impact comes from outside North America. The South Asian
case of Nayar "marriage" [Gough 1952, 1959] is possibly the most fre-
quently cited ethnohistorical analysis in introductory anthropology texts.
The study is for unknown reasons seldom identified as an ethnohistorical
work, possibly because its author was educated in the tradition of British
social anthropology and published in a British journal. Also, the later
publication [Gough 1959] is the more frequently cited and reprinted. This
is less explicitly ethnohistorical, failing to provide the historical sources of
the data presented (Gough appears to assume the reader will consult her
earlier work, especially Gough 19520. For whatever reason, several gen-
erations of students have passed through introductory anthropology
courses probably under the misconception that Kathleen Gough was kept
awake every night by the noise of Nayar males leaving the matrilineage
hearth to go across the village to the beds of their lovers/wives. Such
was not the case. Gough used informant testimony and primary historical
sources to uncover details of a past society. In other words, she did a
 53

conventional ethnohistorical investigation of a most unconventional social

system.

CONCLUSIONS

To summarize, most ethnohistorical studies have had, I believe, mini-

mal impact on the discipline of anthropology. I do not think the position
of ethnohistory has changed that much since 1950 when Margaret Mead
presented a paper entitled "Anthropologist and Historian: Their Common
Problems" [Mead 1951] without giving the slightest hint that anyone was
engaged in the type of research we call ethnohistory. Two factors are felt
to be behind this lack of appreciation of ethnohistory.
The first factor is the failure of our colleagues to value library and
archival research. As a discipline we value persons who n create n data,
via field work, rather than "find11 data in the library. An element in this
value system is the ignorance on the part of our colleagues of the rich
sources of data available in archives about the world. These colleagues
also fail to appreciate that such data can be evaluated and tested in a
manner fully as rigorously (or nearly so) as can the statements made by
informants in the field [see Pitt 1972; Berkhofer 1969]. One might also
note that, in contrast to the field study, the ethnohistorical study is more
readily open to replication. *
The second, and, in my view, more important factor in the lack of
recognition of the potential significance of ethnohistory lies with a funda-
mental deficiency exhibited by too many ethnohistorians in their role as
anthropological researchers. I feel ethnohistorians have become too en-
thralled by the facts they find—names, dates, and places. Such need not
be the case. One can produce ethnohistorical studies which are of interest
to other scholars beyond specialists in a particular people or region.
However, for this to be the case, ethnohistorical research must move be-
yond its present descriptive concern of painstakingly and accurately con-
structing chronological developments in the microevolution of a single cul-
ture. Ethnohistorians must begin to use their documentary materials as
data or evidence from which they address issues in anthropological theory.
Documents must be approached by ethnohistorians as anthropologists to
test hypotheses. I am here echoing, but with what I hope is some empha-
sis, statements which have been made before. Cohn [1970:102] argued,
"The anthropologists must do the same work with manuscripts and docu-
ments that the historian does, although he must ask his own questions in
his own way" [italics mine].
The view expressed is that ethnohistory, as practiced by anthro-
pologists, must be solidly a social or behavioral science. This view is in
fact in conflict with positions others have taken. I would not concur with
Evans-Pritchard's view [1962:26] that anthropology and history lie in the
humanities, nor do I, like Hudson [1973:135], see value in "conceiving of
anthropology as a kind of history. . .[as] an alternative to positivism."
While it is not completely clear what these scholars imply, I feel they are
arguing in favor of description rather than scientific analysis. All anthro-
pology should involve both but the major fault, as I see it, with most
ethnohistorical writing is that it emphasizes the former to the near exclu-
54

sion of the latter. It would seem that both Evans-Pritchard and Hudson
argue that such is satisfactory and desirable. I would argue that while on
occasion such a descriptive treatment might be satisfactory, it is certainly
most undesirable as a characteristic of a whole subdiscipline (or methodolo-
gy) within the science of anthropology.
I would emphasize that I am not making a distinction between history
and science (or history and anthropology). I concur with Helms [1978:1]
that such a distinction is "hoary and unwarranted" and that "the anthro-
pological literature on the subject is not much help in deciding the matter,
although much has been written on the subject of anthropology and histo-
ry." Nor am I arguing against "historical explanation" [as defined in
Hammel 1968] for indeed sophisticated historical explanation is one (but on-
ly one) possible and desirable goal of ethnohistorians. However, one may
approach a set of data and simply describe what is there. These data may
come from participant observation in the field or they may come from docu-
ment collections in archives. To be sure the most blatantly descriptive
study involves selection, presumably to suit some set of academic criteria
already held by the student. One is dealing with a continuum with de-
scription at one pole and analysis or explanation at the other. All studies
in anthropology and history fall somewhere on that continuum. What is ar-
gued here is that "typical" ethnohistory as produced by contemporary
anthropologists falls toward the descriptive end of that continuum and this
explains in part the lack of impact of ethnohistory on the rest of anthro-
pology.
When I was an undergraduate anthropology major, it was common to
ask students in an examination to respond to Maitland's [1968:249] state-
ment: "By and by anthropology will have the choice between being histo-
ry and being nothing." This, in my undergraduate days, evoked a flood
of verbage on the functional approach to the study of culture and society
and/or a discussion of the dominance of concern for personality and cul-
ture in some segments of anthropology. Perhaps the question is still
asked, and if so I assume students respond with discussions of network
analysis, urban anthropology, or the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. I
have chosen there to reverse Maitland's statement, however, and to sug-
gest to anthropological colleagues who, like myself, enjoy doing
ethnohistory, that we had best get on and do some anthropological studies,
testing social science hypotheses through the data in the documents of
which we are so fond. Ethnohistory, as pursued by anthropoligists, cer-
tainly must become anthropology or it will remain nothing.

Notes

Acknowledgements; An earlier version of this paper was read to the 25th meeting of the Amer-
ican Society for Ethnohistory, October 13, 1977, in Chicago, Illinois. I wish to thank James
Axtell for the invitation to participate in the session he organized for that conference.
Participants and commentators, both official (Axtell, Omer C. Stewart, and Nancy Lurie) and
official, at that session are to be thanked. T. E. Bunting has read several drafts of the
paper, each time providing helpful suggestions. Charles Bishop and David Hartman have also
been generous with criticism of this paper, some of which I have, possibly foolishly,
ignored. My initial conference presentation was meant to be provocative to promote thought
and discussion. It is presented for publication in that same vein.
 55

1. While of late some historians have been having an increasingly great impact on ethno-
historical writing [for example, Jennings 1975], I concur with Schwerin [1976:324] that
this "natural meeting ground for historians and anthropologists" has "been dominated by
anthropologists from the first." It should be noted, however, that if ethnohistory
within history continues to rise in prestige yet continues at its present low level
within anthropology, there is a real danger of anthropology's "losing" ethnohistory to
the historians who will be better able to attract younger scholars with talents and in-
clination for this type of research.

2. Talcing an egocentric view (I am in the directory but not, probably due to my error,
counted among the ethnohistorians), I feel these data are unreliable and invalid. It is
likely many more anthropologists.actually do ethnohistory.

3. Nancy 0. Lurie, as a discussant in the session in which an early draft of this paper was
presented, implied she believed few individuals held joint appointments with departments
of history. This she contrasted with the number of joint appointments anthropologists
hold with departments of sociology, psychology, or other social science departments.
The feeling which Lurie had in 1977 does not hold with respect to current (1980-81) fig-
ures for joint appointments. Only one anthropologist is listed in the Guide as a joint
psychology-anthropology appointment. However, psychiatry and education, along with so-
ciology, appear to have more joint appointments than history with anthropology among
cultural or social anthropologists. The small numbers involved, the possibility of er-
ror, and the difficulty of recognizing comparable academic units in different insti-
tutions make interpretation of the 1980-81 figures most tenuous, however. Indeed, I
feel the comment made by Lurie at the session (it was, of course, that comment which
sent me, or rather my research assistant, to the Guide to count) is more Important to my
thesis than the 1980-81 figures. I feel the fact Lurie expected such a joint history-
anthropology appointment to be relatively rare is strongly supportive of my thesis that
history lacks respect within anthropology, given Lurie's long experience as an eminent
ethnohistorian in the anthropological academic community.

4. The Annual Review of Anthropology has twice dealt with ethnohistory in its pages.
Carmack [1972] has made a valiant attempt to consider ethnohistorical research on native
peoples and cultures of North America, Africa, and Mesoamerica. He presents, however,
"no comprehensive summary of the ethnohistory of these three areas. . .but rather. . .a
few noteworthy and illustrative cases" [Carmack 1972:235], His article does provide a
useful substantive starting point for someone wishing to survey the literature. Spores
[1980] has surveyed "New World Ethnohistory and Archaeology, 1970-1980." From an histo-
rian's viewpoint, both Axtell [1978] and Berkhofer [1971] have provided surveys of eth-
nohistorical treatment of North American Indians. Of all the above I find Berkhofer's
the most satisfactory.

5. The unconventional nature of the role of ethnohistorian, and perhaps the lack of posi-
tive sanctions reinforcing that role, have created among ethnohistorians (historians as
well as anthropologists) a penchant for navel contemplation.
56

6. These studies were often written in the "ethnographic present" tense when in fact it was
the "ethnographic past" which was being described. The utilization of present tense to
describe past cultures are in my view two of the more unfortunate and confusing aspects
of our heritage from our anthropological ancestors.

7. Sturtevant [1968:454] has pointed to the different usage of the term ethnohistory by
anthropologists and historians. "Anthropologists defining ethnohistory tend to specify
that it relies on written documents. . .whereas historians tend to use the label only
for studies of the past of societies wherein written records are lacking or scanty."
This paper is addressed to the anthropological practice of ethnohistory, so the term is
used in the first manner presented by Sturtevant.

8. Fenton [1966:72] called it a "tirade."

9. There are others besides Fenton whose work might be cited. Fenton's former colleague,
John C. Ewers, in the Bureau of American Ethnology has the same relationship to the
Blackfoot and ethnohistory that Fenton has to the Iroquois and this methodology. Ewers1
[1955] study of the horse in Blackfoot culture has with justification been reprinted as
a "classic" study. Ewers, like Fenton, studies culture, but his goals, like Fenton's,
are limited to detailed description.

10. In this respect ethnohistorians more closely resemble the inhabitants of Bernard Conn's
"Historyland" than they do other residents of their native "Anthropologyland"
[Cohn 1980:209].

11. It is tempting to point to many of the articles (including my own) in the recently pub-
lished [Trigger 1978] northeastern volume of the Handbook of Worth American Indians.

12. Schwerin has attempted a crude typology of articles published in Ethnohistory in its
second decade. His dichotomy of "Historical" and "Scientific" does not correspond to my
intuitive feel for the papers or to the distinction I am emphasizing here between simple
chronology and an attempt to deal with questions of general anthropological interest.
However, it is perhaps of some significance relative to the points being discussed here,
that even though 65% of the authors in that decade are identified as anthropologists,
only 41% of the articles are classified as "Scientific" [Schwerin 1976:326]. If one
were to exclude studies of "culture change and conflict" (many of which are simple chro-
nology) from the "Scientific" category, the proportion of "Scientific" articles falls to
a mere 26 percent of the total. Spores [1978:201] engaged in a similar exercise in
classifying the contents of the first 23 volumes of Ethnohistory. He fails to present
details of his 60 topical categories, but does note "ethnographic description" is the
largest category (56 of 323 articles).

13. One can compare Jennings1 [1963] treatment of Partanan to the attack by Lewis [1951] on
Redfield's Tepotzlan material [Redfield 1930]. While I find both Jennings and Lewis to
be convincing, the argument of Jennings seems less open to criticism as being the result
of ideosyncratic personality variables and hence appears to be stronger than that of
Oscar Lewis. With respect to the Redfield-Lewis case, Kaplan and Manners [1972:24] have
raised the unanswerable question: "How do we decide which account is closer to the
'truth,1 and what does this mean as far as the objectivity of anthropological knowledge
is concerned?" While an ethnohistorian must also have great reservations about what is
 57

"truth," he at least is aware that barring some disaster he can examine all the docu-
ments utilized by a predecessor in reaching a conclusion and his own work is subject to
the same scrutiny.

14. It is possible that Evans-Pritchard and Hudson, in their call for non-positivist anthro-
pology, indicate a desire for greater usage of "artistic explanation," to use Hammel's
[1968] term, within anthropological writing. However, at the time Evans-Pritchard
wrote, and probably even when Hudson was writing his call for a non-positivist ethno-
history, the discipline of anthropology was firmly rooted in science and positivism.
Its goal was a natural science of society. Unfortunately it has not retained this high-
ly desirable goal [see Leach 1976]. Since Hudson published there has been a decided
movement within anthropology toward a type of exposition neither scientific nor posi-
tivistic, namely toward French structuralism [for support of this characterization of
Levi-Strauss and his following see Murphy 1963]. Indeed, one could argue that today the
situation is a reversal of that which existed when Hudson wrote. It is quite possible
that a rigorous ethnohistory may provide a strong positivist antidote for the French
structural malaise plaguing contemporary anthropology. In fact, a historical article
[Gainst 1975] revealed the absurdity of Leach's [1970:15-32] structural analysis of color
symbolism and usage in traffic control systems for land transport.

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