The issue for history is what happened through time, and this is assisted by looking at the interactions of two cultures, again especially with the experience of the arrival of Europeans into native hunter-gatherer tribes and civilisations in the Americas. (Green, Troup, 1999, 175-176; 179-180) Using written accounts of even contacting sympathisers on the writing side to illuminate the oral side is still fraught with danger (Green, Troup, 1999, 176-177).
Ethnohistory takes from social anthropology the study of "primitive" cultures, or people without a written history (Green, Troup, 1999, 178). There is though no reason why the techniques are not extended into Western society, except for the complexity of Western social life, and such as the Chicago school has.
Social anthropology is often allied with sociology, as they share some of the research methods and theories. However, social anthropology has stressed the inductive method, where researchers go into the field, learn the language if necessary, and absorb themselves into the ways of the culture, and as participant observer see what happens. In this idealised view, issues throw themselves up, and so the way that the culture and society works reveals itself. This can be a natural system (structural-objective) or moral system (people interacting-exchange) put into the anthropologist's essay. A question is whether cultures are unique to their own descriptions or whether generalised points can be made using broader theoretical insights, which is certainly the case with structural approaches.
This is to be contrasted with sociology, which is more deductive, and where a researcher goes into the field with a working hypothesis. Yet the social anthropologist, in this pure form, is rather more like the empirical and other inductive historian. The historian too is immersed, this time in the documents of the past, and applies skills of authenticating, sifting, connecting, and then generating an overall picture faithful to the evidence in both the witting and unwitting testimonies, just as the social anthropologist finds out what are the alternative ways people do things beyond the official or proper ways of living. The difference is that the anthropologist is not seeking (primarily) a film made over time, but more like a photograph of great detail where changes over time are to confirm means of stability: what makes a society an actual society as in the Durkheimian sense (see Green, Troup, 1999, 173).
A difference is that whereas historians tend to divide up areas of inductive research into separate fields, social anthropologists use their inductive research in the pursuit of understanding cultures and societies as a whole.
So whilst there clearly is some research parallel between history and social anthropology, this difference is important because an overview of holism leads on to trends in social anthropology. History too does not walk around in a theoretical vacuum with its schools and approaches, one of which has been to learn from social anthropology as it has actually been practiced.
The collectivist functionalism of Durkheim, evidenced in social causality and reflected in social rituals, pushed British anthropology towards functionalist and structural-functionalist stances. The British view was less cultural and isolationist as was the tendency in the United states (Green, Troup, 1999, 172-173). Anthropologists were looking for socially binding rituals and structures of continuity (and these are above and across cultures, ultimately universal binding methods and less relativistic). However, this search for means of generating stability and continuity is where there is some departure from history (and sociology) because historians are interested in changes, not maintenance. (Green, Troup, 1999, 173) What does history measure if not changes and then posits reasons for them? What does social anthropology measure if not the maintenance of a social whole and the reasons for this otherwise amongst bunches of individuals?
The difference has become greyer. Once historians investigated broad sweeps over large geographical and time areas, and anthropologists kept the study to relatively small and detailed fieldwork; now, however, the historian has also found appeal in data-rich small scale investigations. Historians have also found appeal in the holism of the social anthropologist. (Green, Troup, 1999, 174). This is the influence of functionalism on ethnohistorians.
Another important claim of the anthropologist is to take seriously anything which is meaningful to the individual. This is because what might seem trivial or irrational to the western mind may be fundamental to the mind in a different culture and therefore derive from/ contribute to social cohesion.
So ethnohistory has to widen its source material, and the writing skills. The techniques advertise themselves to other historians. It needs absorption into the other culture, close observation, interpretation of symbolic behaviour (language-based and extra-language based communication) and connecting parts together. (Green, Troup, 1999, 177, after Natalie Zemon Davis)
There are problems with ethnohistory that follow those of social anthropology.
First of all, who is to say, even with the greatest layers of description and interpretation that the ethnohistorian is going to get it right? Subjectivity comes into the essay writer. (See 178) There is the useful social anthropologist's method of going against the grain (Green, Troup, 1999, 179) but again the writer takes risks of interpretation.
Secondly, and inevitably, there is little evidence. The social anthropologist at least has the ongoing society to immerse within, but the ethnohistorian in the same place would have to assume no changes or only clues to the past. The ethnohistorian must focus on the varieties of historical data. There may be a case for taking from apparently similar cultures where evidence does exist (Green, Troup, 1999, 179).
Another problem is in the nature of writing. Writing by even a sympathetic and empathetic outsider is by another than of the culture itself. This leads writing to have the potential of a colonial relationship, that the account is extracted and indeed is over powerful. The anthropological and ethnohistorical account is written:
- With the researcher's power to write and describe
- For another culture, the Western culture, into which translations are made of the findings
- Using Western expressions
- According to another type of writing genre (that is, academic)
- To be read by the academic community not the local one
- Grasping the moment where something can change
(Rapport, Overing, 2000, 238)
- Therefore the account produced must be conscious of the construction of the text, which is therefore always a personal authored account.
(Rapport, Overing, 2000, 239)
In the end ethnohistory is one means by which historians can get away from the traps of the documentation of the elites in elite run cultures, into the lives as lived of people where records are less extensive. This is the history of the ordinary people, in the least literate of societies, and the result is to put them into writing.
Some Personalities:
§ James Axtell (in 1980s): Ethnohistorian who said that ethnohistory combines history and anthropology so that researchers emerge who insert the time dimension into anthropology. He looked at the views of Indians about incoming Europeans which they labelled on the basis of their technologies because of the importance of weapons in their tribes, looking at both sides' accounts (Green, Troup, 1999, 175, 176)
§ Robert Darnton (in 1980s): Ethnohistorian who argued using Clifford Geertz's extensive descriptive methodology that the massacre of cats in the 1730s by printing apprentices in Paris was, concludes Darnton, their way of showing resistance to the bourgeoisie because they knew what meanings cats had for this elite. (Green, Troup, 1999, 177-178)
§ Natalie Zemon Davis (in 1980s): Ethnohistorian who looked at what ethnohistorians could learn from social anthropologists in terms of methodology. (Green, Troup, 1999, 177)
§ Emile Durkheim (1858-1917): Sociologist who looked at social solidarity, collective conscience, scientific methods to study society as an entity, and social integration to overcome anomie. (See Green, Troup, 1999, 173)
§ E. E. Evans-Pritchard (in 1950s): Earlier, like Radcliffe-Brown's determinism, he stated that social anthropology is as of a science because of common features classifiable in societies; but then he said social anthropology is like historiography, because it studies (Marett Lecture, cited in Kuper, 1983, 130-131):
§ Moral not natural systems
§ Design not process
§ Patterns not laws
§ Interprets not explains
§ He went on to stress the use of history and opposition to determinism, and moved towards Parsons' stance. (Kuper, 1983, 129-135)
§ Clifford Geertz (in 1970s): Social anthropologist interested in the signs and symbols of people, who writes and advocates writing at length to find out and guess about symbolic acts, to produce layers of meaning that uncover what would be held by insiders' knowledge of what these communicative acts mean between them. This idea of "Thick description" originated from a philosopher Gilbert Ryle where the smallest difference in gesture might have a huge symbolic difference, which can only be discovered by highly focussed usually participant observations and a writing that follows at length to connect to culture by many broad abstractions. (Green, Troup, 1999, 177; Rapport, Overing, 2000, 350)
§ Hildred Geertz (in 1970s): Social anthropologist who said ethnohistory should be value free and non-judgmental. (Green, Troup, 1999, 175)
§ Francis Jennings (1980s): Ethnohistorian who tested colonial myths in his examination of them in contact with Indians, looking into Indian history. (Green, Troup, 1999, 176)
§ W. C. Sturtevant (in 1950s): Ethnohistorian who said that ethnohistory studies the same people as anthropologists. (Green, Troup, 1999, 175)
§ Susan Kellog (in 1990s): She stated that history was in social anthropology but only explicitly after the 1970s (Green, Troup, 1999, 173)
§ Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942): Cultural anthropologist who saw the primitive as just like the advanced person and who lived within a functioning system so that these could be observed through intensive multilayered observational analysis realising that people following enlightened self-interest do otherwise than what they say they do. He looked at the folk-psychological motive in with the folk-social motive. All culture should be studied as an associating interacting whole unit and never in isolation. Reciprocity bound the individual to the social, so there is here a moral system rather than a structural one. The idea of reciprocity relates also to theology and exchange. (Kuper, 1983, 1-35; see Green, Troup, 1999, 173)
§ Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1953, originally Brown): Social anthropologist for whom the concepts of structural systems were added to Malinowski's observational functionalism in the maintenance of societies. Radcliffe-Brown's background was natural sciences. He moved from a diffusionist ethnology to a Durkheimian position of orderly, scientifically understood social relations and Spencer-like evolution towards complexity. Early he paid particular interest to socially binding ceremonies and went on to kinship structures. Later he developed theory and after Malinowski left Britain and he returned giving sociology (through social relations based classification) and order into anthropology. Social structure was reality and he could compare societies but his discovery of oppositions in totemism worked into Levi-Strauss' view of binary linguistic structuralism. He claimed tha Malinowski was not sociological enough whereas Malinowski was cultural, and the way forward was sociological (Kuper, 1983, 36-68; see Green, Troup, 1999, 173)
§ Keith Thomas (in 1960s, then 1970s): This ethnohistorian whose work included the decline of magic in Britain suggested that history should relate to a whole society (as do social anthropologists) yet this is difficult when society is complex. He wanted to use social anthropology to redirect attention from elites to ordinary lives, though he discriminated between religion and magic. (Green, Troup, 1999, 174)
See:
Green, A., Troup, K. (eds) (1999), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 172-182.
Kuper, A. (1983), Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Rapport, N., Overing, J. (2000), Social and Cultural Anthropology, London: Routledge.
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