Ethnohistory has existed for decades as a dialogue between history, linguistics, and anthropology. Its gradual transformation from an applied approach (situated in the interstitial spaces of empirical anthropology) to an interdisciplinary method for understanding cross-cultural meanings has left an important imprint in the social sciences and the humanities. What is ethnohistory today? What methods distinguish this disciplinary field from others? And how do ethnohistorians understand their activity in the current context of postmodern research? All these convoluted questions are addressed in Transforming Ethnohistories, a compilation of ten essays based on a double panel given in honor of the American anthropologist Raymond J. DeMallie (American Society for Ethnohistory, New Orleans, 2009). The book includes a sharp introduction by the editor, an epilogue and an afterword by DeMallie himself.
While these essays are based on specific historic case-studies of the American Native cultures, most of them discuss the construction of the ethnohistorical approach and the potential contributions of its method. Taking DeMallie’s theoretical work as a way to interrogate their cases and the history of the discipline, authors tacitly agree that ethnohistory is an effective approach to understand cross-cultural meanings and symbols in Native American cultures both in past and present societies. Ethnohistory provides a comprehensive tool to listen to history through documents and experiences, establishing the relationships between language, history, kinship, and community. As Felix Braun explains, “This volume is not trying to rebuild historical or anthropological theories, or to reargue the proper approach for a critical analysis of texts. What it is attempting to do is to show how these different approaches can be bridged to create a true ethnohistorical approach… by placing emphasis on having ears: listening to narratives” (5). Therefore, “having ears” means not only recognizing native texts in order “to understand…their conception of their own history” but also listening to documents (whether oral or written) in order to “transform them into stories” toward the construction of an anthropological history (15, 229).
The book is organized into four parts. The first one opens with a useful intellectual biography of DeMallie’s neo-Boasian anthropology, written by David Miller, who gives a personal and professional account to understand DeMallie’s academic legacy. The next three chapters (Hogue, Quick, and Jackson) discuss ethnohistorical performances by examining their juxtaposition of fieldwork experiences and Native documents. Quick and Hogue emphasize the potential of the ethnohistorical method to “see” and “listen to” the intangible quality of events or performances at any historical moment (78), and also as “a sustained intellectual engagement between diachronism (history as cultural concept) and synchronism (culture as a historical concept)” (57).
The second part includes two chapters where storytelling is analyzed socially and linguistically, revealing its capacity to provide “larger insights into history and community” (18). Dinwoodie explores cultural context in great depth in order to hear the Native voice of the “speech communities” (100), which includes consideration of the political economy of language. Complementing this idea, Moore analyses the performance of language as a source of Indigenous identity especially in reference to the construction of narrative accounts of places and historical lands (124).
The third section of the book offers biographical perspectives where personal histories are discussed (Bucko, Wagoner, Morgan). These essays are good examples of how the encounter between anthropology, linguistics, and history can be used to understand nineteenth- and twentieth-century Native cultures of North America. Like the rest of the book, this section is focused on Native literature written in indigenous languages, as well as in French and English. Particular attention is given to those documents whose content has the potential to determine the construction of ignored or neglected historical narratives. As Morgan remarks, the study of the context in which Native literature was produced influences the texts themselves, epitomizing the “epistemological struggles regarding authoritative knowledge and the power of representation” (186).
The fourth part closes the book with a case framed within theoretical arguments about the connections among narratives, procedural landscapes, and history (Braun). This section also includes two different discussions by the aforementioned ethnohistorians, Raymond Fogelson and Raymond J. DeMallie. Fogelson, DeMallie’s former teacher, remarks that despite the perpetual “problematic” condition of ethnohistory through its different stages, it has succeeded in promoting the academic recognition of Native texts and it has raised the critical question of “who owns the past”(229).
The afterword, written by DeMallie, offers a discussion of the complexity entailed in the etymology of the ethnonym Oglala (Sioux) in order to warn scholars of how cautious they should be when using historical sources ethnohistorically (251). While DeMallie and Fogelson are cautious in assessing the development of ethnohistory, both implicitly assert that it has gained its rightful place as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge with its own methods, epistemological foundations, and historical complexities.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Transforming Ethnohistories is to update the discussion of the variety and currency of ethnohistorical methods. The cases presented offer powerful insights for discussing the historical production of symbols and meanings through documents and narratives, exemplifying that the theoretical issues posed by DeMallie can be applied to the past and the present. Although the book does not provide a deep account of the “future of ethnohistory,” as Fogelson allows (227), it affords an outstanding collection of essays about Native American cultures, proving the dynamism and vitality of ethnohistoric writing in the current research scenario.
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[Review length: 886 words • Review posted on September 13, 2016]