Ethnohistory: an historian's viewpoint1

TL;DR: Although anthropologists have dominated its definition and practice, frontier historians and practitioners of the "new" Social History have moved strongly into the field and their different but complementary approach to Ethnohistory needs to be recognized by their anthropological brethren as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: Although Ethnohistory is a disciplinary hybrid, anthropologists have dominated its definition and practice. In recent years, however, frontier historians and practitioners of the "new" Social History have moved strongly into the field. Their different but complementary approach to Ethnohistory needs to be recognized by their anthropological brethren. Signs of closer cooperation can already be seen in a number of recent works that betray little of their authors' disciplinary origins. In the not-so-distant past, the small number of historians who wandered into ethnohistory must have felt like trespassers in a foreign land. Not only were its first and most successful practitioners members of the anthropological tribe, but the initial definitions of ethnohistory reflected the anthropologists' recent experience in Indian claims work and their own disciplinary habits. They tended to see ethnohistory as the use of written documents only for the study of special people - "primitive" people - that is, the use of non-anthropological evidence for their own anthropological purposes. Understandably, ethnohistory was considered an exclusive "sub-branch of ethnology" or "sub-discipline of cultural anthropology" (Euler 1972:202;