Ethnohistory: A Review of its Development, Definitions, Methods, and Aims
The relationship between history and anthropology has too often been viewed in terms of the misleading dichotomy between the ideographic, the specific and unique, and the nomothetic, the abstract, and general (see, for example, Boas 13; Harris 40; Kroeber 46; White 102). Nagel (67), who traces the dichotomy back to Aristotle, has convincingly demonstrated the use of generalizations and specific cases in both history and science, and Sahlins and Service have done a similar thing through their analysis of specific and general evolution (75). The early evolutionists were not historical in the ideographic sense but they were in the diachronic and documentarian senses. The founding fathers of anthropology-Morgan, Tylor, Maine, Marx, and others-sought to find the origins and antecedents of sociocultural systems and to trace their evolution through time. They based their studies on documentary accounts about native cultures written by travelers, missionaries, etc. As Kroeber repeatedly claimed, the historical approach was precociously applied in the social sciences, compared to the biological and physical sciences (47). The delayed development of a historical approach in the other sciences, Kroeber argued (48), was the requirement of a prior development of systematic, synchronic generalizations. This suggests one explanation for the patently ahistorical phase which followed the evolutionary beginnings of anthropology-viz. the need for detailed, synchronic studies. The aversion of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski to historical studies is well known. The structure-functionalism of British social anthropology was ahistorical on all counts. In the study of the structures of whole societies it was nomothetic, in the almost total reliance on ethnographic observations it was antidocumentarian, and in failing to study social change it was synchronic. In spite of Harris' recent attempt to portray the American culture historians' work as exclusively ideographic (41), there is good reason to view it as ahistorical in certain fundamental ways. Certainly the culture historians cannot be accused of failing to make diachronic studies, as under Boas' guidance