Ethnohistory Revisited:
Questions to Ponder
Please consider these questions in the light of the research you are currently conducting on your own paper topics. You can also use these questions to evaluate your progress on the ethnohistorical analysis of your data.
Both authors caution us to examine carefully our own world-views and not to either presume they are shared by members of other cultures or to impose them on other cultures when writing ethnohistory. How have you identified and avoided this problem in writing your own papers?
Often historians assume that Europeans acting in the past have the same thought world as Europeans and American today. Thus Jesuits are often portrayed as having purely secular, and most often economic and political, reasons for converting Indians. Can we presume that since we share an ethnic identity with people in the past we can presume that we know their thought world?
Raymond DeMallie makes careful use of anthropological analysis of Lakota language documents to more fully understand the mental world of these people at the time of the battle of the Little Big Horn. In your own research what kinds of anthropological analyses (as in supplemental material) are you using to more fully understand your own primary source documents?
What are the contemporary biases of the year 2000 that might affect how we write ethnohistory? You will need to consider your own thought worlds rather than any of the articles. Have you detected any of these biases appearing in your work and what have you done to create a more unbiased representation of your research topic?
Ethnohistory is essential for producing a more rounded approach to understanding the past. How has this proven true (or has it!) in your own research?
Read the opening statement in the Notes section of DeMallie’s paper and discuss the importance of the collaborative approach to scholarship. What kinds of collaboration have you utilized in writing your own paper and how will you acknowledge this in your own work?