Anthropology, History, and the North American Indian. A Review Article

Abstract

Anthropological students of the American Indians have been in an historical mood at least since 1954, when a number of anthropologists formed the American Indian Ethnohistoric Conference (re-named in 1966, the American Society for Ethnohistory). In more recent years the field of social/cultural anthropology as a whole has taken a major historical turn. As social/cultural anthropological research became more historical, historians began showing greater attention to anthropological contributions in ethnography, linguistics, archaeology, and social theory. A number of scholars including E. E. EvansPritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Edward Spicer, Clifford Geertz, Bernard Cohn, Marshall Sahlins, and Renato Rosaldo among the anthropologists, and Peter Brown, Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, William McLoughlin, Rhys Isaac, and Greg Dening among historians, have either discussed the relationship between the disciplines or contributed significantly to interdisciplinary research. In American Indian studies specifically, Bruce Trigger's two-volume ethnohistory of the Huron (The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 1976) is an important recent contribution to an historical anthropology. The major American historians now involved in American Indian research include James Axtell, Wilcomb Washburn, Francis Jennings, Gary Nash, Calvin Martin, and Alden Vaughan. Neal Salisbury's Manitou