ABSTRACT
In anthropology ‘ethnohistory’ has conventionally denoted the scholarly reconstruction of indigenous cultures’ past, carried out primarily through the analysis of contact-period texts and archival materials. Anticolonial and postmodernist writers in the social sciences have undermined the notion that history is an objective, authoritative account of past events. In similar fashion the notion of ethnohistory has been progressively relativized and contextualized, particularly in recent Pacific history and anthropology. Rather than an objectivist reconstruction of ancient lifeways, ethnohistory has come to refer more broadly to modes of historical discourse-variable ways of constructing, narrating, and interpreting events (see for example Gewertz and Schieffelin 1985: 3). A selective intellectual genealogy of this shift in meaning would include Smith’s (1960) concept of ‘European Vision’, Dening’s (1966) discussion of the ‘values and assumptions’ that ‘coloured’ early European accounts, Said’s (1978) Orientalism, and Clifford’s (1988) questioning of scholarly narrative authority.
