ABSTRACT
In their present-day forms, ethnography and historiography are twins, born of the same parentage at the same moment in the eighteenthcentury dawn of Western modernity. They have most often seemed, however, to be nonidentical, even antithetical twins, each trait of the one answering to a corresponding but converse trait in the other. This complementary relation has been remarked on and analyzed almost since the eighteenth century itself. One recent summary, offered by Michel de Certeau in the wake of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, puts it this way: Where ethnography has taken as its object orality, historiography scrutinizes written traces; where the one has wanted to describe an atemporal space of culture, the other follows change through time; the one starts from a gesture of radical estrangement and alterity, the other from an assumption of transparent identity; the first analyzes collective phenomena of a cultural unconscious, the second the consciousness of historical selfknowledge (de Certeau 1988, 209-10).
