Culture Theory in Contemporary Ethnohistory

Bibliographic Data

ID2741479
AuthorsWilliam S Simmons (corresponding author)
Year1988
Volume35
Issue1
Pages1
Publication date1988-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnohistory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1801 • E-ISSN: 1527-5477
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/482430
OpenAlexW1992665690
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited12

This paper is about how historians and anthropologists have interpreted the encounters between Europeans and native people.Since classical times these encounters have been driven by expansionist societies that colonized the smaller-scale indigenous people who lived around their peripheries.Attempts by historians and anthropologists to interpret this process have been shaped by and in turn have shaped European bias toward native peo ple.To a considerable extent, this bias is an expression of the widespread ethnocentric idea that one's own society is the norm and what lies outside is a distortion of that norm.In his discussion of the territorial rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep identified the importance of boundary sym bolism to protect the inner from the outer worlds.Van Gennep wrote that "the prohibition against entering a given territory is ... intrinsically magi co-religious.It has been expressed with the help of milestones, walls, and statues in the classical world" (1960 [1908]: 16-17).The Roman arch of triumph, for example, once separated their society from that of their enemies: "The victor was first required to separate himself from the enemy world through a series of rites, in order to be able to return to the Roman world by passing through the arch" (ibid.: 21).In this symbolism, center differs from periphery, state differs from tribe, and colonizer dif fers from colonized, as sacred differs from profane.In a sense, the Roman arch also symbolized the boundary between two kinds of person.Marcel Mauss traced the origin of the contemporary western idea of the autono mous conscious "person" or "self" to the development of the Roman Republic.According to Mauss, this idea was absent in preclassical and non-Western societies where the "person" was submerged within received

Archaeology · Ethnohistory · Expansionism · Indigenous · Norm (philosophy) · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law

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