The Ethnohistory Program is an interdisciplinary enterprise that draws upon the expertise and interests of faculty throughout the University. It is coordinated by an Ethnohistory Board consisting of scholars from departments that include Anthropology, History, and History and Sociology of Science. Active participants in the program also represent a wide range of disciplines and area specializations.

The Ethnohistory Program at the University of Pennsylvania was established in 1976 in order to explore the areas of intellectual convergence between historians engaged in the "new" social history and anthropologists interested in a diachronic approach to the study of social and symbolic forms. Ethnohistory, as it is pursued at the University of Pennsylvania, seeks insight into human behavior based upon evidence from written documents, oral literature, material culture, and sociocultural analysis within a comparative and crosscultural framework. Located at the juncture of two major disciplines, ethnohistory is, in effect, history informed by an anthropological understanding of social structure, culture, and community; anthropology informed by an historical understanding of time and change.

Besides offering, via participating departments, a range of courses designed to provide students with the concepts and tools necessary to do ethnohistory, the Program has as its centerpiece a thriving workshop devoted to current research in the field.

 

The Ethnohistory Workshop, now in its third decade, meets every month for discussion of papers offered by both visiting scholars and members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty. Copies of the paper are distributed to participants in advance. At the workshop, a brief introduction by the author, followed by short commentaries by one graduate student and one faculty member with different disciplinary and area studies backgrounds, ensures a lengthy exchange of questions, criticisms, and comments between author and workshop participants. In contrast to meetings where the emphasis is upon the actual presentation of a paper to an audience unfamiliar with its content, this format permits a detailed discussion of the issues raised by the author in his or her paper. Ethnohistory presenters are encouraged to use the workshop to gain feedback on unpublished work-in-progress.

The workshop is organized each year around a theme. Papers are solicited from prominent historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and scholars from related disciplines whose current research bears directly upon this theme. The theme for 2006-2007 was "Powerful Objects: How do things come to hold sway over people?"   Examples of other past themes are "Collectivities as Agents and Re-agents of Discourse," "Alternative Modernities," "Images," "The Making of Public Culture," "Religious Change," "Commodities and Culture," and "Ideology and Processes of Domination."