The Emperor's Mirror: Understanding Cultures through Primary Sources (review)

The Emperor’s Mirror: Understanding Cultures through Primary Sources. By Russell J. Barber and Frances F. Berdan. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. xiii + 350 pp.)

“What is ethnohistory?” For those who read Ethnohistory regularly, such a question should come as no surprise. Most of us who write ethnohistory have developed our own implicit definitions. But we, like other historians (and some anthropologists), often do not make our definitions and methodologies explicit. Russell Barber and Frances Berdan have written a book that is vital to the enterprise of defining ethnohistory. While they are not always successful in allaying the fears of critics that the field has no definitional or methodological boundaries, Barber and Berdan’s proposals make this book vital both for those of us who are attempting to write and teach ethnohistory and for all anthropologists and historians. The authors not only ably define a proposed field and method, they also make some vital points regarding the critical interpretation of written documents and other sources. They propose that ethnohistorians adopt a model of reality-mediation in which sources are read critically as references to an external, lived reality, one that can never be recovered but can be interpreted effectively through the mediating exercise of analyzing a series of sources. While the authors admit that the aspects of this model have been proposed before, theirs is the first to bring all the parts together in a systematic way.

“Ethnohistory is an interdisciplinary field that studies past human behavior and is characterized by a primary reliance on documents, the use of input from other sources when available, a methodology that incorporates historiography and cultural relativism, and a focus on cultural interaction.” This definition, proposed by the authors, distinguishes ethnohistory from the broader fields of historical anthropology and cultural history primarily by its focus on cultural interaction. While both historical anthropology and cultural history focus on past human behavior, often primarily use documents, and usually incorporate both historiography and cultural relativism, it is the interaction between two or more cultural groups that forms the basis for ethnohistory. This solid working definition delineates a field that allows scholars to focus on such interactions.

The second chapter of the book promotes the core argument. There, Barber and Berdan review the methodologies and theories proposed by ethnohistorians, and then they propose their own method. In the final two parts of the book, the authors use this proposed method to analyze various sets of sources in different contexts. Other scholars have supported theories ranging from approaches in which reality is viewed as self-evident to others wherein the sources (texts) are seen as the only reality (there is no external world, no context). Instead, Barber and Berdan’s proposed reality-mediation model views sources as texts that mediate and necessarily distort an external reality. The ethnohistorian’s task is both to describe the external reality as presented by the sources and to interpret the mediating effects of the sources themselves. This theoretical approach leads to a methodology in which the sources need both to be deconstructed (interpreted for authorial presence and intent) and analyzed for clues to external reality.

As the authors continue, they show the reader various ways in which the reality-mediation model may be used. This next section will be most useful to students in classes related to ethnohistorical, anthropological, and historical research, as the authors discuss specific applications of their approach. They include chapters on paleography, calendrics, linguistic analysis, interpretation of names, source analysis, quantitative analysis, visual interpretation, map interpretation, and complementary sources. The instructor who plans to use this book will be pleased with the level of detail and the large number of case studies from a variety of contexts. In each case Barber and Berdan provide a sufficient introduction but avoid some controversial issues that will be important to the ethnohistorian (e.g., can deconstruction, quantitative analysis, and philology all be considered part of the same approach, or are there...