Mi favourite subject: Ethnohistoria

I am in the second year of my career, and the anthropological topics of this semester are more specific and concentrated on Social Anthropology. The two subjects about Archeology and Biological Anthropology are interesting but not my favourite ones, because I would like to work in the social area. This term I learned other anthropology theories and fields like structural anthropology, ethnolinguistics and ethno-history, and this last one has been the most interesting for me.

The ethno-history was something unknown for me until this year, and when I knew about it the first class I was so surprised. It was the first real approach to the anthropologist´s work in real life with ethnic groups. The ethno-history work, basically, is to recover the voice of the ethnic groups that has always been hidden or silenced on the history of the “winners”.

The ethno-history doesn’t close its field to the ethnics groups because you can make ethnohistory every time you recover the speech or ways of life that has been silenced in the dominant history. The objective, when you recover a speech, is that you recover a part of the thinking or models of that society.

But I am not sure if that class is my favourite. I really enjoy the contents of the class but I think that this Anthropology area is so unknown and the impact on the alive societies (and those ethnic groups) is so little or minimum.  That's is a huge problem, because I think that we can't dedicate our work for our own interest.

Regards!