Perhaps “ethnohistory” has been so called to separate it from “real” history, the study of the supposedly civilized. Yet what is clear from the study of ethnohistory is that the subjects of the two kinds of history are the same. The more ethnohistory we know, the more clearly “their” history and “our” history emerge as part of the same history. Thus, there can be no “black history” apart from “white history”, only a component of a common history suppressed or omitted from conventional studies for economic, political, or ideological reasons.

Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History, 1982.