Apology of Ethnography: methodological reflections from Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft

Abstract

In the last years of his life, the French historian Marc Bloch was living in clandestinity as a partisan against the Nazi invaders and, at the same time, feverishly pursuing the work of writing a book on the profession of the historian and the defense of historiography as a fundamental science. But the writing of those pages was interrupted by the tragic fate that history itself reserved for its author: Bloch was captured by the Nazis and executed in June 1944. That interrupted manuscript, however, has reached us: The Historian’s Craft (In the original French: Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien). The influence of that book went beyond the circles of those who practice historiography. Precisely because of its interdisciplinary character, and through the experience of translating a new and augmented edition of the book in question, this article explores some suggestions and directions that can be drawn from it for the practice of ethnography. What reflections and lessons might ethnographers reading The Historian’s Craft draw for their own fieldwork? This is the fundamental question of this contribution, which focuses on three of those possible suggestions and parallels: observation, transmission, and the defense of ethnography.