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This captivatingly provocative book falls firmly into the current genre of criti cal ethnographic and methodological literature in anthropology. Ethnography and the Historical Im agination is a tour de force of the ethnographic enterprise and attempts to locate ethnography squarely within the boundaries of the broader historical contexts which have shaped the discipli ne of anthropology in all its manifestations. It evokes not only the intellectual cli mate that spawned ethnographic interest in "native cultures," but also raises some fundamental que stions of epistemology in the construction and presentation of the so - called "savage soc ieties" to Western readers.
The authors depict the current state of anthropology as one riddled with am bivalence towards its enterprise and its "mode of inquiry that appears, by turns, uniquely revelat ory and irredeemably ethnocentric" (p. 7). They concur with the pointed observation of Aijimer (1988:424) that ethnography "always has been ... linked with epistemological pro blems" (and, one might add, of both conceptualization of research problems and of ethnographi c practice). The authors raise tantalizing questions about the methodology and interpretation of ethnographic research. They draw attention to the sometimes apparent contradictory perspecti ves of its major proponents, that is, whether anthropology is part of "natural science," as Radcl iffe - Brown (1957) would have it, or part of history as advocated by Evans - Pritchard (1961 , 1963).
The Comaroffs conclude that "Ethnography ... is a historically situated mod e of understanding...