“The Ethnohistory of Events and Nonevents” was originally delivered as a presidential address by Ray Fogelson at the 1988 American Society for Ethnohistory meeting. In it he aligned himself with the French Annales school as far as its critique of a positivist, event-centered view of history is concerned, and he encouraged ethnohistorians to attend to various kinds of “nonevents” (see Kan and Turner Strong 2006: xviii).
Later published in Ethnohistory (Fogelson 1989), this very important and frequently cited article offered a typology of nonevents, including nonrecognition (or nonvalorization) of what others consider eventful occurrences (as in political events), imagined events (as in prophecies or rumors), latent (unrecognized) events, erasures (as in a society’s conscious adoption of a low profile, or the repression of a traumatic event),1 and mythic or “epitomizing” events (as in the Cherokee narrative of the demise of the Aní-kutáni priesthood that Ray analyzed in...
