Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The future of emic and etic
As *Lévi-Strauss (1985:115–20) has pointed out, the emic level is the level of perception. People do not understand sounds as sounds, but through the phonological structure of their language. Likewise, people understand actions or words only through the culture they possess. Thus, in Lévi-Strauss’s view, the materialist objection to the emic as merely culture-specific and not based on objective principles does not hold. The †poststructuralist objection to the etic is more difficult to counter on a philosophical level. However, the simple answer to this apparent dilemma is to seek objectivity, while realizing that it is elusive. Clearly, etic models can exist as heuristic devices, but they are as problematic as emic ones to define precisely.
The concepts ‘emic’ and ‘etic’, although less often discussed today than in the past, are implicit in more recent anthropological approaches, even postmodernist and reflexive ones, where they exist as exemplars of the contradictions in anthropology itself. They are also taking on new significance in *regional analysis and regional comparison. A defining feature of the classic emic approach is that ideology or behaviour is studied from ‘within’ the cultural system. This implies that only one cultural system can be studied at a time, and in the past the cultural system was often taken as equivalent to one culture or society.
Yet, for those who define cultural systems more broadly, i.e., who draw their boundaries around a wider geographical area, renewed interest in a more elaborate version of the emic/etic distinction shows promise.
ALAN BARNARD
See also: language and linguistics, psychological anthropology
Further reading
Conklin, H.C. ([1962] 1969) ‘Lexical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies’ in S.A.Tyler (ed.) Cognitive Anthropology, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Frake, C.O. (1980 ) Language and Cultural Description: Essays by Charles 0.Frake (Selected and Introduced by Anwar S. Dil), Stanford: Stanford University Press
Goodenough, W.H. (1956) ‘Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning’, Language 32 (1):195–216
Harris, M. (1976) ‘History and Significance of the Emic-Etic Distinction’, Annual Review of Anthropology 5: 329–50
Headland, T., K.L.Pike and M.Harris (eds) (1990) Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate, Newbury Park: Sage Publications
Jorion, P. (1983) ‘Emic and Etic: Two Anthropological Ways of Spilling Ink’, Cambridge Anthropology 8 (3): 41–68
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985) The View from Afar (trans. J.Neurgroschel and P.Hoss), New York: Basic Books
Pike, K.L. ([1954] 1967) Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (2nd edn), The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co.
Tyler, S.A. (ed.) (1969) Cognitive Anthropology, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
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