Emic and Etic Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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”Emic” and ”etic” have become shorthand terms, especially in anthropology, for an ”insider” versus an ”outsider” view of a particular social world. For example, an outsider view of an economic exchange might hold that a seller’s goal is to maximize profit. An insider view from people actually involved in the exchange might show that profit was not the concern. Kinship ties, a long relationship history, previous social favors, earlier non-cash trades, a desire to curry favor – such social threads in a relationship might result in an exchange that, to an outsider, would look ”irrational,” while to an insider it would make perfect sense.

The distinction between emic and etic, insider and outsider, originated in the linguistics of the 1950s, most famously in the work of Kenneth Pike (1967). In the 1960s, anthropology borrowed and shortened the linguist’s distinction between phonetic and phonemic and began talking about ”etic” and ”emic.” But the abbreviated concepts were applied to ethnography as a whole, not just to language.

Because of debates between ”materialist” or etic and ”symbolic” or emic approaches to anthropology, ”etic” and ”emic” turned into labels for competing kinds of ethnographic descriptions. This was a fundamental error, since neither the original linguistic concepts nor their development in cognitive anthropology had defined an ”either/or” use of the terms. The shift to etic/emic as a partition of the ethnographic space rather than a dialectic process by which it was explored introduced distortion into the use of the terms that continues to this day. The question should not be, does one do emic or etic ethnography? The question should be, how does one tack back and forth between human universals and the shape of a particular social world at the time an ethnographer encounters it. That was the original sense of emic and etic in phonology.

Bibliography:

D’Andrade, R. G. (1995) The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Pike, K. L. (1967) Language in Relation to a Unified Theory ofHuman Behavior. Mouton, The Hague.