File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-05-17.000, message 4


From: "termite-AT-worker.com" <termite-AT-worker.com>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 17:00:44 +0000
Subject: Re: BHA: People's ideas


I'm just a civilian lurker on this list, but it seems to me that the
following few paragraphs from Marvin Harris's _Cultural Materialism_
(1979) might be useful at this point:

"Since both the observer's point of view and the participants' point 
of view can be presented objectively or subjectively, depending on 
the adequacy of the empirical observations employed by the observer, 
we cannot use the words 'objective' and 'subjective' to denote the 
operation in question without creating a great deal of confusion. To 
avoid this confusion, many anthropologists have begun to use the 
terms 'emic' and 'etic,' which were first introduced by the 
anthropological linguist Kenneth Pike in his book _Language in 
Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior_.

"Emic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of the native 
informant to the status of ultimate judbe of the adequacy of the 
observer's descriptions and analyses. The test of the adequacy of the 
emic analyses is their ability to generate statements the native 
accepts as real, meaningful, or appropriate. In carrying out research 
in the emic mode, the observer attempts to acquire a knowledge of the 
categories and rules one must know in order to think and act as a 
native. One attempts to learn, for example, what rules lie behind the 
use of the same kin term for mother and mother's sister among the 
Bathonga; or one attempts to learn when it is appropriate to shame 
one's guests among the Kwakiutl.

"Etic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of observers to 
the status of ultimate judges of the categories and concepts used in 
descriptions and analyses. The test of the adequacy of etic accounts 
is simply their ability to generate scientifically productive 
theories about the causes of sociocultural differences and 
similarities. Rather than employ the concepts that are necessarily 
real, meaningful, and appropriate from the native point of view, the 
observer is free to use alien categories and rules derived from the 
data language of science. Frequently, etic operations involve the 
measurement and juxtaposition of activities and events the native 
informants may find inappropriate or meaningless." (p. 32)

And this, which distinguishes Harris's position from Pike's:

"In the cultural materialist research strategy, etic analysis is not 
a steppingstone to the discovery of emic structures, but to the 
discovery of etic structures. The intent is neither the convert etics 
to emics nor emics to etics, but rather to describe both and if 
possible to explain one in terms of the other [i.e., emics in terms 
of etics]." (p. 36)

Of course, if this seems irrelevant to the current discussion, please ignore it.


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