Cross-Cultural

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Emics and Etics, The Insider/Outsider Debate – edited by Thomas N Headland, Kenneth L Pike and Marvin Harris
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17 Aug. 2004 - 11:40:00 AM

Emics and Etics, The Insider/Outsider Debate – edited by Thomas N Headland, Kenneth L Pike and Marvin Harris

Pub. Sage Publications Inc. Newbury Park, CA 1990

On the Emics and Ethics of Pike and Harris – Kenneth L Pike

An emic unit, in my view, is a physical or mental item or system treated by insiders as relevant to their system of behaviour and as the same emic unit in spite of etic variability.  Appropriateness of an emic unit includes the feature of its relevant occurrence in relation to the total cultural pattern of an individual or society (e.g. involving the purposes of a person in relation to the set of philosophical presuppositions shared with his or her culture).

“Tagmeme” a special kind of emic unit.

In my view the emic concept bridges the troublesome gap between idea and thing.

“I would personally expect that the study of emic, local cultural differences in developed entropy patterns, and the etic comparison of cross-cultural differences and likenesses between them, would turn out to be very important, in the future, to our understanding of the dilemmas of the human race. Utopian dreams must cope with the cross-cultural horror of an observed continuing tendency toward a process of social entropy.”

Emics and Etics Revisited – Marvin Harris

Emic statements refer to logico-empirical systems whose phenomenal distinctions or “things” are built up out of contrasts and discriminations significant, meaningful, real, accurate, or in some other fashion regarded as appropriate by the actors themselves.

See Marvin Harris – “The Nature of Cultural Things” [1964].

… etic analyses, ..stand or fall on their contribution to predictive or retrodictive nonothetic theories about the evolution of sociocultural differences and similarities.

The bigger the social problem, the less likely that it can be accounted for by emically valid intentions and the more likely that there are no elicitable emic accounts that match the etic behavioural accounts.  For example the makers of motor cars do not intend to produce traffic jams and pollution.

Underlying the frequency with which intentions and social consequences do not match is the fact that much of social life, even in band and village societies, is a product of intersecting and often conflicting meanings and intentions. In chiefdoms and states, these intersections and conflicts often take the form of a struggle between men and women, social classes, factions, and ethnic, religious, and racial groups, the outcome of which cannot conceivably be predicted or retrodicted even with the most perfect knowledge of the emic cultures of the participants.

It is only through etic accounts of behaviour streams events that unintended outcomes, or outcomes intended but dependent on differential amounts of power, can be predicted or retrodicted.    Moreover the importance of etic behavioural accounts necessarily increases with the span of time over which one seeks explanations for sociocultural differences and similarities.  For anthropologists who are concerned with the evolution of culture from remote times to the present, there is no alternative to etic descriptions.`