etic / emic
Mar. 15th, 2011 07:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordetic (EH-tik) - adj., of, relating to, or involving a description of a culture using the concepts and categories of the anthropologist's culture.
emic (EE-mik) - adj., of, relating to, or involving a description of a culture using the concepts and categories of the culture being described.
So the former strives (or pretends) to be culturally neutral, while the latter does not -- but which is nonetheless valuable for demonstrating what the culture values and omits. Note that this does not exactly map to outsider and insider descriptions: someone inside a culture can create an etic description and someone outside it can create an emic description (for example, good works of anthropological science fiction are emic description of a culture that the author cannot be a member of because it's fictional). Coined in 1954 by the anthropologist Kenneth Pike from phonetic and phonemic, to create athropological concepts related to those in linguistics.
---L.
emic (EE-mik) - adj., of, relating to, or involving a description of a culture using the concepts and categories of the culture being described.
So the former strives (or pretends) to be culturally neutral, while the latter does not -- but which is nonetheless valuable for demonstrating what the culture values and omits. Note that this does not exactly map to outsider and insider descriptions: someone inside a culture can create an etic description and someone outside it can create an emic description (for example, good works of anthropological science fiction are emic description of a culture that the author cannot be a member of because it's fictional). Coined in 1954 by the anthropologist Kenneth Pike from phonetic and phonemic, to create athropological concepts related to those in linguistics.
---L.
