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Oleo de José Tola
From: Susana
Date: 2/4/99
Time: 11:09:57 AM
Remote Name: 130.68.50.16
Excellent Luis! How could I have forgotten Pike? Hymes (1974) also elaborates on the etic/emic distinction. Sapir made a very astute observation regarding the a rule of avoidance among the Wishram Chinook (i.e., an emic account of their behavior): "If the avoidance of man and woman here were known only objectively it would present a situation resembling that, say, in Melanesia. One might suppose then the explanation to be that women were set apart from the man's social fabric because of the low esteem in which they were held, or that men avoided them because of their periodic impure state. Either guess would be a shot far wide of the mark. The moral is that it is as necessary to discover WHAT the native sentiment is as well as to RECORD the behavior." He goes on to explain that the Wishram avoidance is due to the severe punishment, even death, visited upon violators for 'constructive' adultery (Hymes, 1974:11). Hymes states "that an "emic" account is one in terms of features relevant in the behavior in question"; whereas an "etic" account, "however useful as a preliminary grid and input to an emic (structural) account, or as a framework for comparing different emic accounts, lacks the emic account's validity." Thus, according to Hymes, "no amount of acoustic apparatus and sound spectrography can crack the phonemic code of a language, and a phonemic analysis, based on the intersubjective objectivity in the behavior of those who share the code," is crucial for further experimental or ethnographic studies.