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Oleo de José Tola
From: Still confused about emic vs. etic? Perhaps this might help!
Date: 2/8/99
Time: 8:12:40 PM
Remote Name: 205.188.197.171
From Microsoft Encarta '99 Encyclopedia
"In the 1950s anthropologists began to distinguish between two ways of interpreting culture: from an emic perspective and from an etic perspective. The people native to a society have an emic understanding of its culture. Someone who comes from outside a society, such as an anthropologist, gains an etic understanding of its culture. Traditional ethnographies, written from an etic perspective, describe and analyze each aspect of a society’s culture in detail. Many early anthropological books, for example, discuss each aspect of culture in its own chapter or section. On the other hand, the people within a society can provide an emic description of their culture. Such a description rarely resembles an anthropological interpretation. People living within a particular culture do not usually analyze its meaning. They do not think, for instance, about why they perform one kind of ceremony rather than another, or why they produce food one way rather than another. A native of the United States, for example, might say that Americans commonly go to the movies on Friday and Saturday nights but not discuss or even understand the significance of this behavior. Anthropologists, on the other hand, specialize in comparing and analyzing cultures. For this reason, anthropologists have traditionally regarded immersion in a foreign culture as a fundamental part of doing research. Still, they remain outsiders. But in the 1960s some anthropologists began attempting to describe and analyze culture from an emic perspective, as an insider experiences it.