The Pandemic of Emic (and the pathetic of etic?)
Kenneth L. Pike’s massive 1954 opus in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics takes one of its cues from Roman Jakobson’s useful distinction between phonetics and phonemics. The former is the linguist’s scientific rendition of a language in question, the latter’s how it is actually spoken by the native. Shortening these terms to ‘etic’ and ‘emic’, Pike coined a duet of discursive diminutives that, over the course of a half a century, became standard fare across the disciplines. No doubt such success was beyond his original expectations. What he never would have suspected, however, was that the emic, which by definition was to be understood as non-discursive, would haul itself into serious discourse and of its own accord. But this is precisely what we have witnessed, especially in the 21st century, as a multi-generational fashion for vaulting social, and even mere personal, experience into objectificity has overtaken epistemology itself. In short, the native’s point of view has come of scientific age.
Though the emic was a necessity in and to any ethnography – sometimes communicated by the so-called ‘key informant’, which in many a classic anthropological study from the colonial period, turned out to be the pith helmet’s only informant, and just as often, an entire village desired to speak; in such cases, the anthropologist realized he had discovered rifts within even the smallest scale societies – it was never considered, nor was it ever to be considered, the final word on how things ‘really were’. It is well known that none of us, as children of specific cultural and historical periods, can see the entirety of the forest no matter how minutely we see a few of its trees. The immediate implication here is, of course, that we lack the big picture, and this expresses itself with morbid delicacy in our geopolitics. By 1961, Edmund Leach was one of the first in-house critics of this kind of ethnography, wherein the emic was given center stage. Not only was it titillating, even thrilling, to listen to the ‘’wild’ voices describe their world and how they lived in it – Malinowski’s 1929 ‘The Sexual Life of Savages’ was a best seller in the interwar period – these varied valedictions valorized the average reader, who could see herself living this or that way, if only she could escape the bonds of her own stale stoicism. If Woolf epitomized this theme in her novels, the female prisoner of both society and her own soul the leitmotif of early literary feminism, then it was the ethnographer who directly competed with the novelist in alluding to the European’s bad conscience following the Great War, and along far more than just lines of gender and sexuality.
A rakish and reckless wit might exclaim, ‘If the ‘queerest’ of queer theorists, if the ‘blackest’ of black scholars, only knew!’ The emic, well before it was even given a useful epithet, had begun its lengthy ascent to discursive dominance as soon as the earliest of ethnographers began to listen to it. Perhaps the first ‘moment’ in this careening anti-epistemological career occurred by the mid-19th century, in a footnote to a Bureau of American Ethnology publication in which an extended narrative taken from one indigenous fellow is disputed by another, the second man being reported simply as ‘Two Crows denies this’. Does he indeed.
This is the entire problem with any emic point of view: it lacks the ability to self-verify. The novelist well knows that veridicity and verity are two quite different things. That is perhaps the hallmark of good fiction; that it isn’t real but it comes across as being so. Whether or not Woolf herself confused the two is as maybe, but certainly many of her acolytes over the succeeding century have quite happily done so. If one enlightened thing can be said about the colonial ethnographers, none of them were deluded into imagining that what the native said about anything could be taken as the truth entire. And when I say, anything, I mean anything at all. It was only with the advent of the fourth generation of anthropological studies that we find the emic and the etic beginning to bleed into one another, and thus what was once ethnography beginning to read more like a novel. Experiential immersion was the goal of these experimental texts, and as brilliantly expository as they are, they are nonetheless not representations of scientific observation. Not quite emic, neither etic, narratives such as the superb ‘Nine Dayak Nights’ by Geddes or Radin’s ‘Primitive Man as Philosopher’ contain much beauty and perspective alike. But while these persons, however ‘primitive’, can certainly be poets, sorcerers, even journalists, they cannot be scientists, let alone philosophers. None of us can be either of these, without the extensive training and worldly outlook that all traditional cultures notoriously lack.
While anthropology had belatedly heard the call of emic-based book sales, some anthropologists, and in the case of Jung, even one or two psychologists and mythologists, had heard the call of the emic itself. ‘Going native’ is surely a cliché, once again more entertaining in the hands of a novelist than ever in an ethnographer herself, but within that moment of regression-conversion, there is tacit another element of the emic’s discursive ascent. While we can leave it to Peter Gabriel and other modern musical sorcerers and poets to celebrate Jung and the like, we ourselves must press on with distinguishing fact and fancy. In doing so, we discover that the heedless headlong hurry to place emicity and its prenatal perch, along with its attendant rustic logic of the log, atop contemporary ivory pillars, is actually based on the resentment the dominant discourse feels for itself. For back-dropping the pandemic of the emic is the pathetic of the etic.
If the world of the native is parochial, never moving beyond its own limited horizons, the worldcraft of the etic is absent of humanity-as-it-is. By the mid-1960s, this had become self-evident, and Geertz was one of the leading figures in the attempt to construct a ‘middle-range theory’ of humankind. Still far too discursive to satisfy the provincial palette of the emic ‘voice’, a scant decade later we would witness the beginning of today’s penchant for ‘social location’, the much-vaunted marque of apparent authenticity in the human sciences. If Geddes were a Chanel, Patricia Hill Collins might be a Diane von Furstenberg, who staunchly maintains that ‘we women are stronger than men’, and such-like. At once we are told that social location cannot by itself generate discourse, while at the same time, in every such study, this is precisely what occurs. The emic is no longer merely only a means to an etic, it itself has become the etic. What this means for human understanding is tantamount to the attestation that science does not exist, only the ‘voices’ of individuals, limited and inexperienced as they are.
Overlaid upon such voices is the chorus of vox humana emanating from the locational theorist. In a very real sense, this is little different from any colonial ethnography; it is only ‘post’ colonial because some local is now the anthropologist and she doesn’t wear a pith helmet proper but some recognizably native gear that somehow vouchsafes against her own parochiality. The indigenous anthropologist writing about his own culture is certainly interesting and presents a perhaps more-validating manner of retelling the emic than having to go through the foreign ethnographer, part court reporter part parish priest part dime novelist as he may have been, but it is no less biased and no more authentic. We say this because authenticity is not autobiography, not even biography. And social location studies in fact read more like distended autohagiographies than anything else, mimicking many, if not most, contemporary novels. This is the key: that we have forsaken the scholarly and ethical work necessary to distance ourselves from our own dreary druthers. The result is a social science that looks like Subaltern Salvation Army tracts and novels that read like diarrhetic diaries.
Pike, and especially his genius teacher, Edward Sapir, would have been appalled, no doubt. Even so, the fault lies somewhere near their feet, just as Sapir’s own teacher, Boas, the person who essentially invented cultural anthropology, opened the discursive door perhaps a hair too far in also inventing the concept of cultural relativism. As a student of hermeneutics, I would be last person to argue that there is but one truth in the world, or even but one world in truth. What I do suggest, however, and this in the face all the varied voices of such worlds, is that we must not lose sight of the very point of self-study; it is to reveal the self’s misrecognitions and misunderstandings of itself, and not to revel in its own limitations, neither revolt against the history of consciousness as an objectifying force, nor to revile the three millennia tradition of insight, groping and gradual, into the essence of what makes humanity our shared lot, gift and task alike.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, education, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.