Blackwell Reference Online

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“Emic” and “etic” have become shorthand terms, especially in anthropology, for an “insider” versus an “outsider” view of a particular social world. For example, an outsider view of an economic exchange might hold that the seller's goal was to maximize profit. An insider view from people actually involved in the exchange might show that profit was only one of many concerns. Kinship ties, a long relationship history, previous social favors, earlier non-cash trades, a desire to curry favor – such social threads in a relationship might result in an exchange that, to an outsider, would look “irrational,” while to an insider it would make perfect sense. The distinction between emic and etic, insider and outsider, originated in the linguistics of the 1950s, most famously in the work of Kenneth Pike (1967) . Linguists of that era were primarily concerned with learning and describing unwritten languages in field settings. As part of this larger task, they had to master the phonology, or sound system. As a means to this end, they created a notational system that allowed them to describe all possible sounds that the human organism can produce. This notational system was called phonetics, and that term later became abbreviated to etic. Phonetics offered a classification of sounds that humans could produce, given the physiological possibilities of the articulatory system. Training tapes, much ... log in or subscribe to read full text