Native Points of View

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

In the 19th century a number of scholars made use of missionary and military reports, as well as the accounts of travelers, to develop evolutionary models of a single, overarching human culture. These scholars consistently placed non-Western, small-scale societies near the bottom of the evolutionary scale. The models themselves tended to be ethnocentric, and suffered from various methodological and theoretical problems. As a reaction to some of these problems, Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, and others called for the ethnographic study of diverse cultures based on field work involving participant observation, and on an attempt to understand various beliefs and practices from the point of view of the cultural insider. These ideas are now firmly embedded in ethnographic practice.

How researchers have attempted to understand the insider's point of view, however, has differed greatly in terms of both theory and method. Researchers making use of the componential analysis or ethnoscience approach, for example, focused on language and the construction of folk taxonomies to gain a glimpse into how specific individuals gave order and meaning to various phenomena. Ethnomethodologists violated conventional ways of speaking (and sometimes behaving) to elicit responses that would provide a clue to the unspoken assumptions or “commonsense knowledge” people use to understand their interactions with others. While, in contrast, a relatively small number of researchers have engaged in the ethnographic study of their own people (insider research), sometimes through the use of self-reflection and personal narratives (autoethnography), to challenge external representations of their particular community or social group.

The explicit distinction between emic and etic perspectives derives from the linguistic and behavioral research of Kenneth Pike in the 1960s. For Pike, the emic perspective examines how members of a particular society make sense of thought and behavior through the application of implicit structural rules that focus on culturally significant similarities and/or differences between phenomena. In other words, as Marvin Harris has pointed out, the aim of the researcher is to describe the thought processes that underlie people's actions—as the cultural insiders themselves would understand these processes. The etic perspective addresses cross-cultural issues in thought and behavior, including the researcher's attempt to apply theoretical or analytical concepts to make sense of what she or he observes in the field.

By the late 1980s a number of scholars began to critique some of the earlier etic and emic studies for depicting culture, and by implication the “native point of view,” as consistent, homogeneous, and constant. Today, ethnographers not only accept the idea that “the native point of view” may play a significant role in case study research, but also the notion that there are a number of alternative and context-dependent points of view within any social group.

Application

Lila Abu-Lughod has been instrumental in pointing out the need to move away from representations and generalizations that depict people, their culture, and the ways they think and behave in simplistic and quasi-stereotypical terms. She argues that case study research should focus on the complexities of people's life experiences, and the variable nature of meaning (cross-cultural, intracultural, and from one situational context to another). In order to achieve these goals, Abu-Lughod has made use of both a reflexive approach to ethnography, and a focus on the narratives of a small, select group of Awalad ‘Ali Bedouin women in Egypt—women of different generations, but linked together by various kinship ties.

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