Emic

Conceptual Overview

Pike derived emic unit from the concept of phoneme, a meaningful element of sound in a particular language. For example, tones convey phonemic differences in word meanings in the indigenous American tonal languages that Pike studied. Generalizing from phoneme, Pike coined the word “tagmeme” to refer to the meaning of a grammatical construction, and “behavioreme” to refer to the meaning of a behavior. He later dropped the term “behavioreme” in favor of “emic unit.” In Pike's view, explicit statements about meaningful behaviors implicitly refer to other aspects of behavior and meaning.

Emic analysis focuses on one culture at a time, but theoretical systems developed in other societies (see the entry for “etic”) are what Pike calls an essential initial approach to an alien system. Central to Pike's methodology is that a newcomer must systematically combine prior theory with the general human capacity to intuit when learning an emic system. Emic analysis discovers emic units; it does not create them. Since an emic unit is embedded within a set of meanings that abstractions only partially re-create, an emic unit is not created by being defined. Explicit knowledge rests on a tacit or nonconscious base. The conclusions of an emic analysis are adequate to the extent that they correspond to the intuition of someone living within the emic system, hence the link of “emic standpoint” to “insider perspective.” An emic unit is successfully identified when an insider responds to it as being different from other emic units.

Pike used the distinction between insiders' and outsiders' experience as a heuristic base to formalize the application of phoneme to behavior. He does so by referring to the insider (linked to emic) compared to the outsider (linked to etic) perspective in language analysis.

A newcomer inevitably begins from theoretical rather than emic understanding and presents theoretical conclusions to other outsider analysts. However, the newcomer increasingly develops an emic stance in personal interactions with a system. The transition to emic understanding is analogous to language learning. The language learner begins by translating unfamiliar words into his or her first language. The learner progresses to the point where words include meaning in relation to other words in the second language and to the experiences of native speakers. Pike developed a procedure for learning unwritten languages that relied heavily on induction and largely bypassed translation. This procedure encouraged cultural anthropologists to use inductive methods and has influenced other fields as well.

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