Emic/Etic Distinction

Linguist Kenneth L. Pike, in 1954, coined the terms emic and etic from phonemic and phonetic. Pike used emic to refer to the intrinsic cultural distinctions meaningful to the members of a cultural group and etic to refer to the extrinsic ideas and categories meaningful for researchers.

For example, modern medical science defines “diseases” in precise, culture-free (etic) ways for any patient, whereas traditional peoples define “illnesses” differently based on their particular cultural contexts (emically). Western botanists categorize flora and fauna etically, based on the Linnaean taxonomy, whereas indigenous peoples categorize them emically, based on their particular folk-science worldview. Some cultures in Papua, New Guinea (PNG) classify bats with “birds” rather than “mammals” because they fly like most birds. Optical physicists divide the color spectrum according to the wavelength of light etically, whereas local peoples divide it in different ways into emically meaningful divisions based on their languages and cultures. For example, the Selepet people of PNG use a single color term that includes the English yellow, orange, and brown.

Anthropologist Marvin Harris borrowed the terms from Pike in 1964 and applied them to his own cultural materialism method of studying cultures. Misunderstanding Pike, he used the terms very differently. Pike had argued for an emic approach to studying a culture if one wanted to understand it correctly. In contrast, Harris defined the emic method as referring to the ideal reasons the natives give for their customs, and he used etics to refer to the subconscious real reasons for customs. For example, the Yanomami Indians say they raid enemy villages to kidnap young women (an emic explanation, in Harris’s definition); but the real etic reason, which the Indians don’t recognize, is that the enemy villages are encroaching on the scarce wild game resources needed by the raiding group.

COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGISTS follow Pike in using the emic/etic concept as a research method, whereas cultural materialists use the method as Harris remodeled it. This resulted in some confusion among anthropologists and linguists by the 1970s as to what emics and etics were supposed to mean. By the 1980s, the terms were appearing in many of the writings of social scientists. The meanings of the terms had multiplied in many more directions, in part because the emic/etic concept was now being used in other academic disciplines (including psychology, sociology, medicine, psychiatry, economics, and religion). These new meanings are described by Headland, Pike, and Harris (1990, pp. 15–23).

One commonality in both Pike’s and Harris’s models of emics and etics was that they both agreed that an emic description of a culture is not necessarily a model of which the natives are consciously aware. Even though many definitions refer to the emic model as the insider’s view, that is not always so. Whereas emic constructs may make sense to those who hold them, those people often are not aware of them unless an outside ethnographer explains their own emic constructs to them.