ABSTRACT
It was through the work of Harris in the 1960s that most anthropologists
were introduced to the concepts ‘emic’ and ‘etic’, terms borrowed from linguistics where they refer respectively to distinctions which are recognized
within a given natural language (the phonemic) and distinctions which are
recognized by the science of linguistics (the phonetic) (Pike 1954). The con-
cepts have come to be used rather differently within anthropology (Head-
man 1990). In the late 1980s a debate related to ‘native’ anthropology found
a new usage for the concepts. Davies (1988) argued for an Islamic anthro-
pology that only relied on native (emic) rather than western sociological
(etic) terms. That is, she was arguing against an anthropology that relied mostly on European analytical tools in order to understand social phe-
nomena, and for an anthropology which used terms from outside the West
as a way of combating intellectual hegemony. Tapper (1995) published a
rejoinder to Davies,1 arguing that by the time native terms were defined so
that anthropologists could understand them, you might as well use the
translated terms, otherwise you ran the danger of creating a closed herme-
neutic system. Both scholars, however, missed an interesting point: anthro-
pology does use, as part of its etic structures, several emic terms and concepts introduced from other societies – kula, potlatch, shaman, and taboo, for
example. Even the more marginal anthropology of Japan relies on a sort of
shorthand in English that non-Japanese speaking students find confusing:
amae, furusato, nihonjinron, ie, to name a few.
