ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a survey and explication of a new approach in ethnography – of what one might well call ‘the New Ethnography’ were it not for that label’s pejorative implications for practitioners of other kinds of ethnography. Culture-free features of the real world may be called ‘etics’. The label may also be applied to features which are not truly culture-free, but which at least have been derived from the examination of more than one culture, or to the sum of all the significant attributes in the folk classifications of all cultures. A componential analysis is an analysis of a paradigm in terms of the defining features, the ‘dimensions of contrast’ of ‘criterial attributes’ of the segregates in the set. Ethnoscience differs from G. C. Simpson’s ‘theoretical science’ in that it refers to the ‘reduction of chaos’ achieved by a particular culture, rather than to the ‘highest possible and conscious degree’ to which such chaos may be reduced.
