A term from
ethnography, referring to an approach that emphasizes the personal, local-oriented, and internal nature of the data the
anthropologist is gathering. The emic approach tends to emphasize
personal interviews and
cultural consultants, and be
descriptive rather than very
analytic. A
culture's
biases and
values are considered as important as the scientific
data. Generally bias is considered inevitable, and the culture's bias preferred to the scientist's.
The term can also be used, often in direct opposition to etic, to distiguish between a culture's perspective and an archetypal or crosscultural perspective. For example, a description of American Thanksgiving as a commemoration of the early European settlements in America would be emic; calling it a typical autumn harvest festival would be etic.
The terms were popularized by anthropologist Marvin Harris (1968) and are back-formations from the linguistic terms phonetic and phonemic.