Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate

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Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN KENNETH PIKE AND MARVIN HARRIS
ON EMICS AND ETICS
Thomas N. Headland
This essay originally appeared as chapter 1 in the book Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider
Debate, edited by Thomas Headland, Kenneth Pike, and Marvin Harris (published in 1990 by Sage
Publications). It reviews the history and development of the emic/etic concept, the differences in
conceptualization of the concept between Pike and Harris, and how the public debate between Pike
and Harris came about in 1988 at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
This essay is also posted online at www.sil.org/~headlandt/ee-intro.htm.
The 1990 book itself, where this essay appears, was critically reviewed in the following journals:
Contemporary Sociology: An Int’l J of Reviews 20, 1991; Australian J of Linguistics 11, 1991;
J of Asian Studies 50, 1991; Tidsskrift for Samfunnsforskning 32, 1991; American Anthropologist
94, 1992; Guowai Yuyanxui [Linguistics Abroad] 1992 [published in Beijing]; Man 27, 1992;
History of the Human Sciences 5, 1992; Discourse and Society 3, 1992; J of Amer. Folklore 105,
1992; Missiology 21, 1993; Reviews in Anthropology 22, 1993; Semiotica 95, 1993;
Contributions to Indian Sociology 27, 1993; Philosophy of the Soc Sciences 23, 1993; J of Cross
Cultural Psy 25, 1994; and Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 26, 1995. The book has been
cited in 586 journal articles (Google Scholar 4-2-2016).
In November 1988 the Program Committee of the American Anthropological Association
and the General Anthropology Division, also a part of the AAA, joined together to sponsor an
Invited Session at the Association's 87th Annual Meeting on the subject of the history and
significance of emics and etics. The hundreds of professional scientists in the audience who sat
through that four-hour discussion bear witness to my conjecture that this meeting of two great
scholars--Kenneth Pike and Marvin Harris--may go down as one of the significant events of the
decade in American anthropology. I introduced the topic and speakers to the audience by reading
an earlier version of this present chapter. Five other scholars participated as discussants with Pike
and Harris on this panel. These were Dell Hymes, James Lett, Gerald Murray, Nira Reiss, and
Roger Keesing. All of them except Keesing revised their papers into chapters for this volume.
Subsequent to the Meeting, three other scholars accepted invitations to write papers for the
volume: John Berry, Robert Feleppa, and Willard Quine. Their chapters are included herein.
How did this meeting come about? More importantly, how did the terms emic and etic come
about, what do they mean today, and why have they become so popular?
My academic career has been heavily influenced by both Kenneth Pike and Marvin Harris. I
first studied with Pike in 1958 at the University of Oklahoma, and my wife and I wrote our first
two articles under his tutelage at a linguistic workshop he conducted in the Philippines in 1963
(J. Headland 1966; Headland and Wolfenden 1968). My acquaintance with Harris came
somewhat later, in the middle 1970s, when Bion Griffin, an anthropologist at the University of
Hawaii who was trying to lure me from ethnosemantics to cultural materialism, sent me a
photocopy of a chapter out of Harris's 1968 book. That chapter was titled “Emics, Etics, and the
New Ethnography.” Since then, I have read a good bit of Harris's writings; and his ideas, perhaps
even more than Pike's, have had a keen influence in the directions of my own research. I never
actually studied under Harris, however, and indeed I met him for the first time only in 1987.
Both Harris and Pike are famous worldwide as leading theoreticians, Harris in anthropology
and Pike in linguistics. Both men are philosophers, and each has written about 250 articles and 25
books. Both men are founders of important theoretical paradigms: Pike's (1967) Tagmemics in

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linguistics and Harris's (1979) Cultural Materialism in anthropology. While I do not fully agree
with the theoretical schools of thought developed by either Pike or Harris, both theories have
aided me in my own studies, and I recognize and appreciate the work of both of them.
Yet the two theories and the two men are so different that one would hardly expect Pike and
Harris to meet, let alone show any interest in each other. Pike is a theist; Harris is a naturalist.
Though they both share an emphasis on human behavior, Pike takes an idealist position on culture
in his studies,
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while Harris holds to a materialist concept of culture in his. Pike's tagmemics was
developed in the 1950s as a way of analyzing human languages; Harris's cultural materialism was
developed in the 1960s as a way of understanding and interpreting human culture. The concept
that brought them together, of course, was emics and etics.
How could two scientists with such different approaches--theories not even within the same
discipline--come to use the same concept (emics and etics) as a major tool in their theories? And
what happened when these two men finally met together? That is what this book is about.
Readers of this book will, I think, be delighted to find that Harris and Pike take herein what
Richard Bernstein calls a “dialogical approach” as they come together. While hardly in agreement
on the topic of this volume--indeed, as the reader will soon see, they hold rival philosophic
orientations--these two scholars avoid “the adversarial confrontational style” which would prove
unproductive to most of us. In fact, Harris and Pike herein reflect a style of argument that
Bernstein (1989:16-17) has recently appealed to:
Conflict and disagreement are unavoidable in our pluralistic situation. . . . What matters is
how we respond to conflict. . . . [Rather than an] “adversarial” or “confrontational” style of
argumentation, . . . [where] the other is viewed as an opponent, . . . [in a dialogical encounter] one
begins with the assumption that the other has something to . . . contribute to our understanding.
The initial task is to grasp the other's position in the strongest possible light, . . . in which we can
understand our differences. The other is not an adversary or an opponent, but a conversational
partner. . . . One does not seek to score a point by exploiting the other's weaknesses; rather, one
seeks to strengthen the other's argument as much as possible so as to render it plausible, . . . [a]
dialogical encounter where we reasonably explore our differences and conflicts.
In the chapters to follow, we will see that Pike and Harris come surprisingly close to the
ideal Bernstein is talking about. It is their style of argumentation which makes this volume worth
reading.
Pike was the person who first coined the terms emics and etics, and who first used them in
print in 1954 (Pike [1954] 1967 ). Harris first used the terms in print in The Nature of Cultural
Things (1964), where he cites Pike. I suppose that the terms were a regular part of my own
vocabulary by the early 1960s, but it was not until the '70s that I realized how widespread and
popular the terms had become among anthropologists. And it was not until the late '80s that I
realized that the terms were being used in other disciplines unrelated to linguistics and
anthropology.
By the early '80s, in fact, I was becoming increasingly fascinated with the confusion I found
in people's definitions of the terms, and the distinctions that those definitions were supposed to
produce. I was sometimes surprised to hear anthropologists and linguists explain the terminology
to students in ways with which I disagreed. And since in the middle '70s I was running with the
“New Ethnography” paradigm, it took me a long time to accept Harris's use of the concept as a
part of cultural materialism.

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Part of the confusion is that Pike and Harris not only do not use the concept in the same way,
but that they differ in their applications and definitions of the terms. This problem will come out
clearly in subsequent chapters of this volume. Various authors have criticized Harris (Howard
1968; Merrifield 1968; Burling 1969:826-827; Goodenough 1970:112-114; Fisher and Werner
1978) or defended him (Berger 1976; Marano 1982; Langness 1987:133-136) for his unique
applications of the emic/etic notion, while others have attempted to explain the differences
between Pike's and Harris's uses of it (Pelto 1970:67-86; Arnold 1971:22; Durbin 1972:384-385;
Kensinger 1975:72-73; Jahoda 1977, 1983; Fisher and Werner 1978; Lett 1987; Feleppa
1986:244-245; 1988), including Harris himself (1976, 1979:34-38). I found only one paper
(Ekstrand and Ekstrand 1986) that criticizes Pike for the way he defines the terms. Based on their
view of the etymology of the Greek roots from which emic and etic are derived, these authors
rather boldly claim that Pike is guilty of “false analogy” and “confusion” because he put his own
meanings into the terms, which are the opposite of what they should be (p. 5).
Sometimes we dream. As I recall, it was sometime in 1985 that I began to daydream about
how I might possibly get Harris and Pike together where I could listen to them hammer out with
each other just what they mean by emics and etics. As it turned out, someone beat me to the
punch. To add a little more background here, the reader should know that these two scholars
never met or corresponded with each other until 1986. In fact, though Pike was aware of Harris's
use of the emic/etic idea in the '60s (Pike 1967:34, 54), he had read next to none of Harris's works
until 1986. And although Harris had been using Pike's concept for over 20 years, they had never
communicated with each other.
Then, when Pike was lecturing in Spain in September of 1985, Gustavo Bueno, a
philosopher at the University of Oviedo mentioned to Pike that when Harris had spoken in Spain
earlier that year that he (Harris) had mentioned to Bueno that he would like to meet Pike. The
following spring Pike wrote to Harris and invited him to come to the University of Oklahoma to
meet with him and present a formal lecture to the faculty and student body of the Summer
Institute of Linguistics. Harris accepted, and the two of them, I am told, had two days of very
stimulating and cordial discussion together. That was in June of 1986.
I missed it all. I did not even hear about it until weeks later. (My family and I were just
moving back to the States from the Philippines that summer.) I did, however, have the privilege
of reading their exchange of letters which followed that eventful Oklahoma meeting.
So we can thank Professor Bueno for first getting Harris and Pike together. One must
wonder why it took so long.
When I finally met Harris in 1987 at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association in Chicago, I asked him if he would consider participating with Pike at a formal
symposium at the 1988 Annual Meeting. To my pleasant surprise, he said yes. Maybe, I thought,
I will see Pike and Harris in interaction after all. As soon as I got home from Chicago I wrote a
formal proposal to both of them, and they accepted it. The rest is history.
The Diffusion of Emics and Etics in Other Disciplines
Let us review here just how widespread the emic/etic concept has become in academic
disciplines other than linguistics and anthropology by the end of the 1980s. Today, of course, the
terms are found in common usage in the vocabularies of most anthropologists, and the distinction
has proved very useful to them. In fact, most practicing anthropologists today use insights about
the differing perceptions of reality of different subcultural groups as a principal--if not the
principal--conceptual tool of their trade. The emic/etic distinction, then, underlies one of the basic

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contributions of modern anthropology to the working world (i.e., the ability to understand and
interpret other cultures). Many anthropologists, in fact, if not other social scientists, may owe
their jobs to their ability to make the distinction between emic and etic.
In the following discussion I make a few statistical inferences about the emic/etic concept,
drawing from a bibliography compiled by Stewart Hussey (1989), which consists of 278 titles of
published articles and books that use these terms. His bibliography, compiled in a database
format, is annotated and includes several fields, some of which are displayed in summary form in
the tables of this chapter.
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The reader must keep in mind that the 278 “records” in the database
are not a random sample drawn from some library universe, but from a bibliography of all the
references using the two terms that were located through personal library research and library
computer search services.
A gradual change came in both the use and meaning of the emic/etic terms by social
scientists in the 1970s. As one might expect, there has been a geometric increase in the use of the
emic/etic terms since Pike first published on them in the 1954 edition of his major work (1967).
(See Table 1.1.) What is more interesting is how the terms diffused into other branches of science
during the '70s and at the same time became common words in the English language. This trend
is reflected in the gradual inclusion of the terms into unabridged dictionaries (see Table 1.2),
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the
spread of the terms into the journals of other disciplines (see Table 1.3), a decrease in the number
of authors who felt any need to cite Pike, or anyone else, when they used the terms in print (Table
1.4), and an increase in the number of authors who used the terms in print with no definition or
explanation, because they assumed their readers knew and understood the words (Table 1.5).
What is so fascinating is how social scientists use the terms, usually as a heuristic device, for
so many widely divergent purposes. The concept was a major tool of the ethnoscientists during
their heyday in the early '70s, of cultural materialists today, and of lexicographers for the last
quarter century. At least one archaeologist (Arnold 1971) has proposed the concept as a tool for
reconstructing cognitive systems of a people from physical contrasts in their artifacts.
Anthropologists may be less aware, however, of the many specialists in other fields who use the
idea. In fact, various uses of the terms may be found in journals of psychology, psychiatry,
sociology, folklore, semiotics, philology, medicine, nursing, public health, education, urban
studies, and management. A complete bibliography would list hundreds of publications. The
popularity of the concept in psychology is especially salient (Table 1.3), not only obvious in the
many psychology articles that use the terms (65 out of the 278 references in Hussey 1989), but
also in the several articles which discuss them in the authoritative six-volume Handbook of
Cross-Cultural Psychology (Triandis et al. 1980, 1981, 1985).
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The concept had evidently become
so common in psychology by the late '70s that one writer in that discipline stated that “currently,
the suffixes [of phonetics and phonemics] have nested themselves [so] securely in the jargon of
cross-cultural psychology [that they] are hardly ever associated with linguistics by members of
the cross-cultural guild” (Lonner 1979:19). Similarly, Alan Dundes (1962) shows how useful the
emic/etic model is for analyzing folklore, while Johnson et al. (1981) discusses its usefulness for
educational administrators.
It is interesting to note that not only do many of these hundreds of authors neglect to cite
Pike or Harris (56% in my sample),
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but that some have cited others as the source of the terms
(see, e.g., Hall 1964:155, Richards 1972:97, Adams-Price and Reese 1986, and Olmedo
1981:1081). Smith and Sluckin (1979) in citing another source do credit Harris as the early
source. A number of psychology publications--16 in Hussey's (1989) sample bibliography--cite
psychologist John Berry's (1969) now-classic paper, and not Pike, in their discussions of emics
and etics, thus leading their readers to assume Berry is the source, even though Berry states that
“Pike . . . coined the terms” (p. 123). Webster's dictionary supplements (1976, 1983) attribute the

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origin of the terms to John Algeo.
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Of course, a number of publications--7% in my sample
(19/262, see Table 1.4, column 3)--use the terms citing Harris, and not Pike, implying at least to
their readers that Harris is the source. For example, in a 1976 article in Current Anthropology
(Berger 1976), the author and five of eight commentators use the terms many times, citing
Harris's publications frequently, but Pike not at all.
Further, the terms are defined in the literature in many different and--in my view--usually
inadequate ways. (See, e.g., the various definitions in the dictionaries cited in Table 1.2.) Some
authors equate emic and etic with verbal versus nonverbal, or as specific versus universal, or as
interview versus observation, or as subjective knowledge versus scientific knowledge, or as good
versus bad, or as ideal behavior versus actual behavior, or as description versus theory, or as
private versus public, or as ethnographic (i.e., idiosyncratically uncomparable) versus
ethnological (comparable cross-culturally). One linguistic dictionary (Ducrot and Todorov
1979:36) says emic interprets events according to their particular cultural function, while etic
characterizes events only by spatio-temporal criteria. An epidemiological study on obesity
(Massara 1980) differentiates the emic/etic terms as “informal” versus “formal” research
procedures. An article in a medical journal (Weidman 1979) uses the terms 16 times, always in
italics, defining them only as “cultural/within” versus “orthodox/without”; the lengthy
bibliography in this article cites neither Pike nor Harris. In an education journal, a professor of
English (Nattinger 1978) differentiates emics and etics as “soft facts” versus “hard facts.” And
one anthropologist (Monagan 1985:353) explains the difference as “the ethnographic situation” in
contrast to “a grid from the data itself.” Another anthropologist (Sindzingre 1988:447) refers to a
“version of the emic/etic distinction” as dichotomizing between a writer who agrees with a
theoretical perspective (emic) versus one who disagrees with the perspective (“an outside
observer,” hence etic). Levi-Strauss (1972:20-23) uses the terms, but argues that the meanings of
the two words should be reversed: emic should be etic, and etic should be emic!
An example of some of the surprising meanings people give to the terms was brought home
to me one day last year when I was driving along with a group of graduate students. One of them
pointed out to the rest of us an interesting object in a nearby field. Later when the driver asked us
what we had been viewing and talking about, a student said to him, “Oh, you were driving
emically, huh?”--meaning he had only been noticing the significant items needed to be observed
through his windshield to get us safely to our destination. These students, most of whom were
then in my anthropology class, seemed to have no trouble understanding the speaker's adverbial
use of the term. But I did not agree with that semantic use; and I suspect Pike never originally
intended it to be used that way.
Hymes (1970:281-282) discusses in an early work why the most commonly applied meaning
of emic (“native [or insider's] point of view”) is inadequate and misleading, namely, that natives
normally are neither conscious of their emic system nor able to formulate it for the investigator.
(Harris reviews other interpretations in chapter 3 of this volume.)
Common dictionaries do not help us much, either, in our search for the meanings of the
terms. The just-published New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary (Webster's 1989) does little for its
readers when it defines emic with nothing more than “adj. (linguistics) have structurally
significant characteristics,” especially since it neglected to define etic at all! The 1989 20-volume
Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson and Weiner 1989), the most comprehensive English
dictionary ever published, gives inadequate glosses for the terms and attempts to illustrate the
meanings with an example quoted verbatim from a 1969 article in the journal English Studies. It
says:

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One person will shake hands with you by lifting your hand up to about shoulder height and
then drop it, another will move your hand less high and then down again, a third will “pump' it up
and down two or three times; in Western culture these may be called etic differences and can be
viewed as various realizations of the one emic element: “shaking hands' (p. 427; quoted from
Siertsema 1969:586).
Admittedly, it would be difficult to write a short dictionary gloss of the terms, but the
preceding two examples only complicate the already present confusion among students and
scientists as to their meaning. A more satisfactory definition of the words is found in the 1987
Random House Dictionary:
[Emic:] adj. Ling. pertaining to or being a significant unit that functions in contrast with
other units in a language or other system of behavior....coined by U.S. linguist Kenneth L.
Pike....[Etic:] pertaining to or being the raw data of a language or other area of behavior, without
considering the data as significant units functioning within a system (Random House 1987:637,
666).
Perhaps most of these scores of definitions are not incorrect. After all, as we scan through
many of these publications, we are forced to recognize how useful the distinction has proven to
be for different authors in so many different disciplines, as they try to communicate to their
readers.
It is obvious, for example, how heuristically helpful even the simplest and most common
definition of the concept (“insider” versus “outsider” view) has become to doctors and
psychologists attempting to diagnose illnesses of patients of another culture, or to educators
teaching in a cross-cultural setting. What is the norm in the culture of the teacher or examining
nurse may have no application in the culture of the patient or pupil. The resulting
miscommunication may be especially glaring when the world view of the latter differs from that
of the former. In psychology, one author in that field says his colleagues have only recently (in
1979) “become increasingly aware of the desperate need for an emic approach” (Ciborowski
1979:107). Clearly, the emic/etic idea has done much to help psychologists recognize that “much
of what we label as cross-cultural psychology [is] essentially centri-cultural psychology” (ibid.).
So perhaps we should not fault writers too quickly who use the terms differently from their
original meaning. Though many writers are using metaphorical extensions which go beyond (or
restrict) the original meanings of the terms, they, and their readers, find the metaphors useful. In
any case, what is certain--and intriguing--is that there are many meanings today for emics and
etics.
In current anthropological publications the terms are especially common, and usually appear
unitalicized, with no reference to their origin, and often undefined. I was thus surprised to hear
Roger Keesing say, in his discussant's comment at the November '88 symposium where most of
the present chapters were first presented, that “none of the cognitive anthropologists whose work
I have been reading in the last ten years use those terms any more. . . . [The concept] lives on
[only] in the periphery. . . . I just don't think emic and etic is a relevant distinction any more.” I
must disagree with Keesing's view here. Certainly the terms may be found in most current issues
of the major anthropology journals (as, e.g., in the latest issues I have received as I write this--in
January 1990--of American Anthropologist [December 1989, p. 1089] and of Current
Anthropology [February 1990, p. 49]). The terms are also found, of course, as Keesing
recognized in his comment, in 50% of the elementary anthropology textbooks for undergraduate
students published since 1976 (N=28), here always with some kind of definition. Most of those
texts, 72%, cite neither Pike, Harris, nor anyone else in their discussion of the concept, while 28%

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cite Pike.
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In Hussey's (1989) bibliography, 29% of the publications using the terms fail to cite
any source at all (see Table 1.4, column 6).
Perhaps, then, this state of affairs means that by the end of the 1980s the terms have become
so much a part of other academic fields, especially within the social sciences, that they now
belong to all of us and no longer just to Pike and Harris. I view this as good for the discipline. So
do Pike and Harris, I am sure. And as we see from their discussions in the following chapters,
both of them are interested in finding out how we can build on the past--not defend it.
One problem remains before us, however. Although we probably should allow freedom in
others' definitions and uses of the emic/etic distinction, I feel that the anthropological profession
will be hurt if we just sit by and let some of the expressed meanings pass--for example, such
extremes as “emic equals sloppy” and “etic equals precise,” and other definitions which show a
fundamental misunderstanding of the notion. As two anthropologists have pointed out,
“Unfortunately, emic and etic have become slogans or catchwords in anthropology, rather than
clear-cut concepts” (Crane and Angrosino 1984:125). This hurts our discipline, and we must
struggle against such careless uses of what has proved to be one of the most important ideas in
social science today.
With that, we turn in the following chapters to the question: Just what is the history,
significance, and application of emics and etics today, and where do we go from here?
Table 1.1
Publication Dates of 278 References Using Emic/Etic
dates
no. of
references
no. authored by
Pike
no. authored
by Harris
1954-60
1
1
0
1961-65
9
0
1
1966-70
20
1
2
1971-75
44
0
2
1976-80
83
0
2
1981-85
76
3
1
1986-89
45*
1
2
totals
278
6
10
*The small number of references shown for the years 1986-89 is
skewed because many recent publications have not yet been
archived into computerized library computer search services.

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Table 1.2
Dictionaries That List Emic and Etic
dictionary
reference
year
Cites
Pike
Cites
Harris
Supplement Oxford English Dictionary
Burchfield
1972
yes
no
Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Hartmann & Stork
1972
no
no
Gendai Eigogaku jiten
Kotaro et al.
1973
yes
no
Encyclopedia of Anthropology
Hunter & Whitten
1976
yes
no
6000 Words: Supplement Webster's 3rd
Webster's
1976
no
no
Ying Hang Yuyanxue Cihui
Liu and Zhao
1979
no*
no
Encyclopedic Dict Sciences of Lang
Ducrot & Todorov
1979
yes
no
First Dict of Ling & Phonetics
Crystal
1980
yes
no
9000 Words: Supplement Webster's 3rd
Webster's
1983
no
no
Standard Dict of Social Sciences
Koschnick
1984
yes
no
Dictionary of Ling & Phonetics
Crystal
1985
yes
no
Random House Dictionary
Random House
1987
yes
no
Oxford English Dictionary 2nd
Simpson & Weiner
1989
yes
no
New Lexicon Webster’s**
Webster's
1989
no
no
*The Liu and Zhao (1979) dictionary does not cite Pike under “emic” or
“etic,” but does cite him under their definition for “tagmemics.”
**This dictionary (Webster's 1989) includes the word “emic,” but not “etic.”
Table 1.3
Breakdown of Categories
in the 278 References in the Sample Bibliography
categories
no. of references
anthropology
74
psychology
65
linguistics
22
cross-cultural research
18
ethnography
17
sociology
14
medicine
13
dictionaries
12
education
12
psychiatry
7
translation
4
management
3
archaeology
2
folklore
2
economics
2
religion
1
English
1
(other)
9
total
278
Table 1.4
Publications Which Cite Pike, Harris, Others, or No One*
(in their discussions of emics/etics)

9
1
2
3
4
5
6
dates
no. of
% that
% that
% that
% that
% that
references
cite Pike
cite Harris
cite P&H
cite others
cite no one
1961-65
8
88% (7)
0% (0)
0% (0)
0% (0)
13% (1)
1966-70
17
41% (7)
12% (2)
18% (3)
18% (3)
12% (2)
1971-75
42
33% (14)
2% (1)
14% (6)
24% (10)
26% (11)
1976-80
81
20% (16)
9% (7)
7% (6)
32% (26)
32% (26)
1981-85
72
21% (15)
10% (7)
7% (5)
31% (22)
32% (23)
1986-89
42**
26% (11)
5% (2)
14% (6)
21% (9)
33% (14)
totals
262
27% (70)
7% (19)
10% (26)
27% (70)
29% (77)
*N=262 (In this table the 6 publications by Pike and the 10 by Harris are excluded from the sample of 278.)
**The small number of references shown for the years 1986-89 is skewed because many recent publications have not
yet been archived into computerized library search services.
Table 1.5
Percentage of References in Bibliography
That Define the Terms Emic and Etic*
decade
define
don't define
totals
1961-70
72% (18/25)
28% (7/25)
100% (25/25)
1971-80
63% (77/123)
37% (46/123)
100% (123/123)
1981-89
60% (68/114)
40% (46/114)
100% (114/114)
totals
62% (163/262)
38% (99/262)
100% (262/262)
*N=262 (In this table the 6 publications by Pike and the 10 by Harris are
excluded from the sample of 278.)

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Endnotes
1. Not that Pike is an idealist in the philosophical sense, but rather in the anthropological sense. That is, as Pelto
states it, “Pike supports an “idealist' explanation of human behavior. That is, causes of human action are to be found
mainly in the definitions, beliefs, values, and ideologies of the actors” (1970:82-83). Harris, on the other hand, “seeks
explanations of human action in the environmental, the constraints of the “real world' surrounding human actors”
(ibid.:83).
2. The reader who wishes to have a copy of Hussey's (1989) bibliography may order it on three-and-a-half or
five-and-a-quarter-inch IBM-compatible diskette. (See address for ordering in the References Cited). The
bibliography is in a database format which may be read by any standard database file. A "README" file on the
diskette explains the structure of Hussey's database, including the field names and sizes.
3. To my knowledge, the earliest English dictionary to include the terms emics and etics is the 1972 Supplement
to the Oxford English Dictionary (Burchfield 1972).
4. The seven articles I noted in the H.C.C.P. are those by Brislin, by Lonner, and by Triandis in vol. 1, by Berry,
and by Naroll, Michik and Naroll in vol. 2, and by Altman and Chemers, and by Davidson and Thomson in vol. 5.
5. This figure is the quotient of the sum of the totals of columns 5 and 6 of Table 1.4, divided by the sample (i.e.,
70+77/262=.56).
6. Neither of these dictionary supplements indicate why they printed Algeo's name in their definitions of the
terms, nor do they cite any publication by him. Algeo assumes (personal correspondence) that the supplement editors
picked up their citation for the terms from one of the two published versions of an essay he wrote on tagmemics (Algeo
1970, 1974). Algeo, by the way, states clearly in those two papers that “Pike was the coiner of the terms” (1974:3).
7. This sample of 28 textbooks came from my own library shelf. Only one of them appears in Hussey's (1989)
bibliography. Harris himself does not cite Pike in the later editions of his anthropology texts (1985, 1987), even though
he discusses the terms in several places in those books. He does, however, cite Pike in the earlier editions, and in many
of his theoretical publications on emics and etics.
References Cited
Adams-Price, Carolyn E., and Hayne W. Reese
1986 An “Emic' Study of Children's Memory in the Nursery School. Paper presented at the
Conference on Human Development, Nashville. April 3-5.
Algeo, John
1970 Tagmemics: A Brief Overview. Journal of English Linguistics 4:1-6.
1974 Tagmemics: A Brief Overview. In Advances in Tagmemics. Ruth M. Brend, ed. Pp.
1-9. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Arnold, Dean E.
1971 Ethnomineralogy of Ticul, Yucatan Potters: Etics and Emics. American Antiquity
36:20-40.
Berger, Allen H.
1976 Structural and Eclectic Revisions of Marxist Strategy: A Cultural Materialist Critique.
Current Anthropology 17:290-305.
Bernstein, Richard J.
1989 Pragmatism, Pluralism and the Healing of Wounds. Presidential address delivered
before the Eighty-fourth Annual Eastern Division Meeting of the American
Philosophical Association in Washington, DC, December 29, 1988. Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63(3, November):5-18.

11
Berry, John W.
1969 On Cross-Cultural Comparability. International Journal of Psychology 4:119-128.
Burchfield, R.W. (ed.)
1972 A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. I, A-G. Oxford: Clarendon.
Burling, Robbins
1969 Linguistic and Ethnographic Description. American Anthropologist 71:817-827.
Ciborowski, Thomas J.
1979 Cross-Cultural Aspects of Cognitive Functioning: Culture and Knowledge. In
Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Psychology. Anthony J. Marsella, Roland G. Tharp,
and Thomas J. Ciborowski, eds. Pp. 101-116. New York: Academic Press.
Crane, Julia G., and Michael V. Angrosino
1984 Field Projects in Anthropology: A Student Handbook. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights:
Waveland Press.
Crystal, David
1980 A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Boulder, CO: Westview.
1985 A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ducrot, Oswald, and Tzvetan Todorov
1979 Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Dundes, Alan
1962 From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales. Journal of American
Folklore 75:95-105.
Durbin, Mridula A.
1972 Linguistic Models in Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 1:383-410.
Ekstrand, Gudrun, and Lars H. Ekstrand
1986 Developing the Emic and Etic Concepts for Cross-Cultural Comparisons. Educational
and Psychological Interactions, No. 86 (May), 55 pp. Bulletin from Department of
Educational and Psychological Research, School of Education, Malmo, Sweden.
Feleppa, Robert
1986 Emics, Etics, and Social Objectivity. Current Anthropology 27:243-255.
1988 Convention, Translation, and Understanding. New York: State University of New
York Press.
Fisher, Lawrence E., and Oswald O. Werner
1978 Explaining Explanation: Tension in American Anthropology. Journal of
Anthropological Research 34:194-218.
Goodenough, Ward H.
1970 Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine.
Hall, Edward T.
1964 Adumbration as a Feature of Intercultural Communication. In The Ethnography of
Communication. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds. Pp. 154-163. American
Anthropologist (special publication) 66(6), Part 2.
Harris, Marvin
1964. The Nature of Cultural Things. New York: Random House.
1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Harper & Row.
1976 History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction. Annual Review of
Anthropology 5:329-350.
1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Vintage.
1985 Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology. 4th ed. New
York: Harper & Row.
1987 Cultural Anthropology. 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row.

12
Headland, Janet D.
1966 Case-Marking Particles in Casiguran Dumagat. Philippine Journal for Language
Teaching 4(1-2):58-59.
Headland, Thomas N., and Elmer P. Wolfenden
1968 The Vowels of Casiguran Dumagat. In Studies in Philippine Anthropology. Mario D.
Zamora, ed. Pp. 592-596. Quezon City: Alemar-Phoenix.
Howard, Alan
1968 Review of The Rise of Anthropological Theory. Current Anthropology 9:524-525.
Hunter, David E., and Phillip Whitten, eds.
1976 Encyclopedia of Anthropology. New York: Harper & Row.
Hussey, Stewart C.
1989 An Annotated Bibliography of Publications Using the Emic/Etic Concept. (A text file
in a database format on diskette for IBM and compatibles.) Dallas: Summer Institute
of Linguistics. [Order from SIL Bookstore, International Linguistics Center, 7500 W.
Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas, TX 75236; phone 214/709-2400.]
Hymes, Dell
1970 Linguistic Method in Ethnography: Its Development in the United States. In Method
and Theory in Linguistics. Paul L. Garvin, ed. Pp. 249-325. The Hague: Mouton.
Jahoda, G.
1977 In Pursuit of the Emic-Etic Distinction: Can We Ever Capture It? In Basic Problems
in Cross-Cultural Psychology. Y.J. Poortinga, ed. Pp. 55-63.
1983 The Cross-Cultural Emperor's Conceptual Clothes: The Emic-Etic Issue Revisited. In
Expiscations in Cross-Cultural Psychology. J.B. Deregowski, S. Dziurawiec and R.
Annis, eds. Pp. 19-37. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger.
Johnson, Ronald B., Ojo E. Arewa, and Joseph W. Licata
1981 Emic and Etic Analysis in Educational Administration. Paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Los Angeles, April 13-
17.
Kensinger, Kenneth M.
1975 Data, Data, and More Yanomamo Data. Reviews in Anthropology 2(1):69-75.
Koschnick, Wolfgang J, ed.
1984 Standard Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Munchen: K.G. Saur.
Kotaro, Ishibashi, et al.
1973 Gendai Eigogaku jiten [Seibido's Dictionary of English Linguistics]. Tokyo: Seibido.
Langness, L.L
1987 The Study of Culture: Revised Edition. Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp.
Lett, James
1987 The Human Enterprise. Chap. 7, The Importance of the Emic/Etic Distinction.
Boulder, CO: Westview.
Levi-Strauss, Claude
1972 Structuralism and Ecology. Social Science Information 12:7-23.
Liu, Yung-Chung, and Shi-Kai Zhao
1979 Ying Hang Yuyanxue Cihui [English-Chinese Linguistics Vocabulary]. Beijing:
Zhongguo Shehuikexue Chubanshe [Chinese Social Science Publishing House].
Lonner, Walter J.
1979 Issues in Cross-Cultural Psychology. In Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Psychology.
Anthony J. Marsella, Roland G. Tharp, and Thomas J. Ciborowski, eds. Pp. 17-45.
New York: Academic Press.
Marano, Lou
1982 Windigo Psychosis: The Anatomy of an Emic-Etic Confusion. Current Anthropology
23:385-412.

13
Massara, Emily B.
1980 Que Gordita: A Study of Weight Among Women in a Puerto Rican Community.
Dissertation Abstracts International 40(11-A):5921-5922.
Merrifield, William R.
1968 Review of The Rise of Anthropological Theory. Current Anthropology 9:526-527.
Monagan, Alfrieta P.
1985 Rethinking Matrifocality. Phylon 46:353-362.
Nattinger, James R.
1978 Second Dialect and Second Language in the Composition Class. TESOL Quarterly
12:77-84.
Olmedo, Esteban
1981 Testing Linguistic Minorities. American Psychologist 36:1078-1085.
Pelto, Pertti
1970 Anthropological Research: The Structure of Inquiry. Chap. 4, Units of Operation:
Emic and Etic Approaches. New York: Harper & Row.
Pike, Kenneth L.
1967 Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. 2nd
ed. The Hague: Mouton. (First edition in three volumes, 1954, 1955, 1960.)
Random House
1987 The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. 2nd ed., unabridged.
Westminister, MD: Random House.
Richards, Cara E.
1972 Man in Perspective: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. New York: Random
House.
Siertsema, Berthe
1969 “Etic' and “Emic.' English Studies 50:586-588.
Simpson, J.A., and E.S. Weiner, eds.
1989 The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, Vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon.
Sindzingre, Nicole
1988 Comments on Five Manuscripts. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2:447-453.
Smith, Peter K., and Andrew M. Sluckin
1979 Ethology, Ethogeny, Etics, Emics, Biology, Culture: On the Limitations of
Dichotomies. European Journal of Social Psychology 9:397-415.
Triandis, Harry C., with John W. Berry, Richard W. Bristin, Juris G. Draguns, Alastair Heron,
William W. Lambert, and Walter Lonner, eds.
1980, 1981, 1985 Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Six volumes. Boston: Allyn
and Bacon.
Webster's Dictionary (Supplement)
1976 6,000 Words: Supplement to Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.
Webster's Dictionary (Supplement)
1983 9,000 Words: Supplement to Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.
Webster's
1989 The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary of the English Language. Revised edition.
New York: Lexicon Publications.
Weidman, Hazel H.
1979 Falling-out: A Diagnostic and Treatment Problem Viewed from a Transcultural
Perspective. Social Science and Medicine 13B(2):95-112.