Making sense of one other for another: Ethnography as translation

The tension between “etic” and “emic,” between outsider and insider descriptions of language and culture, has been a leitmotif of anthropology since its beginning. This article revisits Goodenough’s original discussion of emic and etic as a bridge into translation studies, emphasizing recent anthropological and sociological contributions. Translation illuminates the relationship between local specifics and human universals in just the way that emic and etic were meant to do based on the original model of phonetics and phonemics. Still missing, though, is a theory of the universal etic space that makes a connection across emics possible. Discussions of recent complexity-based work with multiagent systems serves as a thought experiment to see if an etic framework that generalizes intentionality might be possible. The conclusion calls for use of the etic concept to develop an anthropological theory of what it means to be human.

from Language & Communication