perspective suggested here, the relation between reality and our models of it emerges as very much the same for social science as it is for natural science (see Bunge 1959:95). In both cases, the objective relations we seek to understand exist independently of the analyst, in the behavior of the phenomena under study. The natural or social scientist's job is to make statements about those relations, not to create them.

Emic analysis, whether seen as opposed or as complementary to etic modes, is regarded as essential for ensuring that culture-specific particularities are not suppressed in efforts to subsume social phenomena under cross-culturally valid generalizations. Particularly, there is concern that the aim of providing an account of the concepts and principles subjects use to organize reality will be frustrated if alien etic notions function in ethnographic systematization where emic ones should. This paper examines this and other aspects of the emics/etics problem, with particular emphasis on the ostensible function of emic analysis to avoid interpreter imposition of etic categories. It is argued that ethnographic objectivity must acknowledge some degree of imposition but that this does not render emic analysis pointless. Particular emphasis is given to W. V. Quine's idea of the indeterminacy of translation, which seems antithetical to emics but which, with some reconstruction, provides a basis for a viable emic mode.

/pdf/emics-etics-and-social-objectivity-2495flyzkc.pdf

The Ontology of Social Structure: A Reply to Hanson

Emics, Etics, and Social Objectivity

background

What Myths Reveal About How Humans Think: A Cognitive Approach To Myth

In discussing the exchange between Caws and Hanson (AA, Vol. 78, 1976) the nature of the theory and reality that anthropologists must consider in dealing with social and cultural phenomena is examined. There is no objective structure in the phenomena we study, our constructs always being colored by changing conditions. The assumption of an unchanging human nature has long been an obstacle to progress in the anthropological enterprise. [semantics, language, models, structure, anthropological theory]

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1978.80.3.02a00040

The Ontology of Social Structure: A Reply to Hanson

Citations

Emics, Etics, and Social Objectivity

What Myths Reveal About How Humans Think: A Cognitive Approach To Myth

Structures, Realities, and Blind Spots

References

The problem of other cultures

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