A term from
ethnography, referring to an approach that emphasizes the
cross-cultural and somewhat
scientific approach of the
anthropologist to the cultural data they are gathering. The etic approach tends to emphasize the importance of
objectivity and the viewpoint of the observing scientist rather than the people being observed. Members of a
culture are considered too
biased to accurately describe a culture, while the scientifically trained anthropologist is expected to have a minimum of
cultural bias. Etics often emphasize comparisons between cultures.
The term can also be used, often in direct opposition to emic, to distiguish between a culture's perspective and the modern scientific perspective. For example, a explanation of colds as the result of the night air would be emic; the etic explanation is that they are caused by viruses.
The terms were popularized by anthropologist Marvin Harris (1968) and are back-formations from the linguistic terms phonetic and phonemic.