According to Malinowski’s later recounting of the story of how he developed participant-observation fieldwork, his inspiration began while attending Jagiellonian University in Kraków in Poland, pursuing a doctorate in physics and mathematics. He became bedridden with an illness, and during his convalescence he began to read Frazer’s Golden Bough. Taken by the ideas in the work, he abandoned his current track (after the doctorate) and went to the University of Leipzig in Germany, where he studied economics and psychology, and then in 1910 went to England to study anthropology at the London School of Economics under C.G. Seligman.
Malinowski was in Australia attending a conference in 1914 when World War I broke out, which left him in a precarious position because he was an Austro-Hungarian citizen and, therefore, an enemy noncombatant alien as far as the British were concerned. The Australian government was sympathetic to his plight, however, and gave him funds first to do fieldwork on Mailu Island in Papua, and then in the Trobriand Islands. The particulars are a little obscure, but the received wisdom (based in part on his diary) is that Malinowski was not comfortable with his first placement in Papua. He did not speak the local languages and did not have the ability to live with the people he was investigating, so he felt limited in his ability to understand the culture. What is a little perplexing in hindsight is why these early attempts at fieldwork seemed so limiting to him. What Malinowski was undertaking at first in Papua – verandah fieldwork – was the norm for social anthropology at the time. Thus, in June 1915 he started again in the Trobriand Islands off the northeast coast of New Guinea and continued, off and on, for several years, this time living among the Trobrianders and learning about their culture by being thoroughly immersed in it, in isolation, for long periods.
Malinowski’s contribution to anthropological data collecting cannot be underestimated, and the range of his subject matter is astounding. His method is sometimes referred to now as an “off the verandah” technique, meaning that he broke with the custom of interviewing indigenous people on a hotel verandah, and, instead, lived and worked with them in their local villages – learning the local language rather than relying on an interpreter. The methodological point that Malinowski stresses in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, his best-selling, compendious account of island to island exchange (kula ring) and ocean-going canoe travel in Melanesia, is that the participant observer is both intimately involved in the culture under study while, at the same time, scientifically detached. For example, at one point he writes that the goal of the ethnographer in the field is “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world” (Malinowski 1961 [1922]:25).
Today, anthropologists often use the term “emic” to denote discussion of social situations in local terms (Malinowski’s “native’s point of view”) and “etic” to refer to the anthropologist’s perspective. These terms are derived from Kenneth Pike’s analysis of language. In his Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (Pike [1954, 1955, 1960] 1967), Pike draws a technical distinction between a “phonetic” and a “phonemic” analysis of the sounds of a language. Phonetic differences are any differences in the sound of a word that can be detected, and phonemic differences are differences that make a difference to the semantic meaning of the word in that language. For example, English speakers can detect the difference between an aspirated and unaspirated /p/ when it is pointed out to them (phonetic difference), but the difference makes no difference to the meanings of words in English (phonemic difference). If you hold your hand close to your mouth and say the word “paper,” you should feel a puff of air on the first /p/ and not on the second. The first /p/ is aspirated, the second is not. You can experiment to make them both aspirated or both unaspirated, but the meaning of the word does not change whichever way you say it. Linguists say that there is a phonetic difference (you can detect the difference), but not a phonemic difference (the meaning of the word does not change). In languages such as Khmer, aspirated and unaspirated /p/ are both phonetically and phonemically different. Using one versus the other changes the meanings of words.
Strip off the /phon/ component of Pike’s terminology (“phone” = “sound”) and you have “etic” and “emic.” You can add new prefixes to get such concepts as “proxemics” – documenting the use of interpersonal space to infer what different distances mean locally (see Chapter 6) – or “aesthemics” (as opposed to “aesthetics”) – understanding value judgments concerning beauty in indigenous terms. Or, you can simply use the suffixes “emic” and “etic” as analytic words in their own right (pronounced /eemic/ (long e) and /etic/ (short e) – same is in “phonemic” and “phonetic”).The emic/etic distinction is of considerable importance in anthropology in general and in fieldwork methodology in particular. It often, simplistically, gets translated into: ways of viewing things from an “insider” (emic) versus “outsider” (etic) perspective in anthropological discourse, but such a translation is rather misleading, although not entirely inaccurate.1 Pike, as a linguist, frequently used the phrase “differences that make a difference” to describe an emic approach, which I can illustrate with a simple example.
In Cambodia it is considered disrespectful, as a general rule, to show bare skin on shoulders or knees in public. Some men get away with going shirtless if the weather is hot and they are involved in heavy labor, but otherwise everyone is expected to cover their shoulders. This rule is rigidly enforced in sacred places, such as pagodas. People are denied entry if their bare shoulders are visible. But, covering one’s shoulders is not straightforward. One cannot simply drape a scarf, shawl, or other loose piece of cloth over bare shoulders and expect to be admitted to a pagoda. In European terms, shoulders with skin visible are bare, but shoulders covered with a shawl are not bare. The emics of Khmer culture are different. For your shoulders to be considered “covered” you must be wearing a fitted garment that has sleeves, such as a shirt or jacket, so that the skin on your shoulders is not visible. That is, simple visibility is not the issue. How the skin on your shoulders is covered matters. In Khmer emics: shoulders with skin showing and shoulders covered by loose material = bare; shoulders covered with a fitted garment = not bare. In this case, bare skin versus shawl on skin is a difference that does not make a difference. That is, it is an etic difference, not an emic one, to Khmer people.
Malinowski valued probing Trobriand Islanders’ emic view of the world, but he was also interested in an etic approach. He writes:
Not even the most intelligent native has any clear idea of the Kula as a big, organised social construction, still less of its sociological function and implications … The integration of all the details observed, the achievement of a sociological synthesis of all the various, relevant symptoms, is the task of the Ethnographer … the Ethnographer has to construct the picture of the big institution, very much as the physicist constructs his theory from the experimental data, which always have been within reach of everybody, but needed a consistent interpretation.
(Malinowski 1961 [1922]: 83–84)
Malinowski’s early history as a physicist is clear here, and his comments raise questions about fieldwork methods and