Etics and Emics (Not to Mention Anemics and Emetics) in the History of the Sciences

Pike K. L. , Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behaviour, Part I: Preliminary edition (Glendale, CA, 1954).

Berreman G. D. , “Anemic and emetic analyses in social anthropology”, American anthropologist, lxviii (1966), 346–54.

Butterfield H. , The Whig interpretation of history (London, 1931). On the reception of this work by historians of science, see Jardine N. , “Whigs and stories: Herbert Butterfield and the historiography of science”, History of science, xli (2003), 125–40.

Skinner Q. R. D. , “Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas”, History and theory, viii (1969), 3–52, p. 6.

I argue this more fully in Jardine N. , “The uses and abuses of anachronism in the history of science”, History of science, xxxviii (2000), 256–70.

On genres as covenants, see Damrosch D. , The narrative covenant: Transformation of genre in the formation of Biblical literature (San Francisco, 1987); on genres as shared systems of tacit expectations, see Hirsch E. , Validity in interpretation (New Haven, 1967), chap. 3.

On the importance of distinguishing protocol-guided from purely imitative activities, see Turner S. , The social theory of practices: Tradition, tacit knowledge and presuppositions (Cambridge, 1994).

On the history of the etic/emic debates, see: Harris M. , “History and significance of the emic/etic distinction”, Annual review of anthropology, v (1976), 329–50; Fisher L. E. Werner O. , “Explaining explanation: Tension in American anthropology”, Journal of anthropological research, xxxiv (1978), 194–218; Feleppa R. , “Emics, etics and social objectivity”. Current anthropology, xxvii (1986), 243–55; Headland T. N. , “Introduction”, in Headland T. N. Pike K. L. Harris M. , (eds), Emics and etics: The insider/outsider debate (Newbury Park, CA, 1990), 13–26. It should be noted that these are variously polemical accounts written by active participants in the etic/emic debates.

Pike , Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior (ref. 1), 8.

Ibid., 2nd edn, revised (The Hague, 1967), 37.

Harris M. , The rise of anthropological theory: A history of theories of culture (New York, 1968), 571, 575; endorsed by Pike in Headland, Pike Harris (eds), op. cit. (ref. 8), 62.

On the long struggle between “scientific” and “interpretative” anthropologies see, for example, Ortner S. B. , “Theory in anthropology since the sixties”, Comparative studies in history and society, xxvi (1984), 126–66; Kuper A. , Culture: The anthropologists' account (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

Malinowski B. , Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922), 25, and Boas F. , “Recent anthropology”, Science, n.s., xcviii (1943), 311–14, 334–7, p. 335.

Berreman , “Anemic and emetic analyses in social anthropology” (ref. 2), 346–7.

See, for example, Feleppa R. , Convention, translation and understanding: Philosophical problems in the comparative study of culture (Albany, NY, 1988), chaps. 2 and 3.

The former position is taken by, for example, Fisher Werner , op. cit. (ref. 8); the latter by, for example, Harris M. in his Cultural materialism: The struggle for a science of culture (New York, 1979).

Goodenough W. H. , “Toward a working theory of culture”, in Borofsky R. (ed.), Assessing cultural anthropology (New York, 1994), 262–73, p. 264; see also his Description and comparison in cultural anthropology (Cambridge, 1970), chap. 4.

Geertz C. , The interpretation of cultures (New York, 1973), 14–15.

Sahlins M. , Culture and practical reason (Chicago, 1976), 220.

Rosaldo R. , Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis (Boston, MA, 1989), chap. 1.

Geertz , The interpretation of cultures (ref. 18), 21.

Sahlins M. , Historical metaphors and mythical realities: Structure in the early history of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, MI, 1981), esp. Introduction and chap. 4.

Rosaldo , Culture and truth (ref. 20), chaps. 6–7.

Bourdieu P. , Outline of a theory of practice [1972], transl. by Nice R. (Cambridge, 1977).

Rappaport R. , Pigs for the ancestors: Ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people (New Haven, 1968), chap. 6, and Harris , Cultural materialism (ref. 16), chap. 2.

Harris M. , “Cultural materialism is alive and well and won't go away until something better comes along”, in Borofsky (ed.), Assessing cultural anthropology (ref. 17), 62–75.

Marano L. , “Windigo psychosis: The anatomy of an emic etic confusion”, Current anthropology, xxiii (1982), 385–412.

I owe this suggestion to Nick Hopwood.

Barthes R. , Writing degree zero, transl. by Lavers A. Smith C. (New York, 1977), and “Textual analysis of Poe's ‘Valdemar’”, in Young R. (ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (London, 1988), 133–60.

On this aspect of the histoire des mentalités, see, for example, Burke P. , “Strengths and weaknesses of the history of mentalités”, History of European ideas, vii (1986), 439–51, and Sharpe J. , “History from below”, in Burke P. (ed.), New perspectives on historical writing (Cambridge, 1991), 24–41.

See, for example, Gooding D. , Experiment and the making of meaning: Human agency in scientific observation and experiment (Dordrecht, 1990); Sibum H. O. , “Reworking the mechanical value of heat: Instruments of precision and gestures of accuracy in early Victorian England”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxvi (1995), 75–106; Voskuhl A. , “Recreating Herschel's actinometry: An essay in the historiography of experimental practice”, The British journal for the history of science, xxx (1997), 337–55; and Staubermann K. , “The trouble with the instrument: Zöllner's photometer”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xxi (2000), 323–38.

See, for example, the contributions to Galison P. Thompson E. (eds), The architecture of science (Cambridge, MA, 1999), and to Smith C. Agar J. (eds), Making space for science: Territorial themes in the shaping of knowledge (Basingstoke, 1998).

See, for example, from a vast literature, M.J. Rudwick's classic “The emergence of a visual language for geological science, 1760–1840”, History of science, xiv (1976), 149–95, and Biagioli M. , “Picturing objects in the making: Scheiner, Galileo, and the discovery of sunspots”, in Detel W. Zittel C. (eds), Ideals and cultures of knowledge in early modern Europe (Berlin, 2002), 39–96.

See Gingerich O. Voelkel J. R. , “Tycho Brahe's Copernican campaign”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xxix (1998), 1–34.

See, for example, Ziegler P. , The Black Death (London, 1969).

Latour B. , “On the partial existence of existing and nonexisting objects”, in Daston L. (ed.), Biographies of scientific objects (Chicago, 2000), 247–69. For a compelling critique of Latour's position see Tosh N. , Science, truth, and history (forthcoming), chap. 9: “Bruno Latour: How to make metaphysics matter”.

See, for example, Cohen S. K. Jr , The Black Death transformed: Disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe (London, 2002).

Fine examples of such reconstruction of life-worlds through thick description are to be found in Smith P. , The business of alchemy: Science and culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ, 1994).

An excellent specimen of this approach is Gooding , Experiment and the making of meaning (ref. 31).

These are, however, contentious claims, not to be defended here; for many philosophers, following Wittgenstein, have claimed that reasons cannot constitute explanatory causes. For cogent arguments for attributing causal efficacy to agents' reasons, see Child W. , Causality, interpretation and the mind (Oxford, 1994).

See, for example, Hull D. L. , Science as a process (Chicago, 1988), and Mokyr J. , The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress (Oxford, 1990).

For telling criticism of such natural selection models, see, for example, Amundsen R. , “The trials and tribulations of selectionist explanations”, in Hahlweg K. Hooker C. (eds), Issues in evolutionary epistemology (New York, 1989), 413–32, and Lewens T. , Organisms and artifacts (Cambridge, MA, 2004), chap. 7.

Jardine N. , The scenes of inquiry: On the reality of questions in the sciences, 2nd edn, revised (Oxford, 2000).

Elias N. , The civilising process [1939], transl. by Jephcott E. (2 vols, Oxford, 1978, 1982), and The court society [1969], transl. by Jephcott E. (Oxford, 1983).

Bourdieu P. Passeron J. C. , Reproduction in education, society and culture [1970], transl. by Nice R. , 2nd edn (London, 1990); Bourdieu P. , Homo academicus [1984], transl. by Collier P. (Cambridge, 1988); idem, The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field [1992], transl. by. Emanuel S. (Cambridge, 1996).

For a cogent defence of such anachronism of selection, see Tosh N. , “Anachronism and retrospective explanation: In defence of a present-centred history of science”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxxiv (2003), 647–59.

See W. v. O. Quine's memorable response to such “misdirected modesty”: “The phoneme's long shadow”, in Headland Pike Harris (eds), op. cit. (ref. 8), 164–7.

Kant I. , “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Critique of pure reason, A51/B75), and Lakatos I. , “Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind” (“History of science and its rational reconstructions”, PSA 1970, ed. by Buck R. C. Cohen R. S. (Dordrecht, 1971), 91–135, p. 91).