Abstract
In his book, Mitsutoshi Horii (2021) discusses classification systems used in academic discourse and the need to denaturalize them, to remove the assumption that they are neutral and universal. Readers are urged to ask several questions concerning classifications: From where do they originate? What or who is being privileged? How do these classification systems shape what we can assume to know about the world? These are important questions in any academic field.
Though focused on the binary categories of “religion” and “secular,” Horii’s book is also concerned more generally with emic and etic standpoints. For many of us in the study of religion, we would have first come across the emic/etic distinction in the 1967 paper by Kenneth Pike who adapted it from linguistic theory—phonemic and phonetic—and applied it to the social sciences. Briefly, emic is understood as contextualized, studying behavior as if within, i.e., culture-specific, and etic is decontextualized, studying behavior as if from without, i.e., cross-cultural. Pertinent to the use of classifications Horii is highlighting, Pike (1999, 29) explains: “Descriptions or analyses from the etic standpoint are “alien” in view, with criteria external to the system. Emic descriptions provide an internal view, with criteria chosen from within the system.”
Pike’s essay was included in Russell McCutcheon’s edited volume on The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion, which may have unintentionally contributed to the conflation of emic/etic and insider/outsider, though McCutcheon himself does not do this. However, I have noticed that several scholars of religion use these categories interchangeably. In the study of religion, the emic/etic distinction is poorly understood as it is often conflated with the positions of insider and outsider. In his volume, Horii presents them clearly, advising the use of emic terms while noting how they’re employed in context. This resonates with my own research where I had made a similar decision regarding the study of First Nations in Eastern Canada, which I will return to later in the paper.
However, I would argue that all scholarly analysis (whether the scholar considers themselves “insiders” or “outsiders”) is etic even when using emic terms as it is an external view, redescribing what we think is an emic view. In Studying Religion, Russell McCutcheon (2007, 51) goes as far as to say there is no fully-emersed emic view (at least not in scholarly discourse, whether the person is from “inside” or “outside” the culture being articulated), because when it is explained to those outside the group, it becomes etic. This is a point that Horii could consider further in his volume, that while it is advisable to employ emic terms, we are nevertheless redescribing them (etically) so they could be understood by readers outside the system. What is important to note, however, and key to understanding how the religion/secular binary operates, is that what is assumed to be etic was at one time emic to a particular context. There is also an implicit hierarchy, where the etic, the external view, is elevated above the emic, the local. It is basically imposing one formerly-emic category—a colonial one—over a local emic category.
Before we assume that this is advocating the idea of untranslatability, far from it. Early on in my own research on Native American and Canadian First Nations I was aware of the rejection of “religion” as a label for their traditions and ceremonies. For example, Mohawk scholar Chris Jocks asked, “whether it is respect or colonialism even to assign the label religion to people who explicitly deny that it describes what they do” (2004, 147). Reacting to this in my PhD thesis (published in 2008), I suggested that: “One way to avoid this subtle act of violence is to recognize the limitations of classifications and take note of emic choices of terms and how they’re employed” (Owen 2008:, 12). I was aware of the Native American preference for terms like “ceremonies” over “rituals” and, although both are English colonial terms, “ceremony” has a particular contextual understanding that differs from most scholars’ understanding in relation to ritual (see Ronald Grimes 2000 and Catherine Bell 1997). I was also keen to explore common Lakota terms and how they translate them into English and, in some cases, how a word or phrase had been adapted into the Mi’kmaw language.
The awareness of the hegemony of Western knowledge is a key strength of Horii’s book for me and one that should become more widely realized in our fields. The colonial aspect of what is assumed to be etic is an important consideration in support of employing emic or local categories. Following, in particular, Fitzgerald’s (2003) analysis of “religion” and “secular” categories in Japan, Horii (2021, 28) states that, “The producers and propagators of modern Western knowledge assume their concepts and categories as properly scientific etic, rather than merely emic. This reflects the beliefs and prejudices of, for example, the male intellectual elite in the nineteenth century European metropoles.” Thus, categories such as “religion” have been assumed to be etic, i.e., “scientific” and universal, whereas they are better understood as emic, rooted in a particular culture, which “became globalised through in the context of the colonial matrix of power” (28).
Again, he states, “Ultimately, the emic-etic binary itself in problematic. So-called “etic” terms are effectively “emic” terms of a community of scholars” (Horii 2021, 209). What he would like to problematize “is scholars” tendency to try to find what they call “religion” where people say that there is no such thing” (212). (I would add their rejection of the term can also be revealing). “Rather,” he argues, “the scholar should examine what people and institutions mean by “religion” in highly ambiguous and often contested ways and how these people and institutions conceptualize what scholars would identi[fy] as ‘religious’” (212). Therefore, what we can do is pay close attention to how terms are used, whether presented as etic or emic.
In the end, this leads us back to the problem of all concepts and how we use them. I think one frustrating debate we might have with a philosopher, perhaps, or an Eliadian, is the question about whether any concept can be regarded as universal. As Naomi Goldenberg (2019) noted in her keynote presented at a conference in Belfast in 2018—there is a particular issue with “religion” because of its specialness in law, and I would add the way people attempt to escape accountability when appealing to the authority of “religion” or a “god” concept. In the same way, we as scholars should not justify our own discourse by appealing to the need to communicate somehow. If we apply the term “religion” etically, we should acknowledge where it comes from and the knowledge system it is displacing.
