Insider and Outsider Anthropology

This is a forum post that I created for an anthropology course on the different perspectives utilized in anthropological research. I felt there was a lack of respect for those who focus on aggregating and presenting data as opposed to those who focus on fieldwork. 

If anyone finds grammar or other errors in this document, please let me know as improving my grammar is my focus for this year.

Kenneth Guest, in the textbook Essentials of Cultural Anthropology, shows a clear preference for anthropologists to attempt to develop an inside view of the culture in which they are studying. This can be seen in his inclusion of an entire chapter on fieldwork that includes a brief history, techniques used by other anthropologists, and including many passages bestowing the value of fieldwork. One such passage is that fieldwork "… is simultaneously a social scientific method and an art form". His views seem to be such that an emic perspective of a society is far more important to than an etic perspective.

The emic perspective has advantages such as being able to see the nuances of culture as an anthropologist becomes more ingrained in the culture. There are a few issues that come with obtaining an inside view of a society that cannot be solved with proper scholarly behavior. The anthropologist, although at constant risk of losing perspective due to enculturation, should always realize that they are still not a member of a culture in a way that being born into a culture can make someone. They will most likely always be considered an outsider, possibly a good friend of the community, but never a full member. Anthropologists need to bear this in mind and be reliant on their key informant, their surveys, their kinship and social network analysis, and their field notes.

Never becoming a "full member" of a society should not be considered a detriment to an anthropologists work. Many members of a society exist "on the fringes" or within a subculture that may vary greatly from the societal expectations of the culture in which they exist. This is why the etic perspective, the ability to see the overall patterns of a culture and compare these data with other cultures, is an important skill. The etic perspective may require data from one who has studied the culture with an emic perspective, an insider view, but the analysis of such data in which norms, customs, power structures, and all the elements that make a culture unique can and should be considered in relation to existing cultures. This analysis should also consider the accelerating pace of globalization and its impact on the unique features of a culture.

Photo: Shawn Lowery

The role of those who study data from various sources, aggregate the various perspectives of various anthropologists over time, and create useful information from the raw data should not be overlooked or undervalued. There are anthropological questions that involve considering many different cultures such as considering the effect of climate change on different populations of Inuit peoples. The researcher of this question could not go to every different population in every different time over the last 100 years to see these changes, but they could carefully study the fieldwork of many anthropologists over the last century.

Emic and etic perspectives are both important in the study of anthropology and both require attention to detail and attention to overview. Those who collect data through an insider's view have to have knowledge of the overview of a society to create pertinent data. They must avoid holes in data that are possible when one does not consider a detail in comparison to other cultures. Those with an outsider view are often better positioned to aggregate data on the trends and differences in a society over time as well as compare the differences between multiple societies. Both perspectives could be considered subcultures in the society of anthropology that need to acknowledge the importance of and maintain respect for each other.

citation:

Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: a Toolkit for a Global Age. 2E ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.