How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

situation; analysts can cut through what actors think that they are doing, replacing the
operative terminology of the actors with a conceptual vocabulary that corresponds
more to academic concerns and debates than it does to the actors’ own selfunderstandings.
In the latter case, scholarly analysts are in a sense constrained to limit
their academic speculations by referring their descriptions and explanations back to the
ways that social actors themselves engage the world, and in particular to take very
seriously the meaning-laden accounts of action that social actors themselves generate
and operate with—not as secondary-source descriptions of explanations of what those
actors are doing, but as inextricably involved with the situation under investigation.
The distinction I am drawing here is by no means a novel one. It picks up some
of what linguistic anthropologist Kenneth Pike (1967) was getting at by distinguishing
between “emic” and “etic” perspectives on a culture, with an emic perspective adopting
an “insider’s“ point of view and trying to explicate how participants in that culture
make sense of their own activities, while an etic perspective adopts an “outsider’s”
point of view and brings a detached scholarly vocabulary to bear on a culture. Similarly,
the “interpretive turn” in the human sciences (Alker 1996; Yanow 2006), which
emphasizes the need to use the self-understandings of social actors as a point of
departure for both description and explanation, thematizes something like the
distinction I am concerned with in contrasting interpretive ways of producing
knowledge with “positive” alternatives.
But these ways of talking about the distinction between a scholarly account that
deploys an abstract conceptual vocabulary and makes its own determinations about
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 18