To date, my personal encounters with Marvin's materialists have left me with a distinctively bitter distaste with their program. I have found them aggressive, overly critical, status conscious and worst of all, spurious and 'inauthentic' as anthropologists. I do not hide my prejudice because it has done me no good to hide it, and they do not make any bones about hiding their prejudices. They have become among the most active promoters of 'paradigmatic' unity and normality in academic anthropology. Rereading Harris's now classic article on the etic/emic distinction has led me to reconsider some of my own experiences and prejudices about them. The magnetism of his movement within anthropology is due to his appeal to a privileged status for 'common sense' knowledge, (the etic) and to the embodiment of certain core American values (science, materialism, technology, behaviorism). It is to be wondered whether or not they are joining forces with the ranks of socio-biologists, as both can be found to have theoretical roots in the same American philosophy of utilitarianism and pragmatism, and both strive to achieve on earth a paradise based upon the fulfillment of positivism.

That Marvin Harris commits his 'cultural materialism' to a positivistic paradigm of normal science is obvious from beginning to end of the article. "Cultural materialism shares with other scientific strategies and epistemology which seeks to restrict fields of inquiry to events, entities and relationships that are knowable by means of explicit, logico-empirical, inductive-deductive, quantifiable public procedures or 'operations' subject to replication by independent observers…it is sheer obscurantism to promote the further expansion of unoperationalized terms." (page 329) Harris draws a clear line around his encampment and has rather unambiguous criteria for insider's and outsider's--anthropologists either do (operationalize) sound science or they do not. His is the theoretical null--hypothesis, arbitrarily deciding the acceptable limits for toleration of uncertainty, or its rejection. He was wise to ground the philosophical justification for his theoretical paradigm in an epistemological argument which disambiguates the unity of experience of human reality by its strict and thorough dichotomization between etic and emic. "Cultural materialism rests on a second epistemological postulate which is uniquely relevant to the operationalization of the broad class of phenomena--the field of inquiry--with which it is concerned. This postulate holds that there are two fundamentally distinct kinds of socio-cultural entities, events and relationships." (page 329) He goes on to build a proper science of anthropology by his explicit rejection of the emic mode as empirically untenable and the embracing of what he elaborates as the etic.

The one kind of critique which Harris fails to deal sufficiently with comes as his conclusion and is worth reiterating:

The kind of reaction exposes and illustrates simultaneously several critical facets of the psychology of the confirmed cultural materialist. First is Harris's reliance upon the rhetorical power of their language to persuade, convince and influence the mind of the reader. Indeed, their version of positivistic paradigmatics is founded upon the capitalization of this power. This is without doubt linked to the strong political machinations and motivations which characterizes this brand of professionalism. To dismiss all such criticism as being 'by partisans of obscurantist strategies' shows acutely the obscuring power of this language. For example, how communicative is the following passage "This problem--the problem of alternative emic algorithms and alternative logical models--is to be distinguished from that of consciousness--transformation algorithms and other rules acquire an ambiguous epistemological status to the extent that they are not systematically tested through eliciting techniques aimed at exposing their predictive inadequacies…'(page 337) We may think we know precisely what 'transformation and emic algorithms ambiguous epistemological statuses, systematic testing through eliciting techniques and 'predictive inadequacies' really are, and Marvin's regiment may act like they really know, but does anyone really know such a bottom line basis? I suggest not. The trick twist of the tongue becomes the foolish leap of faith, one of a frequent many demanded by such a belief system. The real aim of such language is not to communicate, but to convince, not to inform but to obfuscate, not to open the mind but to control it. This typical usage of language exposes two other facets of this cognitive orientation. This is his failure to think through and therefore take seriously the 'nothing but the emics of the observer' critique as possibly devastating to his whole methodological framework, even though he clearly recognizes and acknowledges its threat. He dismisses this threat as the worst possible kind of narrow solipsism imaginable. But such a dismissal takes for granted the rootedness of the 'observers' own terms and frames of reference within his/her own culture and language. This is the appeal to the consensus of common census, which demands a non-reflexive and unself critical and unself conscious principle of presence. Its power rests upon transparency of our own cultural forest--a power which lures the 'observer' into a spurious sense of complacency about the values of his own language.

It is understandable then that the point of view of the observer is the preeminent one and the problematics of the other becomes dismissed as readily interpretable into the language (or lingo) of the observer. Participation is not a research value--it is too messy. Harris does not make the strange familiar, but simply eliminates the strange and replaces it with the familiar. Anyone who has had to translate or who had dealt with the paradoxes of multiple translations knows that translation is never as straight forward nor as simple as we as 'scientists of commensurability' would wish.

What this argument begs is the question of the metaphorical and metaphysical salience of 'emic' meaning 'structures' between 'observer' and 'other'--this is always an ambiguous and entangled reality. It may be referred to as the 'relativity of relevance'. All that Harris is really doing is masking the problem, and denying it, by claiming that the only relevant point of view is the observer's and that this can be simply, superficially, systematically, operationally and spuriously superimposed upon the 'behavioral streams' of the 'observed'. The 'others' own relevance can be safely ignored as non-problematic--"from an etic point of view the universe of meaning, purposes, goals, motivations, etc. is …unapproachable." "What I should have said was that from an etic point of view the universe of meaning, purposes, goals, motivations, etc. is in the message and not in the heads of the actors. That is, from an etic point of view nothing is asserted about what is going on inside of the heads of the actors when they exchange messages which have a determinate etic meaning." (page 345) From a post structuralist and post humanist point of view, what Harris accomplishes within a few brief but dense pages is the total abnegation of the emic relevance of the other, and the preeminence of the observer's own etic disguised 'emicity', and thus the total objectification (read reification--'turning an entity into a thing') of the subjective reality of the 'other'. To participate is to compromise 'observation'. This fits the enlightenment ideal of a 'science of totally disinterested inquiry' in service of dominant political interests. Participation is only to be tolerated as a mechanism of spurious (read ingenuine) convenience in 'eliciting frames' which assist 'observation' by exposing the apparent convergences of the 'etic and the emic'. Deeper in a hermeneutic tradition, one which turned Hegel on his head, Marx back again, then Harris, Harris's program of scientific 'truth' is based upon a philology of 'veritas'--exposing falsity (two value truth theorem logic, null hypothesis, true or false principle of identity, either 'a' or not 'a', etc.) rather than upon the alternative dialectic of 'alethea'--of covering over and revealing alternative truths. Needless to say, veritas is concomitant to a Roman Imperial tradition of reform, of bringing into the center, while alethea is rooted in a Greek forum of discussion and debate and philosophical argumentation.

The total objectification of the other, or, totalization of the other, is achieved through a systematic and uniform program of a 'comprehensive etic approach to the behavior stream'--"I italicize comprehensive because the argument I have just presented does not lead to the conclusion that the etic approach like an emic approach necessarily demands a knowledge of the social actor's language; on the contrary, many etic operations, including the study of some aspects of communications phenomena, can proceed entirely without foreign language competence." (page 349) I can myself confirm this attitude toward human data as one temporary advisor I had (they always seem so ephemeral) was a confirmed 'behaviorist' of a 'materialist persuasion'. He had absolutely no qualms about subsuming every single phenomenological 'event' or attribute, whether emotion, cognition, perception, cogitation, interaction, symbolization, etc., under the rubric of 'behavior'. What it did was to subjugate and predicate the relevance of the emic to the methodological salience of the etic.

"if behavioral events are described in terms of categories and relationships that arise from the observer's strategies criteria of similarity, difference and significance, they are etic; if they are described in terms of criteria elicited from an informant, they are emic…" (page 340) Like I told one young dynamic materialist at his oral defense when he was asked how he was going to do so many time--allocation observations with so many people, 'just buy a camcorder.' Then his only real problem (besides discourteous intrusion) would be editing the mountain of videotape. He looked at me curiously but never quite caught on.

It is possible to continue with this critique of Harris classic statement on the etic-emic dichtomization of human reality and to extend this critique to his brand of 'cultural materialism' which has achieved such great paradigmatic predominance. But such a critique is an inherently trivial and uninteresting from a scientific point of view as is his 'etic/emic' dichotomy is in the first place; based as it is upon the elaboration of a spurious and nonexistent idea of the 'etic'. The distinction between 'phonetic and phonemic' is linguistically important, but the extension of the meaning of 'etic' as a contrast to 'emic' in the cultural and cognitive universe is not important, but at best of minor significance. Phonetic sounds, distinctive features, are at best analytical devices in the understanding of the acoustic production of human language, with little application beyond the descriptive (but variable) translation of natural speech into phonetic alphabets (more than one) and the understanding of speech pathology. Invariably, linguists if they seek to understand the relevance, significance and salience of natural language, turn not toward etic but to the emic analysis, and it cannot be otherwise, because extension o f the etic as a 'comprehensive behavioral stream' composing language, culture, cognition and human reality itself, is inherently meaningless--production of physical noise in patterns however coherent and consistent. Etic salience flattens into emic silence. And it is not the burden of the 'observer' to infer, supply or invent the significance of the 'etic', as it has no significance, nor is it to project his/her own 'emic' categories and distinctions upon such a blank screen. It is to attempt to correlate the 'behavioral stream' however observed with the emic phenomenological stream of the actors consciousness that produce both behavior and belief, always in reference to the observer's own streams of action and consciousness, belief and behavior. The problematic is always confounded, always entangled, always ambiguous and never concise and clear-cut. The emic problematic remains, because in the final analysis, that is all there really ever is. 'Etic' becomes the spurious invention of the observer, his/her disguised 'emic' and being so disguised becomes no more communicable about human reality than the most monistic 'emic'. It becomes in Harris's own projective propaganda, "Those who maintain that the behavior stream only exits inside the minds of the observers, to be consistent must also believe that the observers themselves have no existence except as a sophistic figment." (page 349) Whatever else, Harris is completely, complacently consistent in carrying things to their epistemological existences.

Before moving on to more interesting and nontrivial problems, it seems necessary to dispense once and for all with this critical aspect of Harris's theory and method with a brief reminder and a warning. Harris must never have read Hans Gadamer's equally compelling 'Truth and Method'--if he had, then the never took his hermeneutics seriously enough. Gadamer poses the problem of philosophical hermeneutics as central to understanding in the social sciences. Understanding itself is an episodic and trans-subjective linguistic process, and 'event' of the fusion of 'Horizons' in the act of communication. The hermeneutics of the language process is seen as universal and as therefore underlying all attempts at understanding of the world, underlying all forms of knowledge of the world, whether individual or social. Knowledge springs from the linguistically and contemporaneousness of all human experience in the world. The hermeneutic problem arose from the encounter of translation between languages. The relationship of rhetoric to hermeneutics represents the 'positive' side of hermeneutical interpretation. Rhetoric and hermeneutic interpretation are deeply interwoven in the social sciences--in the sociality of human existence. The praxis of all three represents a challenge to the claim of scientificity in the social sciences. Rhetoric appeals to ordinary 'natural' reason in its claim of probable verisimilitude as opposed to the scientific claim of demonstrable truth. Ultimately all understanding and interpretation proceeds from this rhetorical call to reason, as does ultimately, scientific method as well. The rhetorical function of convincing and persuading extends its scope to take in universally all human understanding--scientific as well. It is in particular regard to this hermeneutic and rhetorical universality of its 'linguisticality' that the intentional alienation and 'distancing present' of the logic of social sciences is critiqued. The 'positivistic ossification' of social sciences stems from its failure to reflect upon its linguistic foundations. Hermeneutic methodology replaces social science methodology, as a way of recovering the past. Social sciences raise the claim of transcending 'pre-scientific' universality of the hermeneutic experience by 'methodical and controlled alienation'. The self reflexive consciousness of the hermeneutic problem seek awareness of the prejudice and pre-understandings which undermines scientific positivism. The role of the observer cannot be effectively separated from the ongoing process of the event itself to allow 'objective'--non-hermeneutic appropriation of the independent meaning of the event. The observer's own relationship with the event becomes denied. To understand is itself a kind of 'emic' happening.

Harris failure to pay much attention to such a critique is unfortunate, as it leads his whole enterprise down a theoretical cul-de-sac. In Sahlin's structure of the long run it must eventually reveal itself as an historical metaphor and a metaphorical reality, a methodological dead-end that must fall by the wayside in the dusty unused shelves of the libraries as a useless and counterproductive paradigm, but not before it will have run its full course and done its sufficient damage.

People of the materialist persuasion (materialism is itself an ideal concept) and of similar ideological persuasions will always attempt to predominate, for theirs is ultimately a political language, a political program, a political agenda, a political party, and a political paradigm, whenever I have watched anthropologists become political, I have seen them screw up anthropologically.

For these true believers, an 'emic' reality is intolerable because it is weak, dirty, 'obscurantist' and technologically unproductive because its epistemological and methodological basis is inherently ambiguous and ambivalent in results. A 'strong and clean cut'. Science must be founded upon clear and unambiguous terms, achieved always through the dichotomization of reality, the embracing of the thesis (etic) and the rejection of its contrapuntal antithesis (emic). It has a strong, clear, clean and simplifying influence, but it is in the last analysis Ideology and not science. Paul Ricoeur in his 'Science and Ideology' (1981) critiques ideology and elucidates the relationship between ideology and the human sciences. Four propositions emerge from this critique about the 'science ideology' couple. 1. Objectifying knowledge about our position in a socio-cultural-historical context is preceded by a 'relation of belonging' about which we cannot be entirely reflective--thus mitigating the notion of critical distance. 2. Objectifying knowledge can nevertheless be constituted by a 'relative autonomy' of a critical moment of 'distanciation' which is a part of the relation of historicity. This implies a critical distinction between hermeneutic 'pre-understanding' and prejudice. Positive distanciation is a 'consciousness exposed to the efficacy of history', made possible only by the condition of distance. 'Distanciation, dialectically opposed to belonging, is the condition of possibility of the critique of ideology, not outside or against hermeneutics but within hermeneutics. All distancings is self distancing, thus automatically implying a critique of ideology as a critique of the illusions of the self. 3. If the critique of ideology can partially distance itself from pre-understandings this freedom is never complete or total in its movement towards theory, always characterized by 'non-completeness' and 'non-totalization'. The critique of ideology, supported by a specific interest, never breaks its links to the basis of belonging. To forget this primordial tie is to enter into the illusion of a critical theory elevated to the rank of absolute knowledge. 4. Knowledge is always distancing itself from ideology, in a process which is never complete, but 'ideology always remains the grid, the code of interpretation, in virtue of which we are not unattached intellectuals but remain supported by what Hegel called 'ethical substance'. This concerns the 'correct usage of the critique of ideology, not of arrogance but of distanciation.

I find such a predominant 'paradigm' (or parochialism?) dangerous not because it promotes political interests behind its disguise of scientific neutrality and objectivity, interests which are fundamentally fascist in the Huxlian sense of prediction and control of human reality (and happiness) through scientific social engineering--though this remains a substantial probability. I find it more perniciously dangerous because in its politicization of human reality, in ways not previously politicized it promotes an 'unfreedom' of core values which are fundamentally authoritarian and fascist in their denial of subjective experience both in the self in terms of the subjective involvement of the 'participating' observer and of the 'other' in terms of that other human being's own categories and distinctions of metaphorical and metaphysical salience--his/her and ultimately our own 'emicity'. It promotes also a predominance of a spurious 'self' over the subjectively constituted reality of the other, fitting the American character of 'rugged individualism' (one prominent anthropologist has referred to Harris as 'The Great American Hero') and the progressive elimination of 'subjectivity; as an inherently disheveled and negatively valued domain of experience.

Attributions of 'cannibalism' and 'beef prohibition' as the 'logic of protein deficiency' underpinning the dynamics of whole pristine civilizations (much less small cultures) now make more natural 'common sense' as does the hyper-coherence of an 'America Now'. Part of materialism's appeal is the plea and promotion of common sense 'consensus' to the level of scientific truth criteria. What is neglected is that common sense and consensus itself goes unquestioned, as 'giver' and 'unelicited' (why must it be elicited when the subjective self in which it is invariably situated must be firmly denied as operationally nonexistent?). The apparent spurious 'commonness' of common consensus has always proven poor ground upon which to plant a genuine, open and communicable science.

What such an appeal does do, so fitting in a modern American context, is to reaffirm and buoy up a flagging egoism in the face of cultural crises, and internal contradictions. To deny America has its own mythological charters and ideological praxis is to deny the humanness of American culture--as 'superhuman'. In the paradigmatic philosophy of scientific movements, materialism, when taken to its logico-empirical extreme, becomes a reformative rational nativism which is conservative in function, protecting and preserving a cultural status quo in a sea of world cultural change. It is a lower middle class version of scientism which demands of us the support of its paradigmatic predominance and 'normalization' through the successful production of grant proposals which 'fit' well the ideological and material interests and orientations of the granting agencies--its existential charter and valorization as 'true science'. In this regard, the spuriousness of 'etic' epistemologies (read 'operational methodologies') takes on a new salience. It is quite convenient to have a theory which fits the method, and which also fits the society which produces these methods as well. Let me finally claim, that such methods have been and will remain fundamentally violent and destructive of humankind.

Rereading this article brings me to a more interesting salience to be found in an 'emic/etic' dialectic. This is the counterpoint between 'etic' as 'eticity'--an in-group/out-group boundary identifying consciousness which is rooted in an Ameri-centric and American egocentric value orientation and which provides another 'qualitative' horizon to anthropological knowledge and a kind of 'scientistic ethnocentrism' and the inherently ambiguous problem of 'emic' as 'emicity' of an antithetical kind of 'event horizon' in anthropological knowledge which acts to continuously disrupt and 'relativize' the methodological and epistemological and theoretical boundaries arbitrarily superimposed and customarily constrained by paradigmatic 'eticity'. We may refer to an 'emic boundary' of human consciousness, artificial and to a kind of 'emi-centrism' of orientation which always works to break down etic boundaries between unentangled, uncommitted, uninvolved self as observer and other as natural participant, to confound our 'natural categories' of meaning and attribution, and to conflate behavior and meaning, belief and behavior, and to compound the problematics of anthropological 'encounter'. We may also refer to a pseudo 'eti-centrism' as a boundary maintaining, status role consciousness and identify of ideologues. The contrapuntal dialectic between emic and etic, emicity as 'otherness' and eticity as 'objectification', emi-centrism as de-centering and relativizing and disorienting, as 'estranging' and eti-centrism as orienting, centering, collectivizing and familiarizing, suggest that we may then go on to postulate on the basis of the notion of a 'science of existentiality' two distinct 'modes of consciousness' or perhaps 'cognitive styles' which comprehend these epistemological and methodological 'event horizon'.

One interesting question remains to be asked, if not satisfactorily answered. Emic and etic as a dichotomic dialectic is derived from philosophically more basic dualities between 'subject/object', 'self/other', 'ideal/material' (or 'real' in a substantive empirical sense) and 'phenomenological/instrumental'. The subject/object dichotomy perhaps subsumes in the etic-emic distinction most of the other thematic variations. In the philosophy of science it asks how we can render the subjective objective and the objective subjective, if at all, and what harm is done in such a translation of reality. In methodological terms of 'getting into the head' of an informant, it asks how we can best 'objectify' the subjective experience of the other 'in and of itself' in pure and unqualified phenomenological terms, without undue reification, without 'turning a life into a thing' and without superimposing extraneous categories of experience or domains of knowledge in the process of translation. I do not have all the answers, but can suggest one avenue of exploration. In interviewing confirmed anthropologists and student anthropologist to be, I found the interpretive relevance of Martin Buber's 'I-thou/I-it' distinction to be valuable. It underlies a critical and subtle and sublime difference of 'sensitization' in encounter and experience, of 'empathy' in inter-relationship and mutuality of shared meaning and salience. Similar to this is Abraham Maslow's distinction in his 'The Psychology of Science' between fear motivated cognition which reifies, classifies, analyzes, dissects, to satiate an environmentally focused cognitive curiosity which is obsessive and insecure, and a more healthy, 'naturalistic' love motivated inquiry which seeks understanding in idiographic terms through interrelationship. In my interviews I also came upon the critical difference between the Goffman 'foreground' of the presentational 'self' as professionalized, over controlled, over determined anthropological 'ego' and the inevitable human background of referential or experiential 'selves' subjectively constituted as 'bundles of traits, things, experiences, feelings, thoughts' which have differential salience within an historically constituted mindscape. In encounter situations like interviews, people break down the etic-ego barriers if they are willing and share common 'things' from their bundles, matching and contrasting and thus inferring and learning, questioning and answering in a dialogue that builds from common ground. Such a dichotomization seemed necessary to an analysis of the results of my interviews with anthropologist types in a departmental setting. And such suggestions remain powerful.

In closing, it must be reiterated that I do not reject completely materialist interpretations of human reality--as long as they remain just interpretations. I do reject their programmatic promotion as Kuhnian 'paradigms'. Freedom of thought and speech and press demands universal tolerance--there must be room for the Nazi, however restricted. And like the atomic bomb, once invented, it is not likely to go away. We must learn how to live with its presence, no matter how obnoxious. I have many questions and a few suggestions, but no good answers.

Watson and Watson-Franke in their 'Interpreting Life Histories: An Anthropological Inquiry' (1985) provide an alternative view and review of life history research as a 'modus operandi' of anthropology, providing an history research hermeneutic/phenomenological frame as opposed to a received positivistic scientific framework--'allowing the subjects to speak for themselves'. It presents a critical polemic against psychoanalytic and culture/personality approaches to life history as being biased by the observers unquestioned frames of reference and as being primarily 'male dominated' in which the role of women's dialogue is viewed as only valuable vis-à-vis some implicit, contrapuntal kind of 'maleness', against elimination of the dialogical role of the interviewer in the data gathering process--whose unquestioned pre-understandings constitutes a phenomenological horizon of the life history process. Finally the book provides examples illustrating the possibility of comparison between different individual's life histories which remain relatively emic. "The comparative study of behavior can be accomplished with constructs that are emically sensitive to the subjective authenticity of life histories."