Folklorists and Historians: The Etic/Emic Divide

The Man Who Adores the Negro by Patrick Mullen (2008) caused me to reflect on my own field, History, and how the task of historians differs in crucial ways to that of folklorists and ethnographers.  In this week's reading, Mullen criticized his own approach, plus a handful of other mid-20^th century folklorists who worked across the white-black racial boundary.  He highlighted how predetermined understandings held by the white, highly educated folklorists about black culture helped form the understanding, interpretation and narrative the folklorists constructed about their subjects of study.  In doing so, these folklorists further solidified racial stereotypes upper-class, white, highly educated scholars held about the black community.  Most compelling in this book was Mullen’s own reflective turn on himself, where he criticized the methodologies he used in the past, and outlined his attempts to overcome the one-sided nature of his research by  working collaboratively with a black scholar who came from the community he wished to study.  Interestingly, his first experiment with collaborative work fell apart.  Mullen blamed this on the same race and power dynamics that underlie U.S. society in general, dynamics that could not be avoided even by two academic professionals attempting to overcome these differences.  In the end, despite the challenges he faced in this failed collaboration, Mullen concluded that continued emphasis on cross-racial research is essential to avoid the negative consequences of mis-representing, mis-construing, or mis-understanding another culture from an outsider’s perspective.

Mullen’s book deals primarily with the racial divide white/black.  Clearly, this is not the only cultural divide scholars must worry about.  Beyond the regular litany of race/class/gender/urban-rural/age/linguistic differences, other groups develop with their own cultural practices and nuances, overlapping and intersecting,  formed by individuals who belong to multiple overlapping groups simultanously.  If one understands every human experience as a universe in itself, there are as many cultural divides as there are individuals on the planet.  For academic purposes, neither fully emic nor fully etic analyses of cultural practices suffice, whether across racial, class or gender boundaries, or between two individuals who would be indistinguishable on a demographic statistics page.  Mullen’s suggestion, with steps take to avoid the pitfalls he faced (and others certain to emerge), would be best applied to all ethnographic research.

Finally, I would like to comment on the poor historians who find value in an emic/etic dialogue when writing about culture, but who can only imagine the dialogue they might have with people who lived many lifetimes ago.  Historians work across racial, cultural, class and gender divides where all of Mullen’s concerns apply.  Even working within one’s own cultural past is problematic.  As L.P. Hartley famously said, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."   As a cultural historian, I find myself in a cycle of evaluation and re-evaluation of myself and my field, trying to avoid a sense of despair from the impossibility of my task.  I face the both the inability to completely accurately represent the past and the complication of writing across language, culture, and nation. This is compounded by the knowledge that my own experiences taint the manner in which I view and write about the cultures I wish to represent.  In the absence of emic/etic collaboration, historians rely heavily on humility (not believing their observations can be the ultimate, all-encompassing account of the past), reflexivity (acknowledging one’s own background so the inevitable subjectivity can be filtered at least partially by other readers), and the work and interpretation of other historians.  Within the multitude of approaches and backgrounds from historians working across time and continents, some observations gather some legitimacy over time. That is, until the next archive opens or the next generation of historians comes along to take our philosophy to a new and deeper level.   

Kelley Merriam Castro