Etics

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The study of human behaviour or culture from an outside observer's perspective, using categories that can be applied across different societies
2. An analytical approach to human practices that judges them by externally defined, universal criteria rather than by the insider's own meanings
3. Outsider-based descriptions of a culture or language, framed in terms that researchers bring from beyond the community they are studying

Etymology: "Etics" is the plural of "etic," a term coined in 1954 by the American linguist Kenneth Pike, who needed a name for a way of studying behaviour from the outside. He built it by analogy with "phonetic" and "phonemic," and the word was formed from the suffix "-etic" joined to the root of "phonetic," a pattern he treated as a pair of contrasting viewpoints. The coinage was deliberate. Pike set "etic" against "emic," a word he formed from "phonemic," so that an emic description would use categories meaningful to the people being studied, while an etic description would use categories imposed by the outside observer. Both terms were introduced in his 1954 work on language and behaviour, and they spread quickly into anthropology and the social sciences.