two fannish observations

[lolaraincoat]

I only see TV on DVD or at the gym, so anyone interested is, no doubt, way ahead of me on this, but, well, anyway: tonight the TV at the gym was playing something called Dancing with the Stars, and one of the Stars who was, apparently, signed up for a Dancing competition was Joey Fantone from NSYNC. I only know him from an icon cathexys uses, but I recognized him. He was great! He was goofy and funny! And he seemed as straight as a man dancing on television can be, alas, but then isn't he the one that doesn't get slashed so much?

*********************

And then on the way home Fishwhistle was telling me about an article he'd read for his class on tonality, a formal analysis of certain Grateful Dead jams -- yes, yes, we don't need to mock because it pretty much mocks itself, doesn't it? -- and anyway Fishwhistle described the article as "etic." What does that mean? I asked him. It is, he revealed to me, the opposite of "emic." That is, when musicologists analyze only the formal aspects of music, in terms comprehensible to musicologists but not necessarily to the people who make or listen to the music normally, that is an etic analysis. But when musicologists try to convey something of the experiences and understandings of the people who make the music, or the fans of the music, that is an emic analysis.

So, two questions: Do people engaging in fan studies make this distinction between etic and emic? And if not, would it be useful to fan studies?

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

i saw the advertisement but didn't know it had already started...and personally, i never could slash joey well (his kid ought to be 7 or 8 by now, and he just doesn't hit me the same way). glad LJ teaches you important things, though...like recognizing former boy band members :D

re emic vs etic. Would Hills or Sandvoss fall under that? I'd argue their discourses near purposefully exclude the fans...whereas jenkins'd be the opposite?

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

argh...wrong icon. i guess i needed this one...

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I was going to tackle it from a slightly different angle: the fanscholar vs the scholarfan.

Two More and We'll Have a Dining Room Set!

[executrix.livejournal.com]

ETA: By analogy with Woody Allen's proposed merger between "Commentary" and "Dissent" to form "Dysentery", we could actually *try* to have EmEtic analyses rather than merely achieving them.

Re: Two More and We'll Have a Dining Room Set!

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

I love you. Have I mentioned that lately?

Re: Two More and We'll Have a Dining Room Set!

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Awwww! Miss you. Are you going to be in this neck of the woods, like, ever?

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they started out with a scene of the kid (who is x-tra cute) letting the dance teacher into their mansion -- "Daddy! The dancer is here!"

Jenkins is definitely emic. Sandvoss and Hills ... well, I haven't actually read Sandvoss. Hills is more like not-very-good emic analysis, to me. I mean he's sort of trying to do the participant observation thing, without actually participating. Unless I'm muddling him up with someone else.

You know who does a really good etic analysis? Constance Penley.

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

Yep, Brianna does look about that old now, and apparently, she inherited Joey's ham gene. I'm sure they'll recap next week, and I'm sure somebody already has the torrent up, but the judges fell as head over heels in love with Joey as everyone else on the planet seems to. I'm not sure what NSYNC guys do to people who meet them in person, but people who work with them start falling all over themselves to sing their praises. (I keep remembering Aerosmith's mad crush on NSYNC after the Super Bowl).

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

When I first started reading *NSYNC fan fic, my pairing of choice was Joey and Chris. Of course, then I learned that Joey was the one who had a kid while he was in the band, and watched the behind the scenes footage, and sadly, reality put a harsh on my pairing, because Joey is just he gayest straight boy on the planet. I mean, Joey is this set of contradictions: he loves musical theater, is a total ham, and is the one in the group who seems to hate sports the most (excpet for maybe JC, who always looks so vaguely unhappy at the charity basketball games.) I also adore him because he wears completely inappropriate t shirts all the time. Including one of Supergirl and Batgirl making out. I also have an icon of that.

Joey is one of the less slashed ones, largely because of Brianna and Kelly (the daughter and wife respectively). I almost squealed with glee when I realized he was dancing to the Bee Gees, because NSYNC covered some of their songs.

No brain left for any thoughtful analysis of the etic, emic I'm afraid, mostly because there is a scary stack of survey papers to grade.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

I like that emic/etic distinction. I want to think about it some more, but I think it has some very useful applications. And I don't think there is anything particularly mockable about analyzing the Grateful Dead (as the fan calls the kettle black). They are/were highly skilled musicians who had been playing together for decades and were really inside each others' heads, and because of their active encouragement of fannish taping, there is a huge repetoire available for analysis. Dead shows were actually extremely structured, and I've always understood them as ritual more than entertainment. Joseph Campbell tells us that religious ceremonies are re-enactments of central myths (duh, because he's still really a Catholic); a Dead show is a ceremony that re-enacts an acid trip. If they didn't have an underlying formal structure, they wouldn't be nearly so effective.

I tuned into Dancing with the Stars last night for Ian Ziering, being a long time 90210 fan myself. One of the things I find fascinating about that show is the way it showcases the differences in how the genders are trained for performing careers. Nearly all the women have had some type of dance instruction, at least as children, but most of the men are total neophytes with no theory even to get them started. The athletes often have the most difficulty of all, because they don't want to let loose. My favorite season of that show was the one when John O'Hurley (J. Peterman from Seinfeld) went up to the finals. He was charming, funny, and a good dancer.

So now I am trying to imagine Phil Lesh on Dancing with the Stars. In a purely emic way, of course.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

It's also indicative of a change in popular entertainment patterns--at one time, *everybody* knew at least basic partner dancing, and dancing was not only a central courtship ritual but an important part of socializing among married couples. So if there somehow were an equivalent of Dancing With the Stars in, say, 1930, being able to not only perform but lead common social dances was an expected part of being an adolescent or adult male.

[kaiz.livejournal.com]

Re. emic/etic, poor cathexys has been listening to me rant about this kind of distinction ceaselessly for the past couple of months. Heh. Social science (esp. medical anthropology) often tackles this sort of thing, but I think it tends to go missing from the fananalysis discourse quite regularly.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Do anthropologists use the terms etic and emic? Fishwhistle and I were trying to figure that out. The ideas are certainly familiar but it's so handy to have words for them!

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

Yes dear... we do. The terms come from anthro... popularized by that awful Marvin Harris, but originated by someone earlier (Melvin Singer, maybe?), using the linguistic analogy (as always) implicit in the distinction between phonetic and phonemic.

[fishwhistle.livejournal.com]

I don't quite get the linguistic analogy. Can you explain?



I suppose you dislike Marvin Harris for the same reasons lolaraincoat is driven to furious rants about Jared Diamond? The only thing I know of Marvin Harris is Good To Eat, which I found an interestingly compelling set of just-so-stories although I was also pretty sure those stories would fall apart on closer examination.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Wait! where's the comment where you say, oh yeah, Lola said that those terms emic and etic had to be related to phoneme and phonetic, and I said pooh pooh, couldn't be, but I was so very wrong and Lola was so very right? Well?

I think I deserve a present. Maybe a pony. A shiny pony with glitter on its hoofs. Hooves. Whatever.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

But, though I can't speak for La Sloth, my own furious rant against Marvin Harris would have little to do with furious ranting against Jared Diamond. Diamond is self-agrandizing but at least the ideas he claims as his own are smart ideas. Harris may or may not be borrowing ideas from other scholars without or without giving proper credit, but those ideas are dumb, dumb, dumb.