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?

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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

[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.