lolaraincoat | two fannish observations

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?