[Buddha-l] "Western Self, Asian Other"

[Richard Hayes]

On Dec 29, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Joanna Kirkpatrick wrote:

> Here goes. Since this article is a 29 pager, I'm going to respond
> to it sort of piecemeal, as I go along, instead of having to
> muster copious notes to tide me to the end and longer comments:

That, I think, is by far the best way to proceed. Otherwise, our e-mails would transcend the attention spans of email readers. Thanks for sending along your comments and raising the questions your raised. Some of the same questions came up for me as I was reading the article, but I think you stated your concerns more clearly than I would have done.

Something I hope you, or perhaps some other anthropologist, can clarify for me is the meaning of "etic" and "emic." People in religious studies use those terms all the time, and I have looked them up repeatedly and tried to get a handle on them. But the more I read about how the terms are used, the more confusing I find them. Can you give us a quick fix on how those words are used in anthropology and perhaps shed a bit of light on how Quli is using them? I found myself getting bewildering by what she was describing as "etic" descriptions of Buddhism. (Be gentle with me. I'm a philosopher. My job is to be bewildered for as long as possible about as much as possible.) 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu