Ambiente: personajes y lugares

Members of a society always have more or less coherent ideas as to what the principles are on which that society is built and what makes it tick. However, these so-called participants are not professional sociologists, anthropologists, historians, or political economists. Much of the internal workings of society de- pend on forms of submission and exploitation which the members can hardly afford to realize consciously and which are covered under thick layers of symbol- ism and ideology. Sheer exploitation of one class by another may present itself to the participants as laudable service to the gods, the ancestors, the king, the aris- tocracy, elders, men, etc. So, by and large, the way participants view and catego- rize their society goes some way towards understanding that society, but never all the way. The classification which a scientific observer applies to a society must take into account the participants’ own classifications, but observers also need to go beyond such local classifications, leading to analytical perspectives that the participants themselves would never contemplate, perspectives that would often even be unthinkable in the terms of their own society and culture.

In order to deal with these types of problems, American linguistic anthropolo- gist Kenneth Pike (1912-2000) coined the terms emic and etic, which to him are not so much two modes of approaching and analysing a society but, in a narrower sense, two ways to render the classification system of a different culture: emic, in which the analyst seeks to understand and render the indigenous classification system; and etic, in which external analytical categories are imposed regardless of the people’s own classification.7 The paired concepts of emic and etic have been used to differentiate between the awareness by members of a cultural orien- tation on how the culture is internally structured, on the one hand, and a structur- ing that is analytically imposed from the outside, on the other. In other words, the concept emic signifies a method of analysis of a cultural orientation as produced by members of that cultural orientation. This model explains the ideology or be-

7

See Pike’s Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (1954/1967).

haviour of members of that cultural bearing. The concept etic signifies a method of analysis produced by a researcher or an outsider or an observer towards a local production of cultural elements. The etic model attempts to be universal, while the emic is considered to be culture-specific.

Pike’s terminology is borrowed from a linguistic method of analysis of cultur- al orientations in anthropology. In linguistics, one can describe speech sounds from two interrelated angles: that of phonetics (hence etic), and that of phonolo- gy, whose basic unit of study is the phoneme (adjective, phonemic; hence

emic).The phonetic perspective provides a purely external description, informed by the anatomical and physical parameters of which speech sounds consist. The phonemic frame of reference, on the other hand, points to the smallest unit of speech sound that can be adequately perceived by those who are able to use the given language, relying on the distinguishing parts of the speech sound.

Pike’s classification came from the new orientation of the classic anthropology that had arisen in the 1930s with such proponents as Malinowski, Evans- Pritchard, Leiris, Fortes, and Griaule. Before this new orientation, the etic ap- proach was the dominant mode in anthropology.8 However, with the coming of prolonged, in-depth fieldwork and therefore of an emic approach, the empirical horizon of individual studies had to become narrower. Emic analysis necessitated that the researcher learned a new language and stayed on the spot for years, with- in a narrow space and time. In this sense we can talk of an ethnoscience. Ethno- science is an emic presentation of the indigenous knowledge of a different cul- ture, where diminished mental powers, for example, may be caused by witch- craft, demons, breaking of taboos, ancestors, etc. Yet the same culture also knows about bone setting, obstetrics, and so on in ways that would also be con- sidered valid from a Western or cosmopolitan scientific point of view. We may also cite ethnobotany, which is likely to classify plants according to local cos- mologies and beliefs, and not according to the universalizing, analytical, scien- tific classification system initiated by the Swedish botanist, physician, and zool- ogist Linnaeus. In the same way, ethnophilosophy must be understood as an at- tempt to render in discursive, cosmopolitan academic text, the indigenous philos- ophizing of a particular culture - in this case an African culture. It is not a form of ethnology but simply an application in the philosophical perspective of emic

anthropology. Such rendering is devoid of the universalist and cosmopolitan viewpoint in both form and meaning. This probably explains why in the field of African philosophy, ethnophilosophy (in the hands of Towa, Hountondji, etc.) came to be a pejorative term for the kind of rendering of African traditional

8 _{`We may cite theories concerning the fixed and universal phases of aesthetic development, such as} evolutionism, diffusionism, and materialism.

37 thought (as was the case with Tempels, Kagame, etc.) that is no longer being done. But why not? Did we not throw away the child with the bath water?

One of the persistent questions in African philosophical debates is this: what is the nature and possibility of an African philosophy? Can we retrieve it? We shall see how Tempels and Kagame have attempted to answer this question. I will pro- ceed in the next section to show that there is still much authentic African thought in Tempels and Kagame. Their methods may be flawed, and therefore the format of what they present is disputable; Tempels, for instance, used the Scholastic format.9 However, every format change from oral to text is inherently problemat- ic, and the same format change is always involved whenever we do cultural de- scription.