Emic Concepts Research Articles

An outsider’s insights from the inside: implications of emic concepts on qualitative international management research

An outsider’s insights from the inside: implications of emic concepts on qualitative international management research

The feeling of destiny: taqdeer and ‘voluntary’ return in the everyday lives of irregularised Pakistani migrants

ABSTRACT This article inquires into how rejected asylum seekers and returning migrants feel and make sense of their (im)mobility. Focusing on the emic concept of taqdeer (destiny), it explores how Pakistani migrants affectively experience and interpret restrictive mobility regimes. The article contextualises the value of destiny in the lives of irregularised migrants, (rejected) asylum seekers with an order to leave, as well as those who return under such circumstances. It explores how perspectives, narratives and feelings of destiny form an integral part of their lived experiences: How a shared understanding of taqdeer primarily serves as a means to communicate affective states but also serves as an important way to accept or contest diverse situations of (im)mobility, experiences of irregularisation and return. I argue that taqdeer is an integral part of the affective economy of (return) migration and often aids people in meaning-making and provides them with a way to engage with the vulnerabilities and gendered burdens of irregularised migration and return. The concept of destiny furthers ethnographic understanding of the intimate entanglement of the bureaucratic and divine dimensions of (im)mobility in the lives of irregularised Muslim migrants.

Advancing Cross-Cultural Research Through Mixed Methods Inquiry

Mixed methods principles can support and advance cross-cultural research. This article provides different ways for researchers to conceptualize culture and summarizes the Synergistic Participatory Mixed Methods Quality Model (SPMMQM): Cycle of Research. The SPMMQM summarizes several mixed methods principles and philosophical foundations that support cross-cultural work, including the application of etic and emic concepts drawn from ethnography. This article also introduces the idea of using joint displays within the SPMMQM and cites several primary resources readers can consult should they wish to learn more about cross-culture mixed methods research.

Chinese Emotionality in Chinese Emic Concepts and its Relevance for Discourse - Influences from Ecology, Thought Systems and Folk Religion

Emotions are identified, categorised and expressed differently by different cultures and societies, what is also related to distinct reasoning (regarding which emotions are appropriate to a certain situation, time, or place, and the adequate way to express them, amongst others). A myriad factors contribute to this differentiated cultural development respecting emotionality, being geographical constrictions, history, and thought systems merely a few of them. Furthermore, discourse can be understood as a way through which culture is expressed. Chinese people have a common identity framework that dates back to a few millennia. Moreover, their cultural idiosyncrasies have a rich emphasis on emotional analysis and regulation. This work thus intends to present a few aspects of Chinese culture and society that are relevant to Chinese individuals’ perception and expression of emotionality in their everyday life, introducing also this society’s emphasis on moral, social and aesthetic emotions, and their work in contemporary Chinese discourse.

Metapolitics as Programmatic Storytelling

New Right metapolitics is a challenge for discourse research as its proponents possess reflexive knowledge of the discursive arenas in which they engage. To critically analyse these discursive practices requires conceptual approaches that differ from the emic concepts of the New Right. So far, there are scant methodological reflections on the peculiarity of metapolitics. This paper offers an analytical framework to tackle these shortcomings. I argue to distinguish between narrations and narratives, and to conceptualise the New Right as a narrative community. Furthermore, I propose several analytical categories to be implemented in a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse.

Isabella’s lion: circular care, kinship, and healing in Brazilian Candomblé

This paper centers on Isabella, a Candomblé follower who struggled with severe rheumatoid arthritis from an early age, arguing that care and self-care practices in Candomblé are intertwined to such extent that they challenge the dichotomy of caring and being cared for. In contrast to a linear model of care that positions care-giver and care-­receiver at opposite ends of care relationships, the concept of ‘circular care’ describes forms of care that are directed at others and simultaneously at oneself. Exploring the religious kinship in a Candomblé house – with Candomblé deities (orixás) and between humans – this paper shows how circular care blurs the distinction between self and other. The emic concept of ‘the double mirror’ illustrates the ­‘constitutive alterity’ of humans and orixás who relate to each other through kinship building and collective care practices. Since circular care frames one’s care for the orixás and the religious family as healing self-care, failing to provide the correct care may in turn be experienced as detrimental self-neglect. The concept of circular care thus enables a deeper understanding of complex dynamics of care and self-care in the contexts of chronic illness, religion, kinship, and beyond.

Reported Health Needs among Women Who Have Sex with Women in Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania: What Public Health Personnel and Primary Health Clinicians Should Know

Exiting empirical data on female homosexuality demonstrate women who have sex with women engage in risky sexual behaviors and practices that put them at risk of woman-to-woman transmitted infections and other same-sex sex health-related problems. However, the level of risk varies among women in same-sex relationship pending on sexual risk behaviors they engage in, posing differentiated perceived and real health needs. I present perceived health needs among women who have sex with women in Tanzania. Four qualitative methods were used to collect data: in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, collecting participants’ life stories and observations. Data analysis deployed thematic approach where open systematic coding of data in the participants’ language and combining emerging emic concepts with preconceived theoretical constructs was used. With the exception of the women who identify transgender men or tomboys, women interviewed reported having similar primary and specialized health needs like their counterparts. Transgender men reported in need of affordable sex toys, lubricants and trusted healthcare providers skilled to manage their specific health needs. Deep-rooted belief that homosexual females are at low risk of HIV and other STIs coupled with a lack of awareness of the link between female same-sex sexual practices and diseases informed the poor risk perception demonstrated by women studied. I recommend for larger ethnographic and multidisciplinary (longitudinal/cohort) studies, with different designs and nationally representative samples to assess women who have sex with women’s health needs and wellbeing in the Tanzania context.

Learning the language of social environment: the case of Hungarian in Vojvodina (Serbia)

ABSTRACT This article explores Yugoslav education policy in Vojvodina (Serbia), one of the most multilingual regions of the country, which was implemented in the period between the 1960s and 1980s through the school subject the ‘Language of social environment’ (LSE). Based on archival and field research, this case study is devoted to the school subject Hungarian as LSE intended for students whose L1 was Serbo-Croatian. The article addresses the discourses of policy makers who advocated for the introduction of LSE and how former students and teachers remember the school subject, which was abolished in the 1990s. The analysis shows that LSE was based on the values of societal multilingualism for all members of society and in line with a ‘language-as-resource’ orientation to language planning and policy, both as an etic concept at top-down policy level and as an emic concept at local level where nostalgic memories and bottom-up initiatives for its reintroduction emerged.

From Graphic Units to Unrecognized Landscapes of Expression: New Approaches on Amerindian Graphic Communication Systems

Many studies, even those conducted in the field of the Americas, still argue that graphic communication necessarily builds on coding units of speech. However, in recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the narrowness of this concept by focusing on Indigenous and pre-Columbian societies, who favore(d) non-glottographic systems over written speech. This paper concerns the development of a semiological multidimensional theory and methodology to analyze Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems (GCSs) in Mesoamerica, Amazonia, the Isthmo-Colombian Area and the Central Andes. The aim of this theory and methodology is to understand how and in what ways Indigenous societies communicate and encode knowledge using graphic units. Placing emic concepts and epistemologies increasingly at the center of the investigation comes with a rethinking of Western concepts of writing, and a change of perspective. The proposed model provides access to new analytical dimensions that have not been considered in an integrated way so far. Graphic units are not only studied in relation to each other and on the semantic level, but in the broader context in which they arise. Three examples are used to demonstrate the complexity of graphic communication based on semasiographic principles and test the proposed approach focusing on various forms of Yukpa graphic expressions in Colombia and Venezuela and framed graphic units of the Tiwanaku culture in the Central Andes, Peru.

PERSPEKTIF INKLUSI SOSIAL GURU BK DI KOTA BANJARMASIN KALIMANTAN SELATAN (KAJIAN AWAL TENTANG BIMBINGAN DAN KONSELING BERPERSPEKTIF INKLUSIVITAS SOSIAL)

Guidance and Counseling (Bimbingan dan Konseling or BK) in education should be oriented to the needs of the counselee, yet the biased perspective of counselor. BK teachers must have an emic concept leading to social inclusion perspectives and multicultural competence. This study aims to describe the perspective of the social inclusion of BK teachers in Banjarmasin. The research subjects were 62 BK teachers. The data was obtained through an online questionnaire. The results showed that discourse of social inclusiveness was still rare, in fact almost 80% of the subjects were unsocialized. The subject knowledge is limited to theoretical and normative aspects. Subjects believe that the principle of inclusion must be applied to minorities, however almost all subjects stand up to the majority group. Individuals are considered to conform to the norms and to the authorities. BK teachers in Banjarmasin are still dominated by an exclusive perspective viewing women, children and minority groups. This comes from a belief system and biased values ​​that come from aspects of religion and socialization obtained from and values ​​and culture in society. This shows that there are still inconsistencies between knowledge and perspective, between values ​​and attitudes, between theory and practice.

Between religion and politics: the political deification of Mahishasur

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the political deification of a so-called demon Mahishasur in hegemonic Hindu myths. The Mahishasur movement is a social movement for caste equality headed by indigenous and oppressed-caste groups against the hegemonic upper caste Hindu storyworlds which dominate Indian politics, society, and culture. In this article, I use data collected through participant observation and long interviews to focus on the way political organisers select and create icons for this movement, how the participants in the movement behave around these icons, and finally what terms do they use to understand their own practices. I use three related aspects of the movement – icons, rituals, and discourse – to bring out the emic concepts and practices around political deification used in the Mahishasur movement.

Persepsi Remaja Putri Cilacap tentang Pernikahan Dini (Sebuah Perspektif Emik dan Etik)

This article aims to answer questions about how young women in Cilacap Regency perceive early marriage and marriage in general. To approach this problem, emic and etic concept references are used. The data were collected in a qualitative way through in-depth interviews with 15 participants. The data obtained were then made in the form of a manuscript to obtain a general description of the object of research. The data from the interviews were analyzed using an emic perspective which was then juxtaposed with objective data using an etic perspective. The criteria for informants in this study were young women aged 15-19 years in Cimanggu District, never married or people who were not involved in marriage, had sufficient time and ability to provide information during the research process, and knew about marriage and early marriage. This study concludes that the negative perceptions of young women in Cimanggu District, Cilacap Regency towards early marriage are (1) the quality of marriage, (2) the things that are sacrificed, (3) health risks, and (4) role responsibilities.

Disease, Illness, and Sickness: The Difficulty of Classification. The Example of Saka in The Malay World

Saka is a medical disorder that appears in the Malay speaking world. However, it is difficult for medical or psychological experts to denote whether it fits one of the well-known categories like disease, illness, and sickness. In psychiatry, the term Culture-Bound-Syndrome (CBS) was introduced to cover psychiatric abnormalities, and in the Malay speaking world, CBS like amok and latah are well-known. In this article, the authors argue that the Western concepts and categories might not suffice to understand and categorize emic concepts of non-Western societies. The authors conducted qualitative field research in the North-eastern Malaysian state of Kelantan. Kelantan is considered to be a traditional Malay state. The researchers observed and interviewed five persons with saka. They discovered that there are no uniform patterns of people with the medical disorder of saka.

The Orthodox Charismatic Gift

Based on ethnographic research conducted in a number of Orthodox parishes in Bucharest, this article discusses different conceptions of har among Bucharest Orthodox believers, practitioners, and clerics. Har stands for ‘grace’, ‘charisma’ or ‘gift’ depending on the context. An ethnographically grounded analysis of this emic concept, I argue, is essential for two main reasons. First, understanding grace through gratuity allows us to grasp diverse forms of religious change, such as committed church attendance and the detachment from communal religious life, in contemporary Romania. Second, seeing through the looking glass of Orthodox practice allows for unexplored insights into the workings of charismatic authority. The article ends with a seeming paradox: grace is ‘something extra’, an addition which is best grasped apophatically, that is, through subtraction.

Where Is the Nomadic Family? Rigid Laws and Flexible Tundra Life in North-East Siberia

Abstract We start from a puzzle: in remote Arctic regions of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), why are many reindeer-herding families excluded from official 'nomadic family' benefits? The Republic's Nomadic Family Law is supposed to support indigenous minorities leading a 'traditional' lifestyle, but it often fails. We identify three models of family structure at work, each matching the fluidity of the physical environment and productive process more or less realistically. While our fieldwork reveals a highly flexible and all-embracing indigenous understanding of relatedness, analysis of the urban officials' laws show them to be based on unexamined concepts of 'family' rooted in Russian terminology and based on narrow ideas of the nuclear family rather than on the complementary distribution of labour across a shared space. We suggest that legal initiatives should include a wider ethnographic basis to provide a better understanding of emic concepts, while also consulting the local people most directly affected.

Emic concepts and etic paths

ABSTRACT This article introduces a thematic issue consisting of six case studies of emic concepts that have potential value for serving as etic concepts in the study of religion/s. It briefly reviews theoretical issues relevant to the emic/etic distinction, underlining its relative and pragmatic nature. It ends with a brief overview of the seven contributions to this thematic issue.

Zemi, teotl, huaca: reconsidering materiality through three emic concepts in the New World

ABSTRACT During Early Modern history, the representations of New World’s indigenous beliefs and practices were a process of assimilation within the Western concept of religion. This article assesses three indigenous emic concepts observed by missionaries: zemi, teotl and huaca. First, it analyses the Account of the Antiquities of the Indians by Ramón Pané, sent by Christopher Columbus to carry out ‘fieldwork’ among the Taíno Indians. Then, it focuses on how in New Spain Bernardino de Sahagún confronted another emic concept—teotl—and incorporated it into his Florentine Codex. Finally, it focuses on how José de Acosta, in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, adapted a theory of idolatry assimilating Andean huacas as ‘particular things’. From the comparison of these emic categories will emerge a sort of indigenous theory of materiality that could be valuable to religious studies when considering ‘other’ relational forms with extra-human beings.

Cultural and psychological changes during the social transformation in China: Sociological research and its enlightenments to psychologists

<p id="p00005">Scholars have approached social psychology from two perspectives: a sociological one and a psychological one. Although two perspectives have mostly developed in a parallel way, both has paid much attention into a common area: societal changes and their psychological impacts. Past sociological research on Chinese societal changes has focused on two aspects: changes in society or social structure, and changes in people. The former mainly involves urbanization, social class, social mobility, and family structure; the latter mainly involves Chinese experience, social mentality, group psychology, and organizational psychology. Research suggests that while modern individualism has been on the rise, traditional collectivism has been declining. Compared with psychological approach, sociological approach tends to adopt more emic concepts and qualitative analyses, pays more attention to group psychology as well as the influences of politics and policy, and employs more macro-historical perspective. In future research, Chinese social psychologists from the two perspectives need to learn from and collaborate with each other, ultimately achieving a better understanding of the change of Chinese people and Chinese society.

Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish-Eye: Ouyang Jingwu and the Revival of Scholastic Buddhism by Eyal Aviv

Reviewed by: Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish-Eye: Ouyang Jingwu and the Revival of Scholastic Buddhism by Eyal Aviv Alex Grabiner Eyal Aviv, Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish-Eye: Ouyang Jingwu and the Revival of Scholastic Buddhism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020. xii, 214 pp. US$159. ISBN 978-90-04-43790-6 The late Imperial and early Republican periods in China saw an explosion of new ideas, produced by Chinese intellectuals and imported from abroad. Motivated to find a solution to the challenges posed by Western and Japanese imperialism, political instability, and technological innovations, reformers in every aspect of society turned to Chinese traditions. Yet the reformers found themselves divided over whether these traditions should be seen as millstones to be cast off, or vaults in which lay safeguarded the sources of China’s salvation. Buddhism would become one of the battlegrounds on which new and old ideas were contested, and these debates would help shape Buddhist modernism throughout Asia. Ouyang Jingwu 歐陽竟無 (1871–1943) was a leading figure in the movements that sought to reform Chinese Buddhism, and is the subject of Eyal Aviv’s intellectual history, Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish-Eye. Aviv carefully traces Ouyang’s career as a scholar and teacher who revived interest in the Yogācāra school of Indian Buddhist philosophy, and he explores both the formation of Ouyang’s approach to Buddhism and the legacy that he left behind. With the help of Ouyang’s copious prefaces and commentaries, as well as letters between the “Great Master” (dashi 大師) and his disciples, and several published scholarly debates, Aviv paints a detailed picture of Ouyang’s Buddhist philosophy. Hovering over this investigation is the question: Why, in this moment of crisis, did Ouyang believe that the answers to China’s problems lay in an ancient Indian school of thought? Aviv attributes the motivation behind Ouyang’s efforts to a quest for authenticity and a belief that “the unearthing of the authentic ([zhen] 真) teachings of Buddhism would be efficacious both on the individual existential level and as a spiritual solution for the new China” (p. 2). To help think through the way discourses of authenticity function in religion, Aviv draws upon the work of McCutcheon and Taylor, among others, as well as reviewing emic concepts of authenticity from the historical traditions of Confucianism and Buddhism. This includes the longstanding hermeneutical concerns with determining buddhavacana, the authoritative words of the Buddha, as well as Chinese Buddhist attempts to construct panjiao 判教, hierarchical systems of doctrinal classification that could make sense of the often conflicting texts transmitted to China. Surprisingly omitted is the role India has historically played in the Chinese Buddhist imagination as a place inherently linked with the conferral of authenticity, demonstrated by the attribution of many apocrypha to “Indian” monks and translators and the many journeys undertaken to retrieve teachings from the west. How much this conception of India played a role in Ouyang’s turn to Yogācāra in his attempts to resuscitate Chinese Buddhism remains a project for future research. [End Page 325] While authenticity remains the thematic scaffolding for the book, Aviv also shows that Ouyang’s fixation on distinguishing the inaccuracies of Chinese Buddhist texts seemed to have waned towards the end of his life, as his concerns shifted from purported provenance to soteriological efficacy. The book’s overall structure is fairly straightforward: after a brief biographical sketch in the first chapter, Aviv dives into Ouyang’s scholarship, examining his critiques of Chinese Buddhism generally and the famous text Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana (Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論) in chapters 2 and 3 respectively. Chapter 4 examines a key element of Ouyang’s original approach to Yogācāra thought, while chapter 5 covers the evolution of Ouyang’s views in his later years. Finally, chapter 6 explores the legacy of Ouyang’s contributions to the revival of scholastic Buddhism and to New Confucianism, especially through the work of his students. The strength of the book lies in Aviv’s deep engagement with Ouyang’s writings, as well as those of his peers and students. He has identified, within Ouyang’s extensive oeuvre, those passages...

Connectionwork

Despite their centrality to foundational conceptions of relations in anthropology and their casual use in contemporary discourse, “connections” are only rarely problematized and reflected upon. “Connection” is a key emic concept among neoforagers who engage in practices typically associated with forager lifeways for the purpose of cultivating “deep connection to nature.” Through an ethnography of Israeli neoforagers, this article describes how “connection” acquires different meanings in different contexts and levels of experience, and how it significantly shapes neoforager praxis, epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Neoforagers transpose connection-oriented perspectives and terminology commonplace in the digitally connected society onto more-than-human encounters and relations. The term “connectionwork” is proposed to describe both their connection-oriented ontology and the continuous effort to properly connect and disconnect in the world. It is suggested that an analytical consideration of connections and connectionwork may further illuminate more-than-human sociality and relations in general.