EMICPDX

I'm currently a graduate student at Portland State University, studying Communication. This blog will most likely be a place where I can write about what I am coming across in school and how I am relating it to living my daily life, and how it changes my perspective. And I'll post creative expressive pieces too.

An "emic" account is a description of behavior or a belief in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic account comes from a person within the culture. Almost anything from within a culture can provide an emic account (thanks Wikipedia).

This term came to me from a paper I was reading for class. The opposite term is "etic" meaning an observation from someone outside the culture under study. These two terms are most frequently used within anthropology. Since I moved back from Japan in August, I've been having a daily routine filled with etic experiences; everything here feels local, smaller, and kind of funny in a way. Because when you've grown used to a different environment, coming back into your home culture is trippy. Maybe EMICPDX is a way of observing my home culture from within it, though I have a kind of fading memory of life in Japan pushing me to make sense of daily life here.