Table of contents
Introduction 0 Why Write for the Public? 1 What to Expect, from Pitch to Publication 2 How to Write a Pitch 3 How To Tell a Great Story, Part 1: Structure 4 How To Tell a Great Story, Part 2: Style 5 Navigating Ethics and Reducing Harms 6 Habits of Thriving Public Anthropologists 7 Cultivating the Craft of Writing 8
Table of contents
Introduction 0 Why Write for the Public? 1 What to Expect, from Pitch to Publication 2 How to Write a Pitch 3 How To Tell a Great Story, Part 1: Structure 4 How To Tell a Great Story, Part 2: Style 5 Navigating Ethics and Reducing Harms 6 Habits of Thriving Public Anthropologists 7 Cultivating the Craft of Writing 8
Poem / Standpoints

Emic/Etic

A poet-anthropologist offers an “anti-glossary” to contest ways of knowing in social science that objectify people(s) into categories.
By Khando Langri
10 Feb 2025
A pane of glass blurs pink, red and white, and other colored tulips that appear behind it.

Hiroshi Watanabe/Getty Images

“Emic/Etic” is part of the collection Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through. Read the introduction to the collection here. For more information on the history and uses of these two terms, see this entry.

Emic and Etic - Listen
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​​Emic

Find me           (italicized)
in the mouths of strangers
knowable thing
I sit pretty between text          subtext
white tongue, dull tooth.
This is what they make of me:
tense, action                (pick apart)
intention
I await myself in future study where citation
becomes me.
Still I sharpen my hooves patiently
so that I might beat a path
away from you.
For how do I know who it is that
writes me into being, whose heart
I carry—whose voice?

Etic

When social scientists decreed the body
observable, they made architecture of category.
O sublime ecstasy of knowing
watch:
I set your house ablaze.

Khando Langri

Khando Langri is a Tibetan poet committed to the liberation of Palestine and all colonized lands. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Stanford University’s department of anthropology. Her research examines how land dispossessed people work, dwell, disrupt, speculate, and dream amid nation-state infrastructures. She was awarded the 2022 Ethnographic Poetry Prize by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Her work has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, The Poetry Review, Room Magazine, and Yeshe, among others.

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