(Sociology of self)read an article and answer 3 big questions

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On Insiders (Emic) and Outsiders (Etic): Views of Self, and Othering

Janette Young1

Received August 10, 2004; revised February 12, 2005

“Insiders” and “outsiders” to social issues is a concept that is an integral part of Participatory Action Research, which emphasizes the partnering and working together with people who are closest to the problem by dint of personal experience and identity, in order to address complex social problems. The writer believes that working with “insiders” in regard to social issues is a powerful concept but not as simple as it might at first seem to be. This paper explores the problems associated with accepting the concept wholeheartedly by using a real-life example of a community issue to explore it.

KEY WORDS: self; other; insiders; outsiders; social justice.

1. INTRODUCTION

The aim of this paper is to explore a conceptual field that holds intense interest for the writer for its revelationary (and perhaps revolutionary?) nature. The words to which I most strongly relate are contained in the title of this paper. There is a range of other terms that can be linked to the concepts explored here includ- ing “ethnosociology, ethnoethnography, autoanthropology and autoethnography” (Tedlock, 2003). These are avenues of exploration that run counter to the estab- lished bases of power and control that are often hidden and indistinct in Western democratic societies (Kenny, 1994). My interest in the subject originates from my own experiences, concern for social justice, and a fascination for the intellectual discussions about these concepts.

1.1. The Structure of this Paper

The approach chosen to explore these concepts is three-fold. Firstly, these terms are briefly defined. Secondly, the terms are considered in the context of

1Division of Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia. 2To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: janette.young@unisa.edu.au.

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establishing a concept of self-identity, using the author of this text as the illustration (being the most accessible person I have to hand!). Thirdly, further aspects of the “slipperiness” of the concepts are explored, using a real-life community issue as an illustrative example. This paper is an exercise in what the author terms “mental gymnastics.” This refers to toying with ideas in order to search and stretch their capacity and resilience, so that we do not presume them to be absolute and indestructible, and are aware of their shortfalls when using them for the betterment of humanity.

1.2. Definitions and Concepts

Emic and Etic are terms that were first coined by Pike (1967 in Morris et al., 1999). Emic refers to the concept of “insider perspective,” that is having personal experience of a culture/society. Etic refers to the idea of “outsider perspective,” which is the perspective of a person who has not had a personal or “lived” experi- ence of a particular culture/society.

“Self” and “othering” are linked but different concepts to emic and etic. In thinking about the concepts of self and othering the works of Beck (1998) and Fine (1994) are drawn upon. Beck (1998) in his chapter entitled “How Neigh- bours became Jews” explores the ways in which self is and can be constructed. He makes use of graphic stories from Nazi Germany where many people who had thought of themselves as Germans first and foremost (often for generations) suddenly became “strangers” in their own community; in the language of Fine (1994), they had become “othered.” Fine’s article is an exploration of the “knotty entanglement” (1994, p. 72) of self and other. In particular Fine articulates the ways in which differences (real, perceived and constructed) are made more signif- icant than shared humanity, and how this permeates the thinking and discourses of human experience—both in theory and reality.

As stated earlier, Emic and Etic refer respectively to the situation of one’s self within or without a group, experience and/or community. It also involves an interaction between this self-definition and how others perceive one’s self. Fine, quoting Hall (1991, p. 72) notes that “only when there is ‘an other’ can you know who you are.” While the term “others” can involve both broad concepts such as race, ethnicity, gender and social class, it also operates at more personal levels of contact. It is easy to slip into thinking of the concepts simplistically. What I wish to illustrate here is that they are in fact slippery, elusive concepts with multiple layers.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) can very briefly be mentioned here. PAR is a model that makes much use of the concepts of insider and outsider perspectives. It does this in order to address social problems through the active participation of what could be termed “those who are closest to the problem” (Lincoln, 2001; Park, 2001; Reason and Bradbury, 2001).

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2. “ME AND WHO AM I?”

In order to explore this section of the paper, I will make use of the person I know best—myself—as my illustration and source of information.

Who am I? When I think about the concept of myself as an insider, multi- ple roles and attachments to a variety of groups and communities come to mind. A brief list includes the fact that I am white, come from a working class back- ground but am now a professional, am someone’s sister, a DINK (Double-Income- No-Kids), female, daughter, aunt, social worker, university student, worker. I may also be what is termed an “early academic” (this term having only recently come to my attention). In the past I have been a child carer, an impoverished student, a stepmother, a gardener and a martial arts student (the last only briefly, as I con- cluded I would probably do myself a serious injury before ever needing to use it in self-defence!).

Some of these personae receive more public recognition than others, as evidenced by government programs, academic interests, and consumer surveys. The identity of being a female receives a huge amount of academic and other public interest, whilst that of being a (failed) martial arts student receives little.

Time and public development/creation of a persona have had an impact on my personal description of “me.” As a child, because my mother was disabled I needed to take on some tasks that children are generally not been expected to do. The identity of being an informal carer of someone with an illness or disability had not been ‘discovered’ then. Through the 1990s, however, the identity of this role and persona grew (Gays, 2000), becoming a publicly acknowledged one that could be used as a platform for accessing funding, political point-scoring, academic focus, industrial and welfare policy changes. In recent years it had become clear that a significant number of children undertake such a role (as I did) for a parent and so the label of “child carer” or “children who are carers” (Aldridge and Becker, 1996; Morris, 1997; Olsen, 1996) has emerged. Such activity occurred whether the label existed or not. When I was a child, however, this language and persona had not been invented and I would not have called myself such, although now I would identify myself as having been one. The question arises, would I even recognise myself in this way had the role not become a publicly articulated identity?

Furthermore, my own definition of “me” has changed over time. Identities that I may have held some years ago have become submerged. I would no longer call myself a musician (even though I still participate in musical activities), and my knowledge of my working class origin has gone through a process of awareness as I went through university and realised that where I came from (culturally, financially, experientially) differed significantly from my peers at university. In order to actively hide it, I took on the persona of a professional social worker. Now I consider myself to be a proud working class girl who, over the last few years, has “returned to” the experiential and cultural space that I grew up in.

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Many of my concepts of “me” are highly contestable. Take for example my belief that I have somehow “returned to my working class roots.” I am no longer a teenager/young adult; I no longer have the limited income and lack of opportunity that was previously part of this persona; I do not live in the area where I grew up, nor shop, go to church or even socialise all that regularly there any more. I have in fact been challenged numerous times by other people—both working class and non-working class—about these realities. Some would even question whether I ever really was working class based on the reality of where I am now (i.e. professional, highly educated, and comparatively well paid). They would consider the fact that I “had a desire to succeed” (no matter how submerged this may have been in my psyche) sets me apart from a working class persona—never really “an insider.”

The intersection between self-perception and the perception of self by others is highly fluid. Beck (1998, p. 128) quotes the experience of Wiedenroth, an Afro- German who whilst visiting Africa was “slandered as white by African blacks.” Wiedenroth speaks of this challenge to her sense of self-identity, an identity which in post-Nazi, predominantly fair-skinned Germany had seemed relatively secure, but when taken out of this environment is shown to be fragile and indistinct.

It would seem that the composition of “self” can be disputed particularly when a person moves out of one social environment into another. Wiedenroth moved to another country and my experience has been of crossing class divisions through accessing higher education. Had I or Wiedenroth not moved out of one social environment into another, there may well have been no challenge to our respective identities of class position, and race as related to colour. Conversely, this shifting of position can highlight our sense of self as going to university did for me. Prior to this I had very little awareness of myself as not being middle class. I assumed that I was because my parents voted for the Liberal Party! Discovering people who thought they were hard-up because their parents restricted them to choose between a tennis court or a swimming pool for the backyard of their mansion (during my upbringing my parents house would have fitted easily into one of their living rooms) gave me insight into how incomes, lifestyles, definitions of wealth and rights vary dramatically across Australian society, despite our belief that we are egalitarian.

Who I am is a comparative position and can very much depend on context. Next to my blond German friend I am only a brunette, yet next to my Chilean friend I become “so fair.”

The fact that I have a university qualification, am a DINK, and see myself as an early academic would lead most others to identify me as very middle class–yet this is something which I dispute. It is not an entirely bloody-minded debate on my part. I am conscious of features in myself which I believe are resonances of my class heritage. My lack of belief in a right to succeed, be comfortable, have a good job, in summary the right to privilege—a right that a number of writers

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identify as distinguishing between social classes (Horvat and Antonio, 1999)—is one of these features. The fact that it took me 5 years to consider employing a house cleaner, and then only on the grounds that the money helps a family who have much less than me—is for me a practical outcome of my class origin. My grandmother cleaned houses for “rich women.” Having someone else perform a task that she had to do but felt demeaned by, for a kind of person that she disparaged, has been a great psychological dilemma Whether it is class-related or simply personality I am not sure but I suspect that I have never picked up some of the very fine social mores that are part of acceptable middle class behaviour and upbringing. I am informed, for example, that I challenge people even when I am not conscious that I am doing so. This is a feature that is quite different from my trait of sometimes deliberately and openly doing this—another characteristic that I attribute to my class origins.

3. APPLICATION TO A SOCIAL ISSUE

The self-reflection above provides a foundation for the next phase of discus- sion in this paper.

As alluded to already, my particular interest in the concepts being discussed originated from my experience of growing up in a low socioeconomic community, where very few people progressed to higher education. Stevenson et al. (1999) identified this community as having the third lowest rate of university participation by 19–21 year olds in Australia, the lowest suburban rate. As an insider regarding the issue of low socioeconomic access to university, I was not sure what exactly enabled me to undertake this statistically unusual step. However, I knew that when I heard ‘experts’ discussing the matter I very strongly disagreed with them as to why relatively few people from communities such as the one I had grown up in went to university.

Statistically, it is clear that Australian citizens’ access to and participation in higher education is highly stratified. It is evident that young people from the wealthiest schools, living in the suburbs with the highest average incomes, form the bulk of the university student population. The graph of participation mapped against economic prosperity forms a steadily descending line, with young people in the wealthiest suburbs accessing university at rates of 50% or more, and those in suburbs such as the one I grew up in at less than 10% (Stevenson et al., 1999). Other indicators go hand-in-hand with this statistical profile. Those who are from the wealthiest suburbs and do not go to university are less likely to be unemployed and when employed will probably be in more secure, higher paid jobs than young people in poorer suburbs (Lamb, 2001). Johnson and Lloyd (2000) identify that university education, offers access to an employment market that is becoming increasingly closed to those without a degree. Jobs in this employment market are

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on average more highly paid and offer more security than those not requiring a university degree.

As I have gotten older, the benefits that a university qualification have brought me have become more noticeable in comparison to the lives and experiences of my peers who did not access university. The questions for me were: “Why did so few of my peers access this ticket to a better life?”; and “What would enable more to do so?”

When I began to look at the research that had been undertaken on this topic, I discovered that most of it was in the form of quantitative data, with little emphasis on participatory processes including anecdotal conversations or interviews about barriers with people like myself who grown up and lived in low socioeconomic communities. It is possible that many of these report writers may have had a similar background, but this is not made visible because the impersonal scientific approach and objectivity are considered paramount.

3.1. Accessing the Voices of Insiders

I was introduced to PAR by my supervisor, Dr Janet McIntyre when I first began to research why it was that so few people from my socioeconomic back- ground went to university. PAR is an action research approach that has developed with a focus on linking research, knowledge seeking and development to imple- mentation and change (Reason and Bradbury, 2001, pp. 2–4; Fals Borda, 2001). PAR developed in response to the subjugation of the voice of oppressed peoples in favour of those with more social and political power. As a process PAR has a focus on working with people from oppressed communities, and valuing “experiential knowledge” (Rowan, 2001, pp. 116–117). This strategy is considered to be the key to making real social change possible (Lincoln, 2001; Park, 2001; Reason and Bradbury, 2001). In the language and context of this paper, PAR is about finding and working respectfully with insiders to address social problems.

This conceptual model and approach has fitted in with my experience and awareness of insider and outsider perspectives, concern for social justice and real life outcomes for people with least power. PAR tends to assume that knowing who is closest to the problem is obvious but the previous discussion has noted that identity is not as clear-cut as we may like to think. In the next section of this paper I will apply this lack of clarity to explore a problem from the perspective of those closest to the problem.

3.2. Who is Closest to the Problem?

If the core problem is identified as “why do so few people from X access higher education?,” and “what would enable more to do so?,” PAR requires me to seek people who are closest to the problem or can be defined as “those whose lives

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Fig. 1. Who is closest to the problem?

are most impacted on by the problem.” Figure 1 illustrates a range of identities concerning the focus problem. This is not an exhaustive list as space limits the inclusion of all the groups that can be considered.

Four groups of residents are seen as being closest to the problem, and are illustrated as being “inside” the problem by being visually overlaid on THE PROBLEM in Fig. 1.

These resident categories are:

� Current school students, � Residents—non-university qualified; � Residents—current university students and � Residents—university qualified.

For the next level of closeness to the problem I have identified three categories which are depicted as bordering onto THE PROBLEM. These three categories include: people such as myself, graduates who are ex-residents; parents of current students; and university graduates from the community who went to school outside of the community. As an aside (but an illustration of the complexity of defining “insiderness”) those who went to school outside of the community can be cate- gorised more precisely as those who went to private schools or public schools. In my experience those who went to private schools are seen to be situated away from the problem than those who went to public schools. Welfare workers, education officials, teachers, academic experts and bureaucrats have been placed farthest away from the problem.

In locating people on this diagram my history as a community insider has been useful in identifying where groups of people could be located in the context

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of the problem. These definitions of closeness have been reinforced in the process of speaking to many people who fill the inner circle in regard to this problem. I was aware that residence and public/private schooling are distinct methods of identifying levels of “insiderness” and “outsiderness” in the community being studied. This is tacit knowledge that I have absorbed growing up in the community. It has been a surprise, however, to other people looking at the same problem but who grew up in very different communities. This experience causes me to think that knowing who is closest to the problem may require insider knowledge of a community or issue as a starting point, whether this is through personal knowledge and experience, or through an increased awareness of the need to be analytically aware of how to work across boundaries of experiences and knowledge.

Further information is provided in Fig. 1 in the form of identifying in plain font the groups who in my experience are consulted. As can be seen, those who are closest to the problem when defined as being most affected personally by it, are very rarely approached. I would suggest that those people closest to the problem as identified in the diagram are those with the least status and power. As an example of this style of avoiding those closest to the problem, Mark Latham, leader of the Australian Labor Party and aspiring Prime Minister has displayed an active interest in investigating the reality of Australia’s growing divide between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. He speaks of finding out about poor communities, noting that “one of the problems of modern politics is its disconnection from the poor” (Latham, 2003). Latham, however, does not quote the voices of residents in these communities as an illustration of their experiences, but rather those of outsiders such as school principals.

3.3. Overlapping Personae

Figure 1 is simplistic—it presumes that individuals’ identities are one- dimensional and inflexible. Figure 2 illustrates my knowledge of overlapping personae (symbolised by having boxes slightly overlay each other) in regard to the problem being investigated. Local welfare workers have at times been residents and ex-residents with a university qualification; teachers may also fit this dual per- sona and/or have children who fit the persona of being local university graduates. A whole array of overlaps and multiple personae are possible and indeed occur.

When included, however, in consultations those with a dual persona are approached in their objective/official role NOT in regard to their lived experience. In my observation, this occurs through two mechanisms. We will consider the two mechanisms separately.

Firstly, personal experiences become subjugated to dominant discourses. This is due to a complex mix involving some perspectives developing sophisticated arguments and language as opposed to others, and an awareness of and acceptance of some theoretical and analytical models over others. For example, if I was asked

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Fig. 2. Overlapping personae.

about the plight of women in low socioeconomic communities I could provide a well articulated response using feminist language. However, while writers such as Bourdieu have written extensively about class and it is possible to link this with gender, class distinction is not a generally accepted concept in Australia as there is a popular, deeply held perspective that we are egalitarian. For example, I was recently informed that it was acceptable to include the need for funding to develop culturally acceptable material for indigenous members of a community in a funding application, but not to do the same for white members of the same disadvantaged community. I suffer from a dearth of shared and accepted language and scholarly discourse (Fine, 1994, p. 73) and therefore struggle to describe and be heard in regard to class experience or class-gender interaction.

Secondly, should one try to use one’s “lived experience” as material for discussing an issue, this will frequently be responded to with comments such as, “But you must have been different.” This is an example of negating individual experience as illustrative of any broader or other experiences. Alternatively, one is likely to be informed that this is purely subjective and therefore not valid information. It is invariably easier and more comfortable to retreat into one’s professional persona, than to fight for the legitimacy of an alternate, personal experience

One phenomenon I have been very pleased to observe over the last couple of years in the community where I grew up has been the “coming out” of people in regard to their origins. To have managers note in a high level meeting for example that they had been teenage mothers in the community creates a dilemma for “othering” discussions and debates. It becomes difficult to continue to talk about

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“them” (in this case teenage mothers) as nameless, faceless stereotypes, who “ruin their lives” in the face of clear examples of this obviously not occurring. A conspiracy of silence is being eroded.

4. CONCLUSION—WHAT DOES IT MATTER?

Young (2001, pp. 413, 414) speaks of a range of post-structuralist theorists such as Bourdieu, Althusser and Derrida who all had links to Algeria, the French colony in north Africa which gained its independence in the 1960s. Young queries the link between the development of these writers’ post-structuralist-oriented the- ories and their personal social location(s). He notes that none of these were “Alge- rians proper” in the indigeneous sense but rather “Algerians improper,” descended from the lineage of the conquering French. Thus they were not really accepted in Algeria, which was their home, but neither were they fully accepted in France. From this uncomfortable straddling of personae it is possible to view a culture with a level of outsiderness that insiders—those accepted as “one of us”—are unable to do, yet with insights that come from also being “a kind of insider” (Young, 2001, pp. 413, 414).

Addressing such marginality is a challenge, but it provides potential for indi- viduals to bring significantly different perspectives to dominant debates. I believe that there is a role for people like myself who are (in this case class) migrants that can allow us to bridge the gap between those who unlike ourselves have not been able to learn the tricks of how to make the real life experiences of those with least power “sound good” (Peel, 2003, p. 15). There is an opportunity to break into the process that Geertz (1983) identifies whereby academic theories are perpetuated in a closed circle of people who are characters in each other’s life stories. Academic theorizing about the experiences of low socioeconomic communities can remain free from challenge on any but theoretical and methodological grounds whilst the voices of personal experience from these communities continue to be excluded from the “essentially private realm of academic publishing” (Van Galen, 2004, p. 670) and discussion. Unfortunately public policy is built on such uncontested academic writing rather than experiential, lived knowledge.

Peel speaks of the power of having an insider’s perspective in order to find and make public the voices of those on the “lowest rung” of Australian society. He is aware that there is a different story to tell than that presented by harsh language and words. Peel has noted (2003, p. 10) that “noone dares use the term ‘nigger’ anymore. But loser? bludger? people who don’t count? Some of our most respectable citizens seem happy enough to use those words.” The shared humanity of all human beings becomes lost and submerged as people are “othered” through the use of derogatory labels and theories.

These derogatory terms that Peel queries are the terms that are used about my community of origin. As he goes on to note, discussions about welfare reform

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or ways of tackling unemployment too often fail to address a broader problem, Essentially, this is the “problem of the way that people who are not poor think about those who are” (2003, p. 10). This is where approaches such as PAR are useful, in providing a link to finding and bringing to the surface the voices of those people most personally affected by and therefore “closest” to the many complex problems existing in Western societies. It is not easy to resolve and it will be highly contested, but without this we are losing valuable insights, perspectives and indeed solutions that could benefit all of society.

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