I feel like Rein's point about how the emic effectively tells us nothing was easy to misconstrue. It doesn't tell us nothing about her experience, or about what it means to see God, or whatever: it tells us nothing about religion. And I think the "us" in there is important, too. "I can see this color called mincius. You can't? Oh well."

I don't feel like Ali's example is necessarily the best example of how the emic doesn't quite work. One that I always get stuck on is with born-again Christianity, what it means to be saved. "I'm saved!" "What's that mean?" "It means Jesus died for my sins." "What's that like?" "It's salvation!" "[[Would tear out hair if he had any]]" By keeping it totally within the experience, no comparative work can be done.

And so I'm totally behind the point Rein was making, and it's bizarre to me, because it seems so intuitively true, and yet we have bajillions of examples of where people are not doing that. And furthermore, I would not be terribly surprised if I were to try and do some work that fails to be balanced between emic and etic; it's probably a lot easier to say, "Nope, you're leaning too far to the etic side" than to actually write something that's totally balanced.

But that's OK. I might step on some toes, I might miss some things, all that jazz, but I'll still try to engage. I can't stand the whole "you've got your truth and that's totally unintelligible to me" business.