Insider and Outsider Research: Negotiating Self at the Edge of the Emic/Etic Divide

Reinforcing Insider and Outsider Research Binaries

In Aotearoa New Zealand, qualitative research methods in the fields of education, anthropology, and sociology are commonly taught in ways that acknowledge the colonial legacy of academic research and its enduring impact on scholarship. As teachers in these fields ourselves, we ensure our students learn about the dominance of settler-colonial paradigms embedded in many research methods and methodologies, the othering of indigenous peoples, and the reduction of other ways of knowing to the margins and corners of myth and legend. Our intention is to create an opening for dialogue among ourselves and our students about the need to value and sustain diversity in the contemporary research space. But a question that often arises concerns the stories that we tell as researchers and who we represent in that story. Within the space of this dialogue, we also find ourselves questioning where we sit within the research narrative and how we position ourselves in relation to our participants’ life-worlds. Can we be part of the story of the “other,” an insider, when we are within academia and, as such, part of another story?

In his seminal work, Kenneth Pike (1954) argued for two complementary research perspectives, etic and emic, that come into play when researching human behavior, society, and culture. The etic researcher, he argues, explores human behavior from an objective outsider position. Accordingly, the researcher’s aim is to identify and examine elements of human behavior that either transcend a single cultural setting and which can therefore be seen to relate to the human condition in general; or alternatively, which are limited to a single culture or cultural setting. By contrast, the emic researcher is concerned with the specifics of human behavior within a single culture or cultural setting itself. When taking an emic perspective, the aim is to communicate the particulars of a culture, social context, or group. In this respect, Pike argues, emic and etic research “lenses” complement each other and can assist researchers to make sense of a deeper cultural story. But he adds the caution that too much focus on the etic (the universal), especially when researchers enter into distinctly different cultural settings from their own, can distort the story or even overlook it completely. In fact, Pike contends, all researchers enter the cultural settings of their participants with their own emic (particular) point of view. He argues that this point of view must be held in suspension during the research process because it can bias the emic story of the setting and the etic links between contexts.

Pike’s (1954) observation of the emic and etic has been influential in research methodologies courses. In New Zealand universities, students in the social sciences are generally expected to understand the difference between emic and etic perspectives when exploring ethnographic approaches in qualitative research. However, while it may seem that the meaning of emic and etic can be linked to whether the research tells an inside/localized story or an outside/universal story, the application and theoretical understanding of the terms have shifted over the years. Lett (1996) argues that researchers should see the emic and the etic as an epistemological framework that defines the nature of knowledge. Yet when we look at the use of these terms, there is a blurring within the emic/etic space about the nature of knowledge, its application, and also the source of knowledge. For example, Orey and Rosa (2014) describe emic and etic as a means of scoping the size of the research story that is being told, with emic referring to the local and particular and etic to the global. They argue that the etic viewpoint can only be sourced through research methods and methodologies that are objective and replicable because it is assumed that the story is one that will be found everywhere. Punnett, Ford, Galperin, and Lituchy (2014) also connect emic to the local and etic to the global perspective. In line with this, they define emic and etic as approaches to research, whereby emic is purely qualitative in design and application and etic, quantitative. The assumption that research methods and methodologies can be boxed into either an emic or an etic approach is questioned by others on the basis that research methods can transcend viewpoints; for example, interviews and questionnaires can be used to garner a particular story or a universal story (Buckley, Chapman, Clegg, & Gajewska-De Mattos, 2014; Lett, 1996).

According to Pike, all qualitative researchers approach their investigations with their own emic viewpoints and biases. As such, he conceptualized the etic as the metanarrative that could potentially bring all stories together (Agar, 2011). Pike was writing his ideas in a postpositivist “modern” world where the empirical story was still seen as the desired narrative and a metanarrative was still possible. At the time of Pike’s writing, academic research was largely the domain of middle-class White men. In some fields, this is still the reality but with the rise of postmodern philosophies, the questioning of metanarratives (Lyotard, 1992), and increased recognition of diverse voices in the academy, there has been a shift in thinking about the concept of an etic viewpoint and the relationship between emic and etic. Currently, there is a tendency to see the emic and the etic as viewpoints in tension, rather than in terms of the complementary nature that Pike originally envisioned. Within this tension, researchers have largely discarded the idea that the etic is a story that can be read across all stories; instead, it is often framed, at least in New Zealand, as a settler-colonial story that is imposed upon the emic or particular story being researched (e.g., Berry, 1990, 1999; Gallagher, 2012; Olive, 2014; Persson, 2012; Tipandjan, Schafer, Sundaram, & Sedlmeier, 2012). Berry (1999) describes this as an “imposed etic” (p. 166, emphasis added) on a site of study, in which a researcher forces their own worldview onto the subject of their research. Gallagher (2012) argues that researchers need to acknowledge that the etic of research is an imposed story derived from the dominance of Anglo-American research and the imposition of the more traditional IMRaD (Introduction–Methods–Results–and–Discussion) framework for research design and presentation (Nair & Nair, 2014). In line with this, Persson (2012) argues that, by nature, academia imposes an etic viewpoint onto the world being researched and the world of students entering into study. Students are taught that culture and society are “correctly” researched through established processes and forms of analysis. As such, Persson contends, universities are guilty of expansion by “cultural dominance” (p. 15). In other words, students are drawn to the idea that having a degree is a marker of cultural success and, as such, universities expand their own cultural ideas of what makes good and correct knowledge.

Although the shift of the etic from a metanarrative to the Western academic narrative does enable one to engage in colonial and decolonial discussion, it should be acknowledged that Pike did, in fact, foresee possible tension between the world of academia and the world of the researched in his original thesis. Indeed, he called the researcher an “emicist” and wrote,

Each observer will also have some bias in terms of the behavior events most familiar to him. those which are emic in his own activity. These he tends to take as his point of departure, as his norms. (Pike, 1954, p. 15)

For that reason, Pike insisted that researchers need specialized training to avoid imposing their own emic cultural norms onto the reading of other emic stories and in developing an etic report. He argued that the researcher’s emic point of view was a privileged position that needed to be determined before entering the field. For Marvin Harris (1964, 1976), whose work reflects the contemporary shift of the academic story to the position of etic, the privileging of the researcher’s emic world is problematic because researchers observe, read, and report on the subject being researched and, as such, impose some degree of their own worldview onto the subject’s world through the practice of academic judgment. Effectively, the researcher controls the story being told.

Harris (1976) further notes that Pike’s original distinction between emic and etic was drawn from the field of linguistics, and as such, garnering an emic perspective of nonverbal behaviors is far more complex than observing and coming to conclusions. His response to Pike is that research should focus on discovering the etic elements that bring cultures together as these are less inclined to the guesses and subjective discussions of researchers and research subjects. It is this interplay of discourse between Pike and Harris that shows how the concepts of etic and emic move and twist from viewpoints, to methods, to approaches, to a deeper discussion of what matters most in the research of other peoples and cultures. To explore the edges of the spaces that contemporary researchers occupy, this historical survey of the original intent of the emic and etic and the variations and turns that have followed reveals the porous and fluid edge of this space.

Insider and Outsider Positions in Academia

The primacy of middle-class White men who research the cultures of others has been challenged in recent years by researchers from those other cultures entering into the world of academia and returning to research their own cultures (Smith, 2002). This is our experience as a group of researchers and academics in Aotearoa New Zealand. As academics, we are required to teach about the insider/outsider viewpoint in research but it is here that the emic and etic comes into tension. In Pike’s (1954) writing, there are two distinct cultures or points of view involved with the research process—the emic culture of the researcher and the emic culture of those being studied. The etic is the framework that is intended to expose the relationship between the two. But what happens if there is a tension between the researcher’s life-worlds and the academic world? This is perhaps why the term etic has been used to describe the imposed nature of academia. In fact, when Lett (1996) endeavored to create clear definitions of the emic and etic by epistemologically tying the concepts to the nature of knowledge, it became clear that the emic story is one that reflects and is considered truth by the insider culture, whereas the etic story is considered truth by a “community of scientific observers” (p. 383). Etic research is communicated through the language and categories of scientific research. At times, it dominates and imposes on other viewpoints with a positivist certainty (Berry, 1990, 1999; Persson, 2012). Even Pike (1954) and Harris (1964) acknowledge that the process of an etic reading starts within predetermined universal frameworks. In this way, the etic viewpoint colonizes all others and this is why the emic and etic should not be seen as fully complementary as originally intended, but as points in tension.

This tension between the imposed etic of the academic world and the emic viewpoint of the researcher is what James Olive (2014) experienced in his research on the culture of his own lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Olive began with a now classical differentiation of emic and etic, defining the emic as the insider point of view and etic as the outsider perspective. Before beginning his fieldwork, Olive assumed that researching his own culture would enable him greater insight as he associated strongly with his participants. In his research, he saw himself as completing a degree in an academic institution but firmly planted in his own emic world. Instead,

Having considered myself so close to the topic of study, learning how far I was from that mark was a humbling experience. (Olive, 2014, pp. 8-9)

Olive (2014) found that there were many points of difference and divergence in his story of community affinity, solidarity, and like-mindedness. By framing the academic world as the etic perspective and engaging in deep reflection of his own emic space in a particular cultural setting, Olive was able to demonstrate the double space of the emic as described by Pike (1954) originally; the academic world, culture, and structure are not emic in itself, but the individuals that make up that world do draw upon a variety of emic viewpoints; especially as academia becomes more and more diverse. He also demonstrates the desire found in the lives of many marginalized and researched Others when they enter into the academic space of research. Olive wanted to maintain his identity as an insider but quickly discovered the tensions associated with this.

We have also found this in our own journey. As researchers, two of us are Māori women who are indigenous to Aotearoa New Zealand, one has also Tongan heritage, and two are members of working-class communities with strong intergenerational kinship ties to those groups. We do not want to engage in research practices that have caused harm to cultures and communities, particularly when researchers take the words and knowledge of a culture and “relanguage them” (Cole, 2017, p. 348). In effect, cultural harm is done when these are objectified to make sense of a wider etic story, even if that sense is of an “other” positioned as being different from the norm. As researchers and students of academic research, we want to remain firmly part of the insider story, that of the emic, rather than the observer sitting on the outside, sitting in the space of etic. In practice, however, we struggle to see the “epistemological and ontological borders” (Cole, 2017, p. 348) that encompass us as we stand, not in the shoes of the insider, but in the shoes of the academic researcher. Is it even possible to wear two completely different sets of shoes, one from the academic world and one from the insider world?

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2002), Māori academic, argues that indigenous methodologies disrupt the binary of insider and outsider perspectives because of the multiple insider positions a researcher can hold in the research process if they have an association with the community being researched. Smith’s experiences expose the tension that exists in an academic space when an imposed etic of Western truth seems to dominate and the indigenous researcher seems different, seems like the Other, a person now standing within the gaze of the Western anthropologist. Within the academy, Smith’s Pākehā (settler) academic colleagues positioned her as an insider, a researcher that could garner an emic perspective of Others because she could relate to that community; as such, she would have the ability to read and interpret the nonverbal. But in some Māori communities, she was considered to be an outsider because she was part of the academic world. Accordingly, Smith argues that it is “arrogant” (p. 135) for researchers to claim that they can garner an emic story because their experience justifies their presence as an insider. Indeed, Smith points out that “insider” researchers walk in a landscape of risks as an “insider” researcher because they find themselves having to “test their own taken-for-granted views about their community” (p. 135). As a Māori woman, Smith notes that she can never fully be colonized or assimilated into the academic world; she will always be an outsider but she can never be completely an insider within her own community once she carries the title of “researcher.” Instead, she finds herself playing with the tools of both worlds in a decolonizing process of research.

The ways that Smith (2002) variously positions herself as a researcher can be found in the writing of others as well. Coming into academia, the established institution sees othered researchers as possessing special attributes that are not available to the “traditional” researcher. They are effectively perceived as undercover agents, venturing into the unknown worlds of the Other so that the “real” truth can be garnered and not tainted with the etic viewpoint and lens of the research process. Pamela Zapata-Sepulveda (2017) illustrates this in her reflections on being Ariqueña rather than settler Spanish in a Northern Chilean university. She reflects on her feelings on being “outsider” in a Chilean education system which privileges the Whiteness and uses concepts like Other as an “eraser of our skin colour” (p. 353). Within the academic context, Zapata-Sepulveda acknowledges the special place she has with her multicultural- and racial-insider connections to research the lives of other migrant children. She finds a sense of pride that her colleagues acknowledge that the issues facing migrant children could only be researched by someone with connections; she could come in from the outside with some insider knowledge and begin to tell a different story, one that decolonizes the imposed etic.

For both Smith (2002) and Zapata-Sepulveda (2017), the priority is not so much about exploring the space of the emic and etic, but questioning the imposed etic of settler-colonial academia. The border between the emic and the etic in this process is not porous and fluid, it is rigid, without holes, but does have some plasticity and can be moved inward and outward.

Exploring the Edges of the Emic and Etic

Although Kenneth Pike may have originally intended the concepts of emic and etic to be used within linguistics to explore the unspoken language in social actions, it is unsurprising that the discipline of anthropology would adopt these terms in ethnographic research and play with them to explore the telling of cultural stories. Rubel and Rosman (2003) describe anthropologists as

listeners who are “translating” the local culture, creating a picture of it for the outside world, but they are also seen as outsiders or marginal. What he or she produces is an ethnographic text, a descriptive ethnography, which must involve glossing and contextualising local concepts, which may not have equivalents in the target language. (p. 6)

In any form of qualitative research, what comes to the surface are stories and interpretations of the worlds that we occupy, then the qualitative process is an attempt to translate the emic stories present in the lives of others to make sense in the etic academy. But as Pike originally asserted and, later, researchers such as Patti Lather (1986) stipulated in the exploration of the validity of the qualitative process, any translation must also reflect the views of those being researched; a translation has to make sense both within the imposed etic and the derived emic. This is often the point of tension for the Other who comes into the academic space as they experience an inward tension when they see the gap between the story being interpreted and the story being told. They see that while the story may make sense in each context, when one has a foot in both worlds, the gap, the misinterpretation, and the colonization of one’s own world within the etic viewpoint is readily seen.

This was the experience that hooks (1990) reflected upon when she talked about occupying the margins of the academy. She came into the academy as Black American women who carried memories of segregation and laws were kept apart from White privilege; they literally lived on the other side of the railway tracks. They could venture into the “center” during the day and work in service-industry jobs, but they could not venture into the institutions and lives of those that lived at the center, instead they would return after work, to the margins on the other side of the railway tracks. As an academic, she refused to deny her history and memories of marginalization even though she could occupy a space at the center. Instead of trying to tell the story of the margins with the words of the etic center, she embraces the words of the margin, because that is where a “counter-language” (p. 342) exists. She retells a powerful story that involves a challenge from her own mother to not let go of herself when she ventures into the imposed etic of the academy to work with radical scholars, radical critical thinkers, and feminists, who would speak from the etic center yet continue to other because she refused to become a part of that center. For her, the story that academia told about her as a Black woman was one that attempted to colonize her and take her story from her. She risked becoming the object of a larger story, not the subject, or creator, of her own story as her mother encouraged her to be (cf. Sarup, 1996). She does not see the need to be rewritten into the academic story, but rather for the academic story to be questioned and pushed at the margins and edges. In effect, she calls for a form of edgewalking and edgework. These concepts of edgewalking and edgework speak powerfully to us as academics, researchers, and people in Aotearoa New Zealand and have particular resonance for those Others who occupy the margins of academic space.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Anne-Marie Tupuola (1998, 1999, 2004) explored the identity decisions and directions of Samoan young women growing up during the 1980s. She argued that the boundaries they negotiated were so fluid that they walked within multiple worlds and identity positions. These young women could never occupy one space fully, rather they would find themselves negotiating a single space while also occupying several others. Although classic research tends to frame Pacific youth identities in New Zealand as diasporic (e.g., Aporosa, 2015; Balme & Carstensen, 2001; Chaitin, Awwad, & Andriani, 2009; Esser, 2012; James, 2016), Tupuola turned to the work of Nina Krebs (1999) and the idea of edgewalking. Krebs’s own writing breaks the academic rules in providing a number of narratives that draw truths to her concept of edgewalking, as such, the best definition is found in the synopsis or her work:

Edgewalkers are people . . . who stay true to their particular cultural or spiritual tradition and also engage in mainstream life in their societies across the globe. They “dance in between,” bridge cultural gaps and maintain their uniqueness. Edgewalkers embrace cultural complexity rather than emphasize one aspect of their cultural makeup at the expense of another. They stand astride both the mainstream and the particular culture they claim as their own. (Krebs, 1999, synopsis)

Krebs (1999) describes edgewalkers as embracing the complexity of culture and identity to walk the edge between multiple worlds and positions. Krebs argues that the practice of edgewalking is more than role shifting which all people engage in as they move between their multiple roles over a day. Role shifting involves a full shift and embrace of the role that one occupies at a given point and time. Instead, edgewalkers “do not shed one skin when they move from their cultures of origin to the mainstream and back” (p. 11). Both role-shifting and edgewalking have costs on the individual; the role-shifter risks losing a sense of connection with their cultural/spiritual identity if the contexts are divergently different; in contrast, the edgewalker may experience intense pain as they attempt to remain true to themselves rather than taking the easy way out and becoming a part of the whole. An edgewalker feels astutely the paradox that occurs when you walk between two worlds but remain true to yourself.

Krebs (1999) explored the lives of people she considered edgewalkers during the 1990s within the spaces of healing, business, sport, and societal success. Her work has been picked up in the business world, where edgewalking is framed as an essential skill for the diversification of business across cultural and national boundaries (Edgewalkers, n.d.; Neal, 2006, 2011). Judi Neal is the most prolific writer in this space with training programs and workshops aimed at building capacity among those who walk the edge between cultures, worldviews, and the past/future. Bringing Krebs and Neal together within the context of research, the complexity of insider/outsider and the desire of researchers such as ourselves and hooks (1990) enable one to see that there is a position between the binary divide of insider/outsider, there is the margin and the edge, and here we can find the edgewalker.

Neal (2011) argues that edgewalkers “operate on the margins, not in the center of the mainstream” (p. 2). To be in the center is to endorse the privileges, wealth, and power established by the culture of the center. Krebs’s (1999) argument is similar, minority peoples should not embrace and become part of the wider mainstream culture. Instead, the center, for Krebs, needs to be questioned; it is a “mythical center” (p. 26), a hegemonic position of power which can only be questioned from the margins. Krebs argues that this mythical center is not just a racialized White position but embedded in a highly patriarchal system and, as such, women who operate on the margins, refusing to be defined, but still being able to participate in the old system are edgewalkers. These women, Krebs argues, stand at the margins and challenge the theories that have limited them for so long.

When Tupuola (1998, 1999, 2004) first applied the concept of edgewalking to the identity formation of young Samoan women in the 1990s, she did not know that the concept would take a life of its own on within the teaching of the Pasifika experience in Aotearoa New Zealand. Since the early 2000s, “edgewalking” has been taught in a number of university and polytechnic courses as a theoretical lens to view identity formation through (in contrast to traditional identity theories and diasporic identity research). With a government focus on increasing participation in tertiary education (Ministry of Education, 2010), there has been a take-up of educational opportunities by minority groups which has resulted in small increases in educational diversity. In our experience, teaching in this changing environment, we sometimes find ourselves and others teaching Western theories as the academic norm and cultural theories as those which speak to people on the margins and this is a difficult tension. In turn, concepts like edgewalking enables students to speak back from the margins. When Tupuola originally used the term edgewalking in 2004, she did so to talk into the creative and enabling space that Krebs (1999) had opened up in her work exploring the lives of successful Others. It is this creative edge that our students speak from, why position oneself into boxes and categories created through psychology, boxes and categories that Pike (1954) would say an etic approach would start from, when one can stand at the edge and speak back to the center, “I might be required to be there [the center] but I will never let go of where I am from; my feet remain on the margin.”

It is in the process of creativity in edgewalking that a space for edgework (Lyng, 2005) opens. Although the term “edgework” was first used by Hunter Thompson (1971) to describe the risk-taking behaviors of motorcyclists in the 1960s, Stephen Lyng (1990) developed this concept further in his theoretical work on voluntary risk-taking behaviors in the high-risk leisure activities. For Lyng, activities of edgework involve the negotiation of boundaries. He argues that contemporary society is one that is obsessed with eliminating and controlling risks; however, despite these attempts, there is a group of people who literally break the rules by engaging in high risk taking on a voluntary basis. Edgeworkers engage in activities that have a clear threat to “one’s physical or mental well-being or one’s sense of an ordered existence” (Lyng, 1990, p. 857). These edgeworkers edgewalk a variety of precarious margins which may include walking between life and death, sanity and insanity, and “an ordered sense of self and environment versus a disordered [sense of] self and environment” (p. 857). Lyng’s ideas on edgework have been used in the exploration of a variety of risk activities including BASE jumping (Allman, Mittelstaedt, Martin, & Goldenberg, 2009), motor biking (Austin, 2010), rescue work (Lois, 2005), risk behaviors in adolescence (Miller, 2005), and substance use (Reith, 2005). Consequently, as a theory, it has also been critiqued and developed further.

In Mathew Austin’s (2010) work on BMW bikers, he describes the process of edgework as the boundary between safety, security and stability (in the center), and insecurity and instability (on the outside). Edgework is seen by Austin as involving sensation, skill, control, and motivation. It is a form of identity negotiation that involves telling a story about oneself to others while walking on the boundary between self-realization and a complete loss of self. Lyng (2005) takes this further by describing the edge as one of reflexivity and hyper-reality as the individual finds an authentic sense of life and self if they are not lost in the experience of edgework, in a society that tries to tighten the boundaries of the edge to ensure stability:

Playing with boundaries in acts of transgression and transcendence, exploiting limits, and crowding edges may be the sole remaining form of resistance and one of the few possibilities for human agency that can be found in the disciplinary society. (Lyng, 2005, p. 47)

Although edgework has tended to focus on the high-risk activities, Dragan Milovanovic (2005) argues that edgework is a practice in which everyone engages in some way. He posits a typology of edgework which ranges from packaged edgework (e.g., tourist activities such as bungee jumping) and edgework within the workplace to the transcendental experiences found in the work of Lyng (1990) and others. Gideon Sjoberg (2005) reflects upon his own experiences as an edgeworker as he navigates terrains of risk in academia. Sjoberg takes the work of Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) as his point of departure rather than the classic work of Lyng. As such, Sjoberg defines edgework as risk taking and walking the fine line between tenure and academic freedom. He describes negotiating his identity as an academic in the highly political funding environment of the academy and within the constructs and boundaries of a particular discipline. During his career, he has taken many intellectual risks (or, in his words, edgework) as he traversed the edge between research endeavor and the academic environment. Although Sjoberg’s reflections do not reflect the high-risk activities of the Lyng’s skydivers, his account illustrates how invested researchers become in their academic identity in the academy. To lose tenure, and one’s identity, as an academic destroys one’s sense of an ordered existence and, as such, damages oneself (Acker & Webber, 2015). Although Sjoberg does not draw upon classic positions of emic and etic and a possible clash between his emic world and the broader goal of the academy, he appeals for “‘objective knowledge’—that takes account of multiple perspectives” (p. 267) which he believes can only occur through the institution of the university. As such, he calls for a greater emphasis on an etic perspective that enables a connection between multiple emic perspectives to be constructed. Sjoberg’s reflection highlights the pressures that academia places on researcher identity. Emic identity is either invested in etic culture and surrounds of the academy or invested on the edge.

Negotiating the Tensions at the Edge of the Emic and Etic Divide

As researchers with strong connections to indigenous and working-class communities, and working with research students who are themselves members of marginalized groups, we have found that positioning ourselves as edgewalkers and edgeworkers allows us to acknowledge the complexity of the emic and etic. If the etic is culture imposed upon us by the dominance of the empirical lens of academia (Berry, 1999), then it sits in a mythical center (Neal, 2011). It has a hegemonic dominance as it is assumed to be the way in which truth is realized and the relationship between all cultures and peoples established. When we as women, working class, and/or cultural Others enter into this space, we feel the call and the tug to strip aspects of our identity off and the pressure to speak from the center. This is what hooks (1990) alludes to in her reflection of entering the academic space, the pull to let go of her gendered and cultural inheritance. Even in the spaces of critical reflection, she felt intense pressure to speak in a new language, one that would not be recognized or validated by those on the margins. She chose to resist these demands and stand in solidarity at the edge; speaking back to the center with the language of the marginalized.

We also feel the pull to hold on to ourselves as researchers who have intergenerational kinship ties to othered communities and to take the risk of walking the edge. And we realize that as we stand at the edge in our own research, the mythical center is exposed as an institution of individuals, communities, and groups with vested interests in maintaining power relations. Some like Sjoberg (2005) hold onto the hope that the objective etic will, in the end, fulfill its brief and bring understanding to all. Others, like Olive (2014), want to remain true to their cultural positioning but because the edge is neither inside nor outside, they find their emic positioning problematic.

Researchers who negotiate these tensions at the edge of the emic/etic divide sometimes also experience a sense of loss when their communities reject an evolving researcher identity. One of us had this experience when we wrote to our home town council on the use of government funds. The letter we received back from the mayor expressed disappointment that we had forgotten the pioneer routes of our grandfather’s family and had left the working-class culture of the town to study in degrees that were unwanted and unneeded. In effect, the mayor felt that we had rejected our “true” identity and as such could not claim to be from a hard coal-mining region again. The emic and etic pull and rejection from both sides—the academic and the original community or culture—can be so restricted that you just find you want to claim one position solidly instead of having to balance that tightrope, pushing and pulling, until a hole is created for a bridge and the voice of the margins speaks to the center (Neal, 2006; Stewart-Withers, 2016).

Indigenous researchers also experience the competing demands of operating inside academia as well as inside indigenous communities. Melinda Webber (2009) writes of the dilemmas she faces when navigating the demands of being an academic, an emerging researcher, and a Māori woman:

For me, and those family, friends and colleagues who know me, being Māori is without question an inseparable part of who I am, how I operate and why I persist. They know and trust the intentions of my research and work. For some of my other colleagues and academic contemporaries, my being Māori is seen as a privilege, a bonus, a step up that makes my journey easier than theirs. For some others still, my claim to being Māori is a right that has to be earned, proven and authenticated via my adherence to prescriptive ideologies and demonstration of the “right ‘Discourse.” (Webber, 2009, p. 2)

In the end, however, as Pike (1954) originally argued, each of us has emic viewpoints and connections. But these emic viewpoints do not make us insiders to other cultures and positions, even if we have some direct connection. We might share aspects of the worlds of our research subjects, but we can never really claim to know their worlds completely. But equally, as people who started from the margins, we can never really occupy the center completely, nor is this necessarily our aspiration. Instead, our ability to stand on the edge and hold onto our own identities while speaking from the margins of the academy to the center enables us, as researchers, to create bridges between the space of research (academia) and the place of research (the research location; Neal, 2006; Stewart-Withers, 2016). In this sense, researchers are not necessarily insiders or outsiders, but edge and margin navigators who locate the gaps and trace the moving and movable margins so that their voices not only can be heard in the center but also have access to the center. As such, edgewalkers in the research process have the ability to bring different emic positions together, not in the attempt to create one etic story, but in the attempt to “throw new light on the way cultural or ethnic worldviews are perceived” (Funaki, 2017, p. 31). As such, the edge is a space that enables bridges to be built and new stories to be told. In a world of emic perspectives, the challenge is to walk and work the edge.