Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft, Today

Anthropologists and linguists are familiar with  the  etic/emic dichotomy, the observers’s  and the actors’s idioms,  put forward by Kenneth Pike.  They are possibly less familiar with Marc Bloch’s reflections  on the relationship  between  the historians’s vocabulary  and the vocabulary  used  in   their evidence. The paper will develop the implications of Bloch’s remarks, arguing that  they may help us  to understand  both convergences  and divergences in the domain of  social sciences.