Ethnophilosophy is an emic, non-universal rendering of indigenous philosophizing

Evidence

Ethnoscience is an emic presentation of the indigenous knowledge of a different culture, where diminished mental powers, for example, may be caused by witchcraft, demons, breaking of taboos, ancestors, etc. Yet the same culture also knows about bone setting, obstetrics, and so on in ways that would also be considered valid from a Western or cosmopolitan scientific point of view. In the same way, ethnophilosophy must be understood as an attempt to render in discursive, cosmopolitan academic text the indigenous philosophizing of a particular culture—in this case an African culture. It is not a form of ethnology but simply an application in the philosophical perspective of emic anthropology. Such rendering is devoid of the universalist and cosmopolitan viewpoint in both form and meaning. This explains why, in the field of African philosophy, ethnophilosophy (in the hands of Towa, Hountondji, etc.) came to be a pejorative term for the kind of rendering of African traditional thought (as was the case with Tempels, Kagame, etc.) that is no longer being done. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 498

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the emic/cosmopolitan distinction behind the term ethnoscience and its philosophical analogue.
• XREF: Emic/etic distinction parallels debates in anthropology of knowledge and the reader’s interests in claims about culture.
• QUESTION: To what extent can a rendering ‘devoid of the universalist viewpoint’ still count as philosophy — this is the crux of the whole debate.