Is an etic look possible?

Just as it does not occur to the encyclopedist that he has mistaken his type of rationality for rationality itself, so it does not occur to the etic linguist that scholarly discourse is not the language of natural reason but only one particular way of thinking about human understanding. And so on. In short, rather than a neutral discourse about things from which we have academic distance, “etic” understanding is a universal claim about the interpretative power of modern scholarship and the unitary rationality that undergirds it. Modern scholarship conducts its comparisons within a more capacious form of reasoning than particular traditions themselves exemplify. There is a larger language in which Stoicism or Christianity can be spoken without substantive loss. 194

<idle musing>
He's still not done deconstructing is he?
</idle musing>