The question of the genre of Luke and Acts (or Luke-Acts) is one that continues to bedevil Lukan scholarship. Proposals run the gamut, from the fairly standard (e.g., Bios and “general history”), to the esoteric (e.g., “eschatological kerygmatic biblical historical biography”). This paper will seek to cut through some of the confusion by employing a distinction well-known from the social sciences: the emic-etic distinction (that is, the difference between the way that insiders and outsiders, respectively, categorize phenomena). After explaining the terms, I will demonstrate how some proposals for the genre of Luke and Acts fall into one category versus the other (while the status of others is unclear). I will argue that insufficient attention has been paid to this distinction in discussions of the genre of Luke-Acts, and that doing so can bring clarity to a complicated subject, even if it doesn’t solve all the problems.