Thick+Description-+Toward+an+Interpretive+Theory+of+Culture


 * =Title= || Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture ||
 * =Author= || Clifford Geertz ||
 * =Date= || 2/8/2011 (1973) ||
 * =Summary By= || Caroline Chumo ||
 * =Summary= || Finally, from Geertz we receive a perspective on the relation of interpretive social science—particularly the study of culture in anthropology—to theory. This is something we have been struggling with, for example in terms of Weber’s balance between generalization and contextualization, and in terms of the exact purpose of ethnography in our Conduct of Inquiry class.

Despite the sole purpose of anthropology being the conceptualization of “culture” there remain debates within the field about just how precise the various concepts should be and how the concepts contribute to “knowledge.” Many of the concepts are theories attempting to define culture. Geertz’s analysis of culture is “semiotic […] in search of meaning” (311) and “structure” (Wikipedia). Geertz recalls here Weber’s analogy of “webs of significance.”

To justify his semiotic concept of culture which is at odds with the mainstream, Geertz insists that one must examine the practice of scientific inquiry. Anthropologists for example do ethnography, which is “thick description” (312) to uncover the hidden meanings, or “structures of signification” (314), in social interaction. Geertz gives two examples: the twitches vs. winks, and a scenario in colonial North African. He argues that the debate in anthropology about whether culture is subjective or objective is missing the point; “the thing to ask is: what it is […] that […] is getting said” (315). Geertz presents opposing concepts of culture—a force, patterns of behavior, or “ethnoscience”—claiming they all obscure culture’s essence which Husserl and Wittgenstein touched on during the earlier “attack on privacy theories of meaning” (315) (see also the quote from Wittgenstein on page 316 about “finding our feet”). To sum up his point:

“As interworked systems of construable signs, culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described” (316).

Just because an ethnography can describe a given situation, does not make his description hold for all examples of that type, because if you remember Weber’s webs of significance, the meaning arising from any situation will shift when held in relation to other linked situations. Ethnographies are simply interpretations, “inscriptions,” which are captured in written form. “Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape” (318). Interpretation is about the micro-level, but it is not about testing or distilling the essence of larger phenomena from a single case. Whoa: “Small facts speak to large issues, winks to epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they are made to” (319).

Formulating a systematic way to evaluate cultural interpretation is a nascent endeavor. Cultural analysis is also not entirely conducive to any “theoretical development” (320). There is a “tension” between the idiosyncrasies of culture and the momentum of traditional scientific inquiry. Yet there is an obvious progressive trend within anthropology. There certainly is inference regarding the symbols floating around within a single study in order to generate meaning. Also, cultural theory would not be predictive. But as other cases are understood and social webs shift, an ethnography has intellectual power if the meaning it uncovered is sustained (321). An ethnography has mini-theories, or labels, running through it, i.e. informed speculations about “symbol, ideology, ethos, revolution, identity,” etc. || = = = = = = = = = = = =
 * =Discussion points= || Geertz would claim his essay is an attempt to standardize the art of cultural interpretation, saving it from the jaws of theory-driven approaches. Does he do a good job of that? Has Geertz convinced you that cultural interpretation (or ethnography) can be a straightforward, assessable science? Has he convinced you of the value of ethnography in favoring an understanding of particular contexts versus universal wholes? If so, what would his approach imply about the ultimate purpose of the study of international relations? If not, where does the limit to the value of ethnography end and the value of theorizing/positivist approaches begin? ||

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