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

Analysis is sorting out the structures of signification. Culture is public - because meaning is public (twitch and wink for example are based on the assumption that everyone knows what such a movement might mean)
 * =Title= || Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture ||
 * =Author= || Clifford Geertz ||
 * =Date= || 02/09/2011 Publication Date: 1973 ||
 * =Summary By= || Efe ||
 * =Summary= || Geertz talks about the difference between thin and thick descriptions and claims that anthropologists use ethnography to make thick descriptions about cultural phenomena. He uses Weberian understanding of culture and also borrows the term thick description from Gilbert Ryle.
 * Culture:** It is 'most complex whole' (Tylor). Man is viewed as an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. Culture is a semiotic concept. Cultural science is practically an interpretive one in search of meaning.
 * Thick description:** The best example is the different between a twitch and a wink (and also other meaning that may be imposed to the same eye movement.)

Three characteristics of ethnographic description are: - It is interpretive. - It focuses on social discourse. - It fixes discourse in 'perusable' terms. (fourth one is that is is microscopic)

Shortly: If we want to understand a given social phenomenon, we need to immerse into it. || = = = = = = = = = = = =
 * =Discussion points= || * Geertz's stress on culture and culture being a complex concept highly disturbs me. It gives the opportunity for a scholar or a practitioner to say something is cultural and get away without analyzing it or taking action. I will go ahead and shamelessly give a link to my own blog here. I wrote a post called '[|Perils of Ambiguity: Interdisciplinary and Cultural]'. Is it impossible to come up with categories for analyzing cultural phenomena? In other words, cab we write a 'General Guidelines for Analyzing Culture'?
 * Why should I 'care' about microscopic information?
 * Now, cultural theory is not predictive, it is not explanatory, it is pretty much only descriptive.... How should I use this knowledge for other research purposes? ||

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