Thick Description

Clifford Geertz (1973)

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the concept of
culture
man is an animal
suspended in webs of
signicance
he himself has spun.
ve characteristics
of thick description
interpretation.
interpretation of the ow of social
discourse.
to rescue the "said" of such discourse.
microscopic.
theory.
interpretation
doing ethnography is interpretation, which
is the thick description.
like trying to read (to construct the
reading of) a manuscript.
a manuscript that is foreign, faded, full of
ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious
emendations, and tendentious
commentaries . . .
social discourse
culture (acted document) is public.
human behavior is symbolic action.
culture is public because meaning is.
"to nd our feet with them".
to rescue the "said"
our own interpretations of what our informants are
up to, or think they are up to, and then systematize
those.
anthropological writings are ctions; ctions in
the sense that they are "something made."
the ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse; he
writes it down. He turns it from passing event into
an account.
what does the ethnographer do?--he writes.
microscopic
neither the Jonesville-is-the- USA
microcosmic model; nor the Easter-Island-is
-a-testing-case "natural experiment" model.
anthropologists don't study villages (tribes,
towns, neighborhoods . . .); they study in (an
issue) village.
small facts speak to large issues, winks to
epistemology, or sheep raid to revolution.
theory
to draw large conclusion from small.
"after that it is turtles all the way down."
Anthropology is a science whose progress
is marked less by a perfection of
consensus than by a renement of
debates. What gets better is the precision
with which we vex each other.
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