Thick Description: Toward an Interpretice Theory of Culture. Clifford Geertz. Essay, Review, Summary ANTV 315

Thick Description 

In his Essay entitled, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretice Theory of Culture," in the journal The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz works to define what constitutes the science of culture. It is through his theory and interpretation that he seeks to define culture and anthropology, clarify misconceptions of culture, and characterize ethnography as use of thick description.  

Geertz defines culture with the following simile, "A man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical." (14). While there is debate over whether culture is subjective or objective, it is most certainly public—because meaning is public. Yet, at the same time as it being ever present, it is not physical, and at the same time it is an idea, it does not exist in one's mind. Through this idea the many misconceptions of culture begin to emerge, and Geertz works to explain and rebuke them.  

The main misconception about culture (and the study of culture) can be summarized through Ward Goodenough's idea that “culture [is located] in the minds and hearts of men.” (11). This is to say that culture is composed of purely psychological structures, "In such a way, extreme subjectivism is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an explosion of debate as to whether particular analyses reflect what the natives “really” think or are merely clever simulations, logically equivalent but substantively different, of what they think." (11). This cognitive fallacy is where thick description, rather than the so named "thin description," becomes important in preventing such misconceptions within the science. It is important, too, to recognize anthropology as a microscopic science, which studies mostly small communities. This factor makes it important to recognize and realize that small facts speak to large issues because they are made to.  

With these ideas in mind defining the science of culture itself, the social anthropology, begins to question whether the science is objective or subjective, full of static data or interpretive analysis. Firstly, Geertz emphasizes the importance of containing the concept of culture and anthropology within a limited, focused, and contained discipline. Secondly, Geertz moves to define human behavior as symbolic action in which we should not ask whether it is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, but what its importance is. It is through thick description that we come to understand the importance, "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" (14). 

Using the microcosmic model of the interaction between the Jews, Berbers, and French, Geertz explains that an ethnographer turns events into accounts through the use of thick description. Thus, the very definition of ethnography is transformed into thick description, But the point is that between what Ryle calls the “thin description” of what the rehearser is doing and the “thick description" of what he is doing lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not n fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids. (7).   

Geertz argues that the interpretation of this thick description is, while more difficult in this field, as equally important as any other field of science. Through thick description we are made to practice analysis of data, that is, the sorting out the structures of signification, scientific imaginations of meanings. As defined by Geertz, "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." (20). These analyses are fictions—not in that they are fake, but in that they are created.  Through these analyses ethnographers air able to accomplish the task of drawing large conclusions from small facts, thus supporting theories about the particular culture.  

Thick description is Clifford Geertz weapon of choice when it comes to ethnography—it allows for complex, theoretical conclusions to be drawn about a particular in a subjective way, and then to be analyzed and reflected upon within the complex context of anthropological studies. In an area of science packed with debate and misconceptions, thick description allows for cultures to be studied effectively.  

Bibliography 

“Thick Description: Toward an Interpretice Theory of Culture.” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, by Clifford Geertz, Basic Books, 2017.