But violin playing is neither the habits, skills, knowledge, and so on, nor the mood, nor the notion believers in "material culture" apparently embrace the violin. To make a trade pact in Morocco, you have to do certain things in certain ways among others, cut, while chanting Quranic Arabic, the throat of a lamb before the assembled, undeformed, adult male members of your tribe and to be possessed of certain psychological characteristics among others, a desire for distant things.
But a trade pact is neither the throat cutting nor the desire, though it is real enough, as seven kinsmen of our Marmusha sheikh discovered when, on an earlier occasion, they were executed by him following the theft of one mangy, essentially valueless sheepskin from Cohen.
Culture is public because meaning is. You can't wink or burlesque one without knowing what counts as winking or how, physically, to contract your eyelids, and you can't conduct a sheep raid or mimic one without knowing what it is to steal a sheep and how practically to go about it. But to draw from such truths the conclusion that knowing how to wink is winking and knowing how to steal a sheep is sheep raiding is to betray as deep a confusion as, taking thin descriptions for thick, to identify winking with eyelid contractions or sheep raiding with chasing woolly animals out of pastures.
The cognitivist fallacy--that culture consists to quote another spokesman for the movement, Stephen Tyler of "mental phenomena which can [he means"should"] be analyzed by normal methods similar to those of mathematics and logic"--is as destructive of an effectivc use of the concept as are the behaviorist and idealist fallacies to which it is a misdrawn correction.
Perhaps, as its errors are more sophisticated and its distortions subtler, it is even more so. The generalized attack on privacy theories of meaning is, since early Husserl and late Wittgenstein, so much a part of modern thought that it need not be developed once more here. What is necessary is to see to it that the news of it reaches anthropology; and in particular that it is made clear that to say that culture consists of socially establishcd structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them, is no moreto say that it is a psychological phenomenon, a characteristic of someone's mind, personality, cognitive structure, or whatever, than to say that Tantrism, genetics, the progressive form of the verb, the classification of wines, the Common Law, or the notion of "a conditional curse" as Westermarck defined the concept of 'ar in terms of which Cohen pressed his claim to damages is.
What, in a place like Morocco, most prevents those of us who grew up winking other winks or attending other sheep from grasping what people are up to is not ignorance as to how cognition works though, especially as, one assumes, it works the same among them as it does among us, it would greatly help to have less of that too as a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs.
As Wittgenstein has been invoked, he may as well be quoted:. It is, however important as regards this observation, that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and. We do not understand the people. And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves. We cannot find our feet with them.
Finding our feet, an unnerving business which never more than distantly succeeds, is what ethnographic research consists of as a personal experience; trying to formulate the basis on which one imagines, always excessively, one has found them is what anthropological writing consists of as a scientific endeavor.
We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives a compromised word in any case or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difflcult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.
That is not, of course, its only aim--instruction, amusement, practical counsel, moral advance, and the discovery of natural order in human behavior are others; nor is anthropology the only discipline which pursues it.
But it is an aim to which a semiotic concept of culture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked systems of construable signs what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols , 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.
The famous anthropological absorption with the to us exotic Berber horsemen, Jewish peddlers, French Legionnaires--is, thus, essentially a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us.
Looking at the ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as has so often been claimed, the arbitrariness of human behavior there is nothing especially arbitrary about taking sheep theft for insolence in Morocco , but the degree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by, which it is informed.
Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. The more I manage to follow what the Moroccans are up to, the more logical, and the more singular, they seem. It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
It is this maneuver, usually too casually referred to as "seeing things from the actor's point of view," too bookishly as "the verstehen approach," or too technically as "emic analysis," that so often leads to the notion that anthropology is a variety of either long-distance mind reading or cannibal-isle fantasizing, and which, for someone anxious to navigate past the wrecks of a dozen sunken philosophies, must therefore be executed with a great deal of care.
Nothing is more necessary to comprehending what anthropological interpretation is, and the degree to which it i. What it means is that descriptions of Berber, Jewish, or French culture must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine Berbers, Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through, the formulae they use to define what happens to them.
What it does not mean is that such descriptions are themselves Berber, Jewish, or French--that is, part of the reality they are ostensibly describing; they are anthropological --that is, part of a developing system of scientific analysis. They must be cast in terms of the interpretations to which persons of a particular denomination subject their experience, because that is what they profess to be descriptions of; they are anthropological because it is, in fact, anthropologists who profess them.
Normally, it is not necessary to point out quite so laboriously that the object of study is one thing and the study of it another. But, as, in the study of culture, analysis penetrates into the very body of the object--that is, we begin with our own interpretations of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to, and then systematize those --the line between Moroccan culture as a natural fact and Moroccan culture as a theoretical entity tends to get blurred.
All the more so, as the latter is presented in the form of an actor's-eye description of Moroccan conceptions of everything from violence, honor, divinity, and justice, to tribe, property, patronage, and chiefship. In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot. By definition, only a "native" makes first order ones: it's his culture. To construct actor-oriented descriptions of the involvements of a Berber chieftain, a Jewish merchant, and a French soldier with one another in Morocco is clearly an imaginative act, not all that different from constructing similar descriptions of, say, the involvements with one another of a provincial French doctor, his silly, adulterous wife, and her feckless lover in nineteenth century France.
In the latter case, the actors are represented as not having existed and the events as not having happened, while in the former they are represented as actual, or as having been so. This is a difference of no mean importance; indeed, precisely the one Madame Bovary had difficulty grasping. But the importance does not lie in the fact that her story was created while Cohen's was only noted. The conditions of their creation, all "the point of it to say nothing of the manner and the quality differ.
Anthropologists have not always been as aware as they might be of this fact: that although culture exists in the trading post, the hill fort, or the sheep run, anthropology exists in the book, the article, the lecture, the museum display, or, sometimes nowadays, the film.
To become aware of it is to realize that the line between mode of representation and substantive content is as undrawable in cultural analysis as it is in painting; and that fact in turn seems to threaten the objective status of anthropological knowledge by suggesting that its source is not social reality but scholarly artifice. It does threaten it, but the threat is hollow. The claim to attention of an ethnographic account does not rest on its author's ability to capture primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home like a mask or a carving, but on the degree to which he is able to clarify what goes on in such places, to reduce the puzzlement--what manner of men are these?
This raises some serious problems of verification, all right--or, if "verification" is too strong a word for so soft a science I, myself, would prefer "appraisal" , of how you can tell a better account from a worse one. But that is precisely the virtue of it.
If ethnography is thick description and ethnographers those who are doing the describing, then the determining question for any given example of it, whether a field journal squib or a Malinowski-sized monograph, is whether it sorts winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones. It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.
It is not worth it, as Thoreau said, to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Now, this proposition, that it is not in our interest to bleach human behavior of the very properties that interest us before we begin to examine it, has sometimes been escalated into a larger claim: namely, that as it is only those properties that interest us, we need not attend, save cursorily, to behavior at all.
Culture is most effectively treated, the argument goes, purely as a symbolic system the catch phrase is, "in its own terms" , by isolating its elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements, and then characterizing the whole system in some general way--according to the core symbols around which it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological principles upon which it is based.
Though a distinct improvement over "learned behavior" and "mental phenomena" notions of what culture is, and the source of some of the most powerful theoretical ideas in contemporary anthropology, this hermetical approach to things seems to me to run the danger and increasingly to have been overtaken by it of locking cultural analysis away from its proper object, the informal logic of actual life.
There is little profit in extricating a concept from the defects of psychologism only to plunge it immediately into those of schematicism.
Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior--or, more precisely, social action--that cultural forms find articulation. They find it as well of course, in various sorts of artifacts, and various states of consciousness; but these draw their meaning from the role they play Wittgenstein would say their "use" in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships they bear to one another.
It is what Cohen, the sheikh, and "Captain Dumari" were doing when they tripped over one another's purposes--pursuing trade, defending honor, establishing dominance--that created our pastoral drama, and that is what the drama is, therefore, "about. A further implication of this is that coherence cannot be the major test of validity for a cultural description. Cultural systems must have a minimal degree of coherence, else we would not call them systems; and, by observation, they normally have a great deal more.
But there is nothing so coherent as a paranoid's delusion or a swindler's story. The force of our interpretations cannot rest, as they are now so often made to do, on the tightness with which they hold together, or the assurance with which they are argued.
Nothing has done more, I think, to discredit cultural analysis than the construction of impeccable depictions of formal order in whose actual existence nobody can quite believe. If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens--from what, in this time or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole vast business of the world--is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant.
A good interpretation of anything--a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society--takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When it does not do that, but leads us instead somewhere else--into an admiration of its own elegance, of its author's cleverness, or of the beauties of Euclidean order--it may have its intrinsic charms; but it is something else than what the task at hand--figuring out what all that rigamarole with the sheep is about--calls for.
The rigamarole with the sheep--the sham theft of them, the reparative transfer of them, the political confiscation of them--is or was essentially a social discourse, even if, as I suggested earlier, one conducted in multiple tongues and as much in action as in words. Claiming his 'ar , Cohen invoked the trade pact; recognizing the claim, the sheikh challenged the offenders' tribe; accepting responsibility, the offenders' tribe paid the indemnity; anxious to make clear to sheikhs and peddlers alike who was now in charge here, the French showed the imperial hand.
As in any discourse, code does not determine conduct, and what was actually said need not have been. Cohen might not have, given its illegitimacy in Protectorate eyes, chosen to press his claim.
The sheikh might, for similar reasons, have rejected it. The offenders' tribe, still resisting French authority, might have decided to regard the raid as "real" and fight rather than negotiate. And there are other possibilities: the Marmushans might have regarded the French action as to great an insult to bear and gone into dissidence themselves; the French might have attempted not just to clamp down on Cohen but to bring the sheikh himself more closely to heel; and Cohen might have concluded that between renegade Berbers and Beau Geste soldiers, driving trade in the Atlas highlands was no longer worth the candle and retired to the better-governed confines of the town.
This, indeed, is more or less what happened, somewhat further along, as the Protectorate moved toward genuine sovereignty. But the point here is not to describe what did or did not take place in Morocco. From this simple incident one can widen out into enormous complexities of social experience. It is to demonstrate what a piece of anthropological interpretation consists in tracing the curve of a social discourse; fixing it into inspectable form.
The ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse; he writes it down. The sheikh is long dead, killed in the process of being, as the French called it, "pacified"; "Captain Dumari," his pacifier, lives, retired to his souvenirs, in the south of France; and Cohen went last year, part refugee, part pilgrim, part dying patriarch, "home" to Israel.
But what they, in my extended sense, "said" to one another on an Atlas plateau sixty years ago is--very far from perfectly--preserved for study. Not the event of speaking, but the ''said" of speaking, where we understand by the "said" of speaking that intentional exteriorization constitutive of the aim of discourse thanks to which the ' Sagen '--the saying--wants to become the ' Aussage' : the enunciated.
In short, what we write is the noema ["thought", ''content,'' "gist''] of the speaking. It is the meaning of the speech event, not the event as event. This is not itself so very "said"--if Oxford philosophers run to little stories, phenomenological ones run to large sentences; but it brings us anyway to a more precise answer to our generative question, "What does the ethnographer do? But as the standard answer to our question has been: "He observes, he records, he analyzes"--a kind of " veni-vidi-vici "-conception of the matter--it may have more deep-going consequences than are at first apparent,--not the least of which is that distinguishing these three phases of knowledge-seeking may not, as a matter of fact, normally be possible; and, indeed, as autonomous "operations" they may not in fact exist.
The situation is even more delicate, because, as already noted, what we inscribe or try to is not raw social discourse, to which, because save very marginally or very specially, we are not actors, we do not have direct access, but only that small part of it which our informants can lead us into understanding.
But it does make the view of anthropological analysis as the conceptual manipulation of discovered facts, a logical reconstruction of a mere reality, seem rather lame.
To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autogenous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a priori weltanschauungen is to pretend a science that does not exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found.
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.
So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it is interpretive; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the "said" of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms. The kula is gone or altered; but, for better or worse, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific remains. So far as it has reinforced the anthropologist's impulse to engage himself with his informants as persons rather than as objects, the notion of "participant observation" has been a valuable one.
But, to the degree it has lead the anthropologist to block from his view the very special, culturally bracketed nature of his own role and to imagine himself something more than an interested in both senses of that word sojourner, it has been our most powerful source of bad faith. Western Pacific remains. But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic of such description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic. This is not to say that there are no large-scale anthropological interpretations of whole societies, civilizations, world events, and so on.
Indeed, it is such extension of our analyses to wider contexts that, along with their theoretical implications, recommends them to general attention and justifies our constructing them. No one really cares anymore, not even Cohen well History may have its unobtrusive turning points, "great noises in a little room"; but this little go-round was surely not one of them.
It is merely to say that the anthropologist characteristically approaches such broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters. He confronts the same grand realities that others--historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists--confront in more fateful settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Passion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige; but he confronts them in contexts obscure enough --places like Marmusha and lives like Cohen's--to take the capital letters off them.
These all-too-human constancies, "those big words that make us all afraid," take a homely form in such homely contexts. But that is exactly the advantage. There are enough profundities in the world already. Yet, the problem of how to get from a collection of ethnographic miniatures on the order of our sheep story--an assortment of remarks and anecdotes--to wall-sized culturescapes of the nation, the epoch, the continent, or the civilization is not so easily passed over with vague allusions to the virtues of concreteness and the down-to-earth mind.
For a science born in Indian tribes, Pacific islands, and African lineages and subsequently seized with grander ambitions, this has come to be a major methodological problem, and for the most part a badly handled one. The models that anthropologists have themselves worked out to justify their moving from local truths to general visions have been, in fact, as responsible for undermining the effort as anything their critics--sociologists obsessed with sample sizes, psychologists with measures, or economists with aggregates--have been able to devise against them.
Of these, the two main ones have been: the Jonesville-is-the-USA "microcosmic" model; and the Easter-Island-is-a-testing-case "natural experiment" model. Either heaven in a grain of sand, or the farther shores of possibility. The Jonesville-is-America writ small or America-is-Jonesville writ large fallacy is so obviously one that the only thing that needs explanation is how people have managed to believe it and expected others to believe it.
The notion that one can find the essence of national societies, civilizations, great religions, or whatever summed up and simplified in so-called "typical" small towns and villages is palpable nonsense.
Dictionary of qualitative inquiry 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Skip to content Thick description is a social sciences qualitative research technique that gives detailed descriptions and interpretations of situations observed by a researcher. Contents show. What is Thick Description in Qualitative Research? Thick Description vs. Thin Description. Interpretation in Context. Capturing Thoughts and Emotions. Assigning Motivations and Intentions. Rich Accounts of Details.
The Meaningfulness of the Situation is Detailed. Strengths and Weaknesses of Thick Description Strengths. Weaknesses and Criticisms. Key Scholar: Clifford Geertz 1. Culture must be explained in detail.
Ethnography is more than observation; it is interpretation. Ethnography is case study of the mundane and everyday. References for your Essay. One of the key terms in Clifford Geertz's anthropological theory is that of "Thick Description".
Following Ryle, Geertz holds that anthropology's task is that of explaining cultures through thick description which specifies many details, conceptual structures and meanings, and which is opposed to "thin description" which is a factual account without any interpretation. Thin description for Geertz is not only an insufficient account of an aspect of a culture; it is also a misleading one.
According to Geertz an ethnographer must present a thick description which is composed not only of facts but also of commentary, interpretation and interpretations of those comments and interpretations. His task is to extract meaning structures that make up a culture, and for this Geertz believes that a factual account will not suffice for these meaning structures are complexly layered one on top and into each other so that each fact might be subjected to intercrossing interpretations which ethnography should study.
In " Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture " Geertz outlines four parameters for an adequate "thick description" and a study of culture:.
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