Thick description: Toward an

Interpretive Theory of Culture (1973)

A student-led discussion by
Mae Urtal Caralde
For Media 397: Special Problems in Media Studies

Culture
Kluckhohns definition of culture:
The total way of life of a people
The social legacy the individual acquires from his group
A way of thinking, feeling and believing.
An abstraction from behavior
A theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way
in which a group of people in fact behave
A storehouse of pooled learning
A set of standardized orientations to re-current problems
Learned behavior
A mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior
A set of techniques fro adjusting both the external
environment and to other men
A precipitate of history

Culture
For

Geertz: culture is essentially a

semiotic one
man is an animal suspended in
webs of significance he himself has
spun
Culture is the web
The analysis of culture is not an
experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in
search of meaning

In Anthropology
Practitioners

do ethnography---establishing rapport,
selecting informants, transcribing etc.
Ethnography is an intellectual effort, and elaborate
venture in thick description
Object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of
meaningful structures are produced, perceived and
interpreted (example: twitches, winks, fake-winks,
parodies)
What we call data are really our own constructions of
other peoples constructions and is often obscured
Thick description---a multiplicity of complex conceptual
structures many of them superimposed or knotted into
one another
Doing ethnography is like trying to read / construct a
reading of

The

thing to ask is what their import is

What it is that in their occurrence and through
their agency, is getting said.
From Goodenough: culture [is located] in the
minds and hearts of men
a societys culture consists of whatever it is
one has to know or believe in order to operate
in a manner acceptable to its members
In the above definition---extreme subjectivism
is welded with extreme formalism
==explosion of debates of whether the study
really reflects what natives think.

Culture is public because

meaning is
Finding

our feet
We are not seeking to be natives, but we are seeking
to converse with them.
Aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the
universe of human discourse.
Culture is not a power; culture is a context,
something within which they can be intelligibly,
thickly described.
Anthro writings are 2nd and 3rd order interpretations,
only natives can give a 1st order interpretation
Something made, fashioned
Line between representation and substantive content
is an undrawable in cultural analysis as it is in
painting.

Question

of objectivity: source of anthro knowledge is not

social reality by scholarly artifice?
What matters is the degree to which one is able to clarify
what goes on in such places, to reduce the puzzlement, to
which unfamiliar acts emerging out of unknown
backgrounds naturally arise.
appraisal rather than verification
Measurement of cogency must be against the power of the
scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of
strangers.
Behaviors are attended to with exactness----because it is
thru the flow of behavior or social action, that cultural forms
fin articulation.
Whatever or wherever, symbol systems in their own terms
may be, we gain empirical access to them by inspecting
events, not by arranging them into unified patterns.

If

anthro is a reading of what happens, it

cannot be divorced from what happens
A good interpretation takes us into the heart
of that of which it is the interpretation.
In any discourse, code does not determine
conduct, and what was actually said need
not have been.
Point is not describe what did or did not take
place. It is about tracing the curves of a
social discourse; fixing it into inspectable
forms.

Ethnographers

inscribes social discourse

(he writes it down). What does writing fix?
What we write is the thought of the
speaking, the meaning of the speech
event, not the event as event.
Cultural analysis is (should be) guessing
at meanings, assessing the guesses, and
drawing the explanatory conclusions from
the better guesses, not discovering the
content of the meaning and mapping out
its bodiless landscape.

Characteristics of ethnographic
decsription
It is interpretive
What it is interpretive of is the
flow of discourse
The interpreting involved consist
in trying to rescue the said of
such discourse and fix it in
perusable terms.
It is microscopic

It is Microscopic
Approaches

broader interpretations and abstract analyses

from the extremely small matters.
Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular,
another country heard from
Complex specificness and circumstantiality
It is with this kind of materials produced through long term,
qualitative, highly participative and obsessively finelycombed field study in confined context that the megaconcepts with which contemporary social science is afflicted
Meaning can be given the sort of sensible actuality that
makes it possible to think not only realistically and
concretely about them, but, what is more important,
creatively and imaginatively with them.
Small facts speak to large issues because they are made to.

Problems in theorizing
Characteristics

of cultural interpretation makes

theoretical development usually difficult because
theory need to stay close to the ground
Tends to resist conceptual articulation and escape
systematic modes of assessment.
Whole of point of semiotic approach of culture: aid us
in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our
subjects live so that we can converse with them.
Cultural theory is not its own master
theory building is not to codify abstract regularities
but to make thick descriptions possible, not to
generalize across cases but to generalize within them
Cultural theory is not predictive
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete

Keep

the analysis of symbolic forms as closely tied

to the concrete social events, the public world of
common life, and to organize it in such as that the
connections between theoretical formulations and
descriptive interpretations were unobscured
Danger ---to search for all-too-deep-lying turtles
and will lose touch to hard surfaces of life (pol,
eco realities)
Vocation of interpretive anthro: not to answer our
deepest questions, but to make available to us the
answers that others have given, and thus include
them in the consultable record of what man has
said.