Lincoln, Yvonna S., and Egon G. Guba. They are both fictional, he argues, in the sense of the Latin root fictio, or ‘a making’. My Lit Journey: A Travelogue of Literary Arts. In the 1970s, however, Anthropologist Clifford Geertz saw that the diffuse way other Anthropologists and ethnographers defined culture began to obscure its usefulness. In another it might convey comradery in some sort of conspiracy. Geertz, however, rejects this Anthropological approach. and "Thinking and Reflecting".[2]. This term coincides with its antonym, “thin” description. He was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States. The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing? This is not to say that local knowledge cannot help outline a more general (and thus more abstract) understanding of humanity. “What man is,” he writes, “may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that it is inseparable from them” (35). Following Ryle, Geertz holds that anthropology'stask is that of explaining cultures through thick description which specifiesmany details, conceptual structures and meanings, and which is opposed to"thin description" which is a factual … Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Following Ryle's work, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz re-popularized the concept. [11][12], Geertz's thick description approach, along with the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, has become increasingly recognized as a method of symbolic anthropology,[7][3] enlisted as a working antidote to overly technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures, organizations, and historical settings. Studying communities via large-scale anthropological interpret will bring about discrepancies in understanding. To understand the twitch as a wink, then, involves understanding the web of significance in which the action of winking occurs. According to Geertz’s, ethnography is by definition “thick description”—“an elaborate venture in.” By example of “winking,” Geertz observes how—in order to differentiate the winking from a social gesture, a twitch, etc.—we must Humans cannot be understood separate from their culture. As cultures are dynamic and changing, Geertz also emphasizes the importance of speaking to rather than speaking for the subjects of ethnographic research and recognizing that cultural analysis is never complete. A thick description typically adds a record of subjective explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the behaviors, making the collected data of greater value for studies by other social scientists. What has all this to do with literary criticism? In the social sciences and related fields, a thick description is a description of human social action that describes not just physical behaviors, but their context as interpreted by the actors as well, so that it can be better understood by an outsider. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thick_description&oldid=982677862, Articles with unsourced statements from July 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, thin, which includes surface-level observations of behaviour; and. Yet Geertz calls this description “thin” since it merely describes the action of winking as no different than an eye twitch. Geertz uses Gilbert Ryles‘ term “thick description” to describe the intellectual effort of anthropology (6). These ideas would challenge Edward Burnett Tylor's concepts of culture as a "most complex whole" that is able to be understood; instead culture, to Geertz, could never be fully understood or observed. He was against comprehensive theories of human behavior; rather, he advocated methodologies that highlight culture from the perspective of how people looked at and experienced life.
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