A Summary of Thick Description The Interpretation of Cultures

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Imran Ahmed Jafri

In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz outlines in broader sense the job of anethnographer. The ethnographers role is to observe and analyse a culture by interpreting signs to understand deeper meanings within the context of that culture. He asserts that the essentially semiotic nature of culture has implications for the social sciences in general and political science in particular. His idea of culture is taken from Kluckhohn, where he feels culture is 1) the total way of life of a people; 2) the social legacy the individual acquires from his group; 3) a way of thinking, feeling, and believing; 4) an abstraction from behaviour; 5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave;

6) a storehouse of pooled learning; 7) a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems; 8) learned behaviour; 9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behaviour; 10) a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men; 11) a precipitate of history; 12) a behavioural map, sieve, or matrix. Geertz prescribes interpreting a cultures web of symbols by 1. Isolating its elements, 2. Specifying the internal relationships among those elements and, 3. characterize the whole system in some general wayaccording 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. According to Geertzs, ethnography is by definition thick descriptionan elaborate venture in. By example of winking, Geertz observes howin order to differentiate the winking from a social gesture, a twitch, etc.we must carefully analyse the action in terms of both the particular social understanding of the winking as a gesture, the real intention of the winker, and how the the meaning of the winking action itself is interpreted.

Clifford Geertz: Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture Summary, Review and analysis
Culture is the center of Clifford Geertz's discussion in "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture". Following Max Webber, Geertz views people as being entangled in webs of meaning that are of their own making. Geertz refutes previous anthropological perspectives which viewed culture as a vast array of values, techniques, tradition and so for the in favor of a more narrow definition of the term "culture".

In "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" Geertz views culture in semiotic terms, a sort of public act in which people express themselves using various signs and symbols which have preascribed cultural meaning. Culture for Geertz is far from an abstract psychological construct. On the contrary, culture for Geertz is embodied in the person who acts out of and in a certain context, and culture is revealed in this person's actions and his interpretation of their meaning. Culture is in this sense concrete and public, and not something which exists in people's individual minds.

Following his perception of culture Geertz holds that the ethnographer's task is in fact the same of someone who belongs to a certain culture to have a deep and rooted understanding of in the semiotics symbols and meanings of the culture. This is the basis for Geertz's notion of "thick description". Thick description is for Geertz a methodological imperative which takes into account the structure and nature of a culture's semiotic formations. Geertz distinguished "thick description' from "thin description" which is a factual account of a culture that does not include hermeneutic interpretation which is required by the thick description. In "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" Geertz uses the example of a wink which can be seen as just a contraction of the eyelids or as sign which bears cultural as well as contextual meanings.

Clifford Geertz "From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" - summary, review and analysis
In "From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" (in: Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology") Clifford Geertz refines some of the main ideas presented in his previous studies such as "thick description" and "cultural meaning". Geertz views culture as embodies in public signs and symbols, as a web weaved by man himself which makes the world understandable. Geertz also discussed the anthropoligist's role in tracing and deciphering these meaning structures by coinciding his own as well as the native's point of view.

In "From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" Geertz deals with methodological and epistemological question pertaining to the anthropological quest for an adequate representation of another culture's experience of reality.

According to Geertz the anthropologist's task in neither objective nor subjective, it is both. He demonstrates this point by opposing "experience-near", which is the spontaneous and unaware experience, with "experience-distant" is the conceptualized account of reality. The anthropologist according to Geertz always shifts back and forth between these two forms of experience.

Geertz demonstrates his point through a comperative discussion of how deferent cultures perceive the concept of "person". Geertz compare the perceptions of "person" in Bali, Java and Morocco which are rather different from the western perception of the self as unique, consistent and whole. In Java, for example, Geertz finds that the notion of person is organized through two sets of contradictions: inside/outside and refined/vulgar. The inside/outside distinction refers to two distinct realms: personal and private emotions and external behavior. The refined/vulgar distinction refer to a moral aspect in which the person assumes his correct position in the word.

In Bali Geertz shows how a rich and complex structure of personal denotations construct the person and his place in the social order (see: "Person Time and Conduct in Bali"). In Morocco the main principle according to Geertz is that of " nisba" which denotes or interpolates the person's always relative social identity.

Clifford Geertz - Person Time and Conduct in Bali - summary

Clifford Geertz views culture as a public performance of signs and symbolic acts (see: Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture). In "Person Time and Conduct in Bali" (in "Interpretation of Culture") geertz discusses the importance of recognizing the nature of human thought and perception as an employed social mechanism for cultural analysis. He demonstrates this notion and his idea of "thick description" in the case of the Balinese people and the manner in which they conceive and interpret the sense of being a person, time and subsequent behaviour.

In Geertz's view cultural patterns are the means through which people attribute meaning and structure various events in their lives. Therefore the study of culture according to Geertz is the study of the mechanism employed by individuals and groups in order to orient themselves in the world. These mechanisms serve as private solutions to the universal existential problems of cognition and orientation by answering questions like who we are, where do we come from, the relation between us and other people and between us and nature. According to Geertz one of the focal points of the need for the orientation is the private individual and his definition as a social unit. Social structures organize and construct personal identity and Geertz uses the example of Bali and the Balinese people to show hoe their complex system of names and social denotations of individuals function to construct such as personal identity through an established perception of time and existence.

According to Geertz, the Balinese name system seeks to obscure temporal differences between people and attempts at constructing them as sharing the same time, thus promoting a relative anonymousation of the personality. Geertz shows how personal perceptions in Bali are linked to perceptions of time, which for the Balinese is not linear as it is in the West but rather fragmented with specific meanings assigned to specific days. Time in Bali is simultaneous and all people are each other's contemporary.

Finally, perceptions of the self and time are linked according to Geertz to conduct and behavior. Geertz discusses the Balinese term of "lek", misstraslated as "shame", which refers to one's failure to play out is role in social performance. Geertz's main thesis in "Person Time and Conduct in Bali" is that there exists interdependence between perceptions of the person, time and conduct which all stem from human experience and the attempt to organize social life. The next step for Geertz is try to trace the characteristics of these social experiences such as integration, change and conflict.

Clifford Geertz: "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" summary and review
To start form the bottom line, Clifford Geertz's essential notion expressed in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" (1972) is that a people's culture is an ensemble of rituals which are in themselves ensembles, and these texts are what the anthropologist is trying to decipher.

"Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is one of Clifford Geertz's most influential articles which illustrates not only the meaning of a given cultural phenomenon, the Balinese cockfight, but also Geertz's interpretative approach that sees a culture as a set of texts to be read by the anthropologist. Geertz shows how the Balinese cockfight serves as a cultural text which embodies, at least a portion of, what the real meaning of being Balinese is.

Despite being illegal, cockfighting is a widespread and highly popular phenomenon in Bali, at least at the time "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" was written (1972). Geertz reports that the Balinese people deeply detest animals and more specifically expressions of animal-like behavior. However, they have a deep identification with their cocks (yes, with their cocks) and "in identifying with his cock, the Balinese man is identifying not only with his ideal self, or even his penis, but also, and at the same time, with what he most fears, hates, and ambivalence being what it is, is fascinated by- the powers of darkness".

Although gambling is a major and central part of the Balinese cockfight, Geertz argues that what is at stake is much more fundamental than just money, namely, prestige and status. Geertz distinguishes "deep fights", with high wages, and "shallow fights", usually with low wages of both gambling and prestige. Following Bentham, Geertz defines a "deep fight" is one in which the stakes are so high the people lose their rationality. In the case of the Balinese cockfight, a deep fight is one in which results are unpredictable, the odds are more even and the bets are more balanced. With bets fairly even in the case of a deep fights, financial gain is not the center of the event, but rather everything which is expressed in the concept of "status". Cockfighting is a fight for statues, with bets serving only to symbolize the risk. But it is a momentary gain or lost, the statues is only gained or lost momentarily following the fight but is maintained in the long run, with cockfights assisting in making sure of that.

Participants of the "deep fights" are usually dominant members of society. However the fight, according to Geertz, is not between individuals but is rather a simulation of the social structure of kinship and social groups. People never bet against a cock from their own reference group. Fighting always takes place between people (and cocks) from opposing social groups (family, clan, village etc.) and is therefore the most overt manifestation of social rivalry, and a way of addressing these rivalries. The Balinese cockfight is, as Geertz puts it, a way of playing with fire without getting burned. Social tensions are represented through the cockfight, but after all, it's just a cockfight.

Geertz also notes that the higher the status of the participants in the cockfight, the deeper the cockfight is, and the deeper it the more a person identifies with his cock and the more the financial aspect of gambling associated with the fight is marginal in comparison with the symbolic aspects of it.

The "deep play" of the Balinese cockfight, says Geertz, is like artworks which illustrate an essential insight into our very existence. It is a symbolic manufactured representation of something very real in our social life. It channels aggression and rivalry into an indirect symbolic sphere of engagement. The fights both represent and take part in forming the social and cultural structure of the Balinese people which are dramatized through the cockfight.

Rituals such as the Balinese cockfight, Geertz concludes, are a form of text which can be read. It is a society's manner of speaking to itself about itself, and is therefore of prime interest for the anthropologist.

The
By Clifford

Interpretation

Of

Cultures

(Basic

Books

Classics)
Geertz

Publisher: Basic Books Number Of Pages: 480 Publication Date: 1977-05-18 ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0465097197 ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780465097197 Binding: Paperback Download link: The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Book Classics

Product

Description:

In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.

Summary: Dated

and

irritating

in

places

Rating: 2 Geertz has done much to enrich our understanding of societies, and the role ideas and beliefs play within them. But shouldn't an anthopologist, of all people, also be evaluated for how fairly s/he looks at other cultures? And here I think work like some contained in this book is indefensible. How can essentializing, stereotyping garbage like this be sold by anyone as great anthropology? From the last essay in the collection, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight": "The villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press

themselves Easy, pal,

upon didn't occur

them: to you

as that

though perhaps they

we just

were didn't like

not you and

there." you?

"To anyone who has been in Bali the identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable" C'mon, I mean, don't y'all just see how they identify?

"The Balinese revulsion against any behavior regarded as animal-like can hardly be overstressed. Babies are not allowed to crawl for that reason. Incest, though hardly approved, is a much less horrifying crime than bestiality." Find me a culture to which most of this doesn't apply.

"The Balinese never do anything in a simple way that they can contrive to do in a complicated one." Is it the great anthropologist speaking here, or my grandma Grace upon returning from her ten-day vacation to the island? In sum, while I can certainly see why so many find some of Geertz's work valuable and inspiring, I'm shocked that so few are bugged by his patronizing, essentializing, and plain bellicose mode of looking at other cultures in some other. I think this is an important point, that has to be on this page, no matter how many "unhelpful" votes I get.

Summary: An Academic Giant Rating: 5 This is a book for scholars but it is very readable and will definitely throw you into what anthropology is (should be?) about. You might have to read through each essay a couple of times to make sure you understood the points he was making, but it's not annoying to do because the points he is making are so excellent. One of the best book purchases I have ever made.

Summary: An Imperative Classic Rating: 5 "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs..." These cultural "webs of significance" Clifford Geertz speaks of are constructed of religious beliefs and practices, cultural customs, social interactions, attitudes and behavior -- everything around us that we have constructed as rational beings capable of thought and imagination. According to Geertz, the role of the anthropologist is, in a sense, to 'decode' the symbolic meanings of these certain events, practices, customs and interactions that take place within a specific culture, however insignificant they may seem to the observer. Detail is of utmost importance. An anthropologist must become part of the culture -- looking in from the outside he will understand nothing. Of course, in order to reduce the occurrence of the anthropologist's own cultural bias and to attempt to more accurately understand a culture, one could easily say that it is imperative that anthropologists emerge themselves in the customs and practices of that culture. But, even then, is it ever possible for one to grasp an understanding of a culture in which one was not born into? Are humans socialized from birth to perceive all cultural customs and practices through a shady lens, clouded by perceptions of the world they have acquired during childhood? Geertz believes that, while to some extent it is possible to reach an understanding of a culture outside of our own, it is important to understand that anthropological writing is merely a "thick description," an interpretation of an

interpretation. In other words, the anthropologist is interpreting the culture's interpretation of the event that is taking place. There is nothing precise, categorically logical or rational about anthropological writing: Cultural analysis is strictly the process of creating various hypotheses, examining those hypotheses, and then deriving explanations from the best hypotheses. As Geertz says, the analysis of it is not an "experimental science in search of law" but, rather, "an interpretive one in search of meaning." It is the job of an anthropologist to first attempt to understand how an event is interpreted by the culture in which it takes place, then to make an interpretation of that interpretation, and then it is left up to the reader of anthropological writing to interpret the final interpretations. It is difficult, if not impossible, to derive any absolute factual conclusion from data constructed of so many interpretive layers; thus, interpretation is not definitive. The role of an anthropologist, according to Geertz, is to construct the finest interpretations possible, and most importantly, to be an active participant in the culture, rather than a passive observer. This book is THE classical text for a modern cultural anthropologist. It's also an excellent book for anyone skeptical of social science in general, and serves as a great introduction for anyone just curious about anthropology.

Summary: From Universals to Particulars Rating: 5 The Interpretation of Culture by Clifford Geertz is concerned with articulating a particular view of what culture is, what role it plays in social life, and proposes a methodology with which it should be studied. Geertz posits that culture should not be seen as a science in search of law but instead as an interpretation in search of meaning. "The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself 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 expression on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause demands itself some explication" (p5) In part 1, Geertz begins with "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture". This, the first essay in the series explains the complexity of culture and what it is. Geertz explains his semiotics when he writes: "To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action - art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, common sense - is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of deemotionalized forms: it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential vocations, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said." (p30) In part 2, Geertz explores different dimensions of culture. Culture is a "template" or "program". As individuals, we learn it then modify it. Geertz fails to explain how these templates come to be and be modified but posits that they become "common sense" of Platonic propositions and continue to be so. "In attempting to launch such an integration from the anthropological side and to reach, thereby, a more exact image of man, I want to propose two ideas. The first of these is that culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns - customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters - as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms - plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call "programs") - for the governing of behavior. The second idea is that man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such as cultural programs, for ordering his behavior." (p44) Part 3 centers on religion. Part 4 is the "thickest" sets of essays including "Ideology As a Cultural System" and "The Politics of Meaning". In chapter 8, Geertz identifies what he sees as the phenomenon of ideology and how ideology is vilified as a space for something that is epistemologically "Other". "That the conception of ideology now regnant in the social sciences is a thoroughly evaluative (that is, pejorative) one is readily enough demonstrated. "[The study of ideology] deals with a mode of thinking which is thrown off its proper course,"" (p196) The final section part 5 is where is all come together for me. The last portion is his examination of Levi-Strauss and Geertz's "breaking through the veil" in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." I will deal with the latter first then tackle what I see as his inability to see merit in the universals. As if transported by some form of deja vu, I "feel"

Geertz when he wrote about suddenly being part of the milieu. In "The Cerebral Savage: On the work of Claude LeviStrauss" Geertz takes apart Levi-Strauss and his humanistic/scientific project. Geertz sees this form of inquiry as bankrupt as anthropologists have "...taken refuge in bloodless universals". (p5). Geertz elaborates on this premise in his critique of Levi-Strauss and his work in "Tristes Tropique". Coming out in a generation that was starting to reflect on "how" they were writing rather than "what" they were writing about, Geertz's critique is a reflection on Levi-Strauss' lack of self reflexivity. In a move that parallels Foucault's in "The Order of Things", Geertz begins his anti-humanist attack on a less reflective mode of writing that, on the inside causes epistemic violence and on the outside is naive and self delusory. "In Levi-Strauss' work the two faces of anthropology - as a way of going at the world and as a method for uncovering lawful relations among empirical facts - are turned in toward one another so as to force a direct confrontation between them rather than (as is more common among ethnologists) out away from one another so as to avoid such a confrontation and the inward stresses which go with it. This accounts both for the power of his work and for its general appeal. It rings with boldness and a kind of reckless candor. But it also accounts for the more intraprofessional suspicion that what is presented as High Science may really be an ingenious and somewhat roundabout attempt to defend a metaphysical position, advance argument, and serve a moral cause." (p346-347). I agree with Geertz and Foucault with regards to the complexity and need to effect a "thick" description. However, much can still be learned from that scientific/humanist Man centered project. The Enlightenment and its project has been credited for the wonderfully contradictory le mission civilastrice which accord to Fanon is such a contradiction in that the ideology that places man at the center, is responsible for so much killing. If Levi-Strauss is doing the same thing theoretically, then he is complicit in this move to reinforce placing Man at the center and to submit us to its results. With Geertz and Foucault we can hopefully find a more "enlightened" middle ground. Miguel Llora

Summary: Just a Continuation of Anti-Progressive, Anti-Science Rating: 2 In the typical post-modernist sense, Geertz seeks to cast doubt on everything without leaving us with anything in place. Just like other post modernists, his theories are so vague, poorly stated, and in generally strange that they cannot be proved right or wrong. Even if he, like other post-modernists, is right, we do not gain anything but perhaps a somewhat edited understanding of our world. The field of cultural anthropology in and of itself is a "shady" field. The lack of biological evidence to back up Geertz's claims is immense. To think the Central Nervous System is a result of culture is simply asinine. To think that somehow culture exists out there for us to grab and chose and that it is somehow transferred through our genes and eventually influences evolution is outright ridiculous. Just because you can make claims and cast doubt on opposing claims does not mean you are correct. There is little evidence to show that the human race is still undergoing evolution in the Darwinian sense. Geertz's failure, or rather deliberate attempt to, distinguish between the mind and the brain shows his general distaste for any sort of reasonable logic. Please: Someone rescue anthropology from its current blinding veil of post modernist, post-structuralist ideology. Post modernism is like chewing gum that sticks to your shoe sole and impedes you from moving forward. OK, so it has our attention, now let us get it off our feet, move on into the future, and leave this decrepit, inane theory behind us all.