In his important essay “Thick Description:
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” anthropologist Clifford Geertz aims to provide social science with and understanding and appreciation of
“thick description.” While Geertz applies thick description in the direction of
anthropological study (specifically his own ‘interpretive anthropology’), his
theory that asserts the essentially semiotic nature of culture has implications
for the social sciences in general and, in our case, political science (and
comparative political science) in particular.
“Cultural analysis is
intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the
less complete it is… There are a number of ways of escaping this—turning
culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting
it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures
and toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit
oneself to a semiotic concept of culture and an interpretive approach to the
study of it is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as…
‘essentially contestable.’ Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology,
is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of the consensus
than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we
vex each other.” (29)
I. The idea of “culture”
From Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror
of Man, Geertz lists the following potential meanings of “culture”:
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
behavior"
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 behavior"
9. “a mechanism for the normative
regulation of behavior”
10. “a set of techniques for
adjusting both to the external environment and to other men"
11. "a precipitate of
history"
12. a behavioral map, sieve, or
matrix
Essentially, there is no standard
and it will eventually be “necessary to choose.” (5) Geertz himself argues for
a “semiotic” concept of culture: “Believing, with Max Weber, that 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 interpretative one in search of meaning. It is
explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface
enigmatical.” (5)
We must proceed interpreting a
culture’s web of symbols by 1. isolating its elements 2. specifying the
internal relationships among those elements 3. characterize 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. (17) We must, however, be
careful that such hermetical approaches might actually distance us from
cultural analysis’s proper object, “the informal logic of actual life…
Whatever, or wherever, symbol systems ‘in their own terms’ may be, we gain
empirical access to them by inspecting events, not by arranging abstracted
entities into unified patterns.” (17) Therefore, coherence cannot be a test for
a cultural interpretation’s validity. While cultural systems must have a
certain degree of coherence in order to be cultural systems, coherence is a
loaded measurement as well as a limited one. “Tightness” of a culture, or at
least its interpretation, makes for neither a valid or invalid interpretation.
Rather, the ethnographer ‘inscribes’ social discourse, turning a passing event
into an account. Guessing at meanings is a given in the interpretations behind the
inscriptions. “Tightness” is irrelevant for the most part.
In Geertz’s understanding,
ethnography is by definition “thick description”—“an elaborate venture in.”
Using the action of “winking,” Geertz examines how—in order to distinguish the
winking from a social gesture, a twitch, etc.)—we must move beyond the action
to both the particular social understanding of the “winking” as a gesture, the mens
rea (or state of mind) of the winker, his/her audience, and how they
construe the meaning of the winking action itself. “Thin description” is the
winking. “Thick” is the meaning behind it and its symbolic import in society or
between communicators.
Ethnographic description includes
the following: 1. it’s interpretive 2. what it is interpretive of is the flow of social
discourse 3. the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the ‘said’
of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms.
(20) He compares the method of the
“interpretive anthropologist” (who accepts a semiotic view of culture) with the
method of the literary critique analyzing a text: “Analysis, then, is sorting
out the structures of signification—what Ryle called established codes—and
determining their social ground or import… Doing ethnography is like trying to
read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript.” Additionally we
should treat human behavior as “symbolic action—action, which, like phonation
in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music,
signifies—the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of
mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask is
what their import is.” (9-10) (my emphasis) Approaching culture as either
subjective/objective, modern/traditional or designated by and supposed social
dichotomy is dangerous and misleading. We should, rather, view human behavior
as “symbolic action.”
Culture is public because “meaning
is,” and systems of meanings are what produce culture, they are the collective
property of a particular people. When “we,” either as researchers or simply as
human beings, do not understand the beliefs or actions of persons from a
foreign culture, we are acknowledging our “lack of familiarity with the
imaginative universe within which their acts are signs.” (12-13) We cannot
discover the culture’s import or understand its systems of meaning when, as
Wittgenstein noted, “We cannot find our feet with them.” (13)
Therefore, when faced with “a
multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon
or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and
inexplicit,” the ethnographer must attempt to grasp and interpret them,
striving to understand how and why behavior is shaped in such and such a way
(as opposed to another). Thick description is, thus, much more that mere data
collection although this is an inherent part of anthropological work as well.
Mistaken views of “culture” as a
concept:
- “to imagine that culture is
a self-contained ‘superorganic’ reality with forces and purposes of its
own; that is to say, to reify it.”—
- reductionist tendencies
- We must be wary of defining
what a particular tribe “really” thinks and setting this in stone.
Additionally, we must be aware that simply applying formal models to
subjective realities; refined ethnographic algorithms make the reality no
less subjective. “The cognitivist fallacy—that culture consists of ‘mental
phenomena which can be analyzed by formal methods similar to those of
mathematics and logic’—is as destructive of an effective use of the
concept as are the behaviorist and idealist fallacies to which it is a
misdrawn correction.” (12)
- mistaking the thick
description for thin or vice versa
- taking anthropological
interpretations as first order interpretations—when they are at best
second and third order interpretations (first order refers to
interpretations by a community member living within the particular
community in question)
- careful not to fall into
problematic models; for instance the “Jonesville-is-the-USA microcosmic
model” or the “Easter Island-is-a-testing-case natural experiment model.”
As a semiotic concept, “culture is
not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or
processes can causally be attributed; it is a context, something within which
[interworked systems of construable signs] can be intelligibly—that is,
thickly—described.” We must ever be attempting to uncover “the degree to which [an action’s]
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.” (14)
In sum, Geertz wants us to
appreciate that social actions are larger than themselves, they speak to larger
issues, and vice versa, because “they are made to.” (23) “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.” (16) We seek to converse with subjects
in foreign cultures, gain access to their conceptual world; this is the goal of
the semiotic approach to culture. Cultural theory is not its own master. At the
end of the day, we must appreciate that the generality thick description
“contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the
sweep of its abstractions… [T]he essential task of theory building here is not
to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to
generalize across cases but to generalize within them.” (25-6) Cultural theory
is not predictive; at best, it anticipates. Finally, “Our double task is to
uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts, the ‘said’ of
social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in those terms what is
generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they
are, will stand out against the other determinates of human behavior. In
ethnography, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what
symbolic action has to say about itself—that is, about the role of culture in
human life—can be expressed.” (27)
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