A simple definition of
thick description will be an account of a culture or society which includes
elaborate information on context and social background to explain behavior.
Clifford Geertz, who
coined the term thick description, meant two things by it. The first practical
meaning of asking an observer to write a "thick description" is to
ask him not only to account for what he sees but also to try and find the
context which will account for what he sees. The second theoretical meaning of
Geertz's thick description is that social behavior should be understood
"deeply", that it to understand that any behavior is rooted in
elaborate social and cultural constraints that the researcher must bring into
account if he wants to accurately portray a society.
If we take the example
of the Nacirema
culture, it is not enough to record women putting their heads into ovens or
to describe the in-house shrines. One has to dig deeper and explain how these phenomena
are related to the Nacirema's body culture (to understand the example see: Body
Ritual Among the Nacirema by Horace Miner).
Greetz developed the
idea of thick description in his seminal "Thick
Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture". Geertz
gave a brilliant examples of his theory in his famous articles " Deep
Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" or Person
Time and Conduct in Bali . Another important theoretical
article by Geertz is " From
the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding"
(all these articles have summaries on this site, follow the links).
Geertz's "thick description" was and still is a highly
influential line of thought in anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, sociology
and all of the social sciences. Geertz also influenced to trend in anthropology
that sought to understand cultures from within, and thick description is an
important tool for that.
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