Clifford Geertz: The Interpretations of Cultures. Chapter I/ Thick Description: Toward An Interpretative Theory of Culture
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canicanitaClifford Geertz: The Interpretations of Cultures. Chapter I/ Thick Description: Toward An Interpretative Theory of Culture
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canicanitaClifford Geertz: The Interpretations of Cultures.
Chapter I/ Thick description:
Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture.
In this article the author propose three important issues: The definition of culture, the aim
of anthropology, the meaning of ethnography, the activity of the ethnographer, and the
characteristics of the anthropological description.
The author defines culture as a ‘semiotic concept’. Following Max Weber, Geertz say:
‘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 in an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (5). For the author the
‘meaning’ has ‘now come back into the heart of’ the anthropological discipline, before
meaning because was defined as an ‘elusive’ concept and ‘pseudo entity was leaved in
the area of philosophers and literary critics.
As a consequence, the aim of anthropology is ‘the enlargement of the universe of
human discourse’ (14). This aim is liked with the definition of culture as a semiotic
concept, specifically ‘as an inter-worked systems of construable sings’ (14). This idea let
us to understand what is and what is not culture, the authors say: ‘culture is not a power,
something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally
attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly -that is thickly-
described.(14)
For Geertz the anthropology is an ‘interpretative activity’ (9). Because of this we can
consider ‘anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third
order ones to boot (By definition, only a ‘native’ makes first order ones: it’s his culture)
They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made’, ‘something
fashioned’ … not that they are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if’ thought
experiments’(15). Then do ethnography ‘is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct
a reading of”) a manuscript-foreing, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious
emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs
of sound but transient examples of shaped behavior’(10).
Indeed, the activity of the ethnographer is to ‘inscribes’ and ‘writes it down’ (19) but
the author alerts us that: ‘what he inscribes is not a raw social discourse, to which,
because, save very marginally or very specially, we are not actors, we do not have direct
access, but only that small part of it which our informants can lead us into understanding’
(20). For Geertz the cultural analysis ‘is (or should be) guessing the meaning, assessing
the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not
discovering the continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape (20).
The anthropological description has four main characteristics
- (1) ‘is interpretative; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse;
- (2) and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the ‘said’ of such
discourse from its perishing occasions
- (3) and fix in the perdurable terms.’ Fox example: ‘The kula is gone or altered;
but, for better or worse, The Argonauts of Western Pacific remains’.
- (4) Is microscopic. The author say: ‘this is not to say that there are no large-scale
anthropological interpretations of whole societies…’ but also we can find ‘great
noises in a little room’ (21)
So, for the author the aim of the anthropology is ‘to draw large conclusions from small,
but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the
constructions of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specific’(28)
Geertz recognize that the cultural analysis is ‘intrinsically incomplete’. For him the
interpretative anthropology is ‘a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of
consensus than by a refinement of debate’ (29). He said that the danger of the cultural
analysis is ‘to lose touch with the hard surfaces of life’ political, economic, religion,
biological and physical necessities ‘on which the surface rest’. To go against that possible
danger the author says: ‘is to train the analysis of those realities and such necessities in
the first place’ (30). Because of that the author in this book The interpretation of cultures
wrote about different topics ‘it is thus that I have written about nationalism, about
violence, about identity, about human nature about legitimacy…” in all of this he used a
‘meaningful frame’.
