Geertz: Thick Description: Ch 1

Geertz, Clifford. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
(this is from a pdf printed out via download from ScribD, so my pages are located that way.)

2 his concept of culture is essentially semiotic

3 (section II) "...if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or it findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do."

4-5 thin description: what is physically occurring; thick description: what the ethnographer thinks what is occurring means

7 "Analysis, then, is sorting out the structure of signification...and determining their social ground and import."
8 "What the ethnographer is in fact faced with...is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render."

10 "Culture is public because meaning is."

11 people find it hard to understand the significance of what other groups do or intend because of a "lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs."

Section IV
12 "As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), 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."

13 the object of study is one thing and the study of it is another. REREAD.

14 "In short, 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"--the original meaning of fiction--not that they are false, unfactual, ore merely "as if" thought experiments."

16 You can't take an interpretation out of the context of what you are interpreting without rendering it vacant.

17 "The ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.

18 "...what we inscribe (or try to) is not raw social discourse...but only that small part of it which our informants can lead us into understanding."

19 "To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autogenous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a priori (messed up word spelling--I think it is weltanschauung) is to pretend a science that does not exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found. Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape."

VI




sweet phrasing:
17 "gone into dissidence themselves"


Other texts mentioned:
Langer, Susanne. Philosophy in a New Key
Ricoeur, Paul.
Ryle, Gilbert. Developed term Thick Description?