Clifford Geertz

Transcription

1 Clifford Geertz Born San Francisco 1950 BA Antioch College Ohio studying English and Philosophy 1950 Meets Margaret Mead and decides enrolls in anthropology at Harvard 1956 PhD. on religion and social change in Java

2 Thick Description Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take cultures 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. (Geertz 1973:5)

3 CLIFFORD GEERTZ S IDEALIST INTERPRETATION Geertz: The Concept of Culture I Espouse is a Semiotic One 3

4 Se mi ot ics The study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior The analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing.

5 GEERTZ INTERPRETIVE ANTHROPOLOGY PREMISE: man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun and our name for those webs is culture CONCLUSION: the analysis of it therefore is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning

6 Culture does not exist in some superorganic realm subject to forces and objectives of its own Culture cannot be reified. Culture is neither brute behaviour nor a mental construct. What Culture is Not

7 What Culture is Culture consists of socially established structures of meaning, With which people communicate; It is inseparable from symbolic social discourse Culture is Public because meaning is, and systems of meanings are what produce culture They are the collective property of a particular people

8 WHAT CULTURE IS Culture is Symbolic Culture is Communication Meaning is Contextual Culture is Complex

9 Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; Social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations. Culture and social structure are different abstractions from the same phenomena.

10 WHAT CULTURE IS The method of the interpretive anthropologist (who accepts a semiotic view of culture) is similar to the method of literary critique analyzing a text

11 THICK DESCRIPTION A thick description of a human behavior Explains not just the behavior, But its context as well, So that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider.

12 THICK DESCRIPTION Origins of Thick Description Many researchers cite anthropologist Clifford Geertz s Geertz attributes the term to Gilbert Ryle, a British philosopher at the University of Oxford.

13 THICK DESCRIPTION The first presentation of the actual term, thick description, appears to come from two of Ryle s lectures published in the mid 1960s titled Thinking and Reflecting and The Thinking of Thoughts For Ryle (1971) thick description involved ascribing intentionality to one s behavior. He used the following example:

14 THICK DESCRIPTION A single golfer, with six golf balls in front of him, hitting each of them, one after another, towards one and the same green. He then goes and collects the balls, comes back to where he was before, and does it again. What is he doing?

15 THIN VS THICK DESCRIPTION The golfer is repeatedly hitting a little round white object with a club like device toward a green.

16 THIN VS THICK DESCRIPTION The thick" description interprets the behavior within the context of: The golf course The game of golf And ascribes thinking and intentionality to the observed behavior.

17 THIN VS THICK DESCRIPTION In this case, the golfer is practicing approach shots on the green in anticipation of a future real golf match (which usually includes two or four players) with the hope that the practicing of approach shots at the present time will improve his approach shot skill in a real match at some time in the future.

18 THICK DESCRIPTION & ETHNOGRAPHY The term thick description became part of the qualitative researcher s vocabulary when Geertz borrowed Ryle s (1971) philosophical term to describe the work of ethnography.

19 THICK DESCRIPTION & ETHNOGRAPHY From one point of view doing ethnography is: Establishing rapport Selecting informants Transcribing texts Taking genealogies, Keeping a diary, and so on

20 THICK DESCRIPTION & ETHNOGRAPHY It is not techniques and procedures that define ethnography. It is the intellectual effort It is: thick description

21 ETHNOGRAPHY Geertz (1973) believed that the data of anthropological writing was: really our own constructions of other people s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to

22 ETHNOGRAPHY Therefore, for a reader of anthropological work to gauge for herself or himself the credibility of the author s interpretations, the context under which these interpretations were made must be richly and thickly described.

23 THICK DESCRIPTION A thick description does more than record what a person is doing. It goes beyond mere fact and surface appearances. It presents detail, context, emotion, and the webs of social relationships that join persons to one another.

24 THICK DESCRIPTION Thick description evokes emotionality & self-feelings. It inserts history into experience. It establishes the significance of an experience, or the sequence of events, for the person or persons in question. In thick description, the voices, feelings, actions, and meanings of interacting individuals are heard. (Denzin, 1989, p. 83)

25 THICK DESCRIPTION Denzin s (1989) elaboration of thick description introduced Geertz s anthropological term and Ryle s philosophical concept to the disciplines of sociology, communications, and humanities. Denzin extended the utility of thick description as an anthropological construct used in ethnography, and particularly in participant observation, to the wider audience of qualitative researchers (e.g., in sociology, psychology, education)