The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz

What does Geertz mean by thick description? The American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (born 1926) did ethnographic field work in Indonesia and Morocco, wrote influential essays on central theoretical issues in the social sciences, and advocated a distinctive “interpretive” approach to anthropology. Culture, according to Geertz, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” The function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable.

8 What did Clifford Geertz do at the University of Chicago?.

7 What did Clifford Geertz contribute to social theory?.4 Which approach was applied by Geertz that sees a culture as a set of texts to be read by the anthropologist?.3 Which approach was applied by Geertz?.In brief, a little thicker description is what we need in this life, and that is what, I am here to argue, ethnography, properly conceived as a thick description of particular social situations, does indeed provide. 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.

And it is not even, finally, meanings that I am after, but rather significances.

It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. “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 interpretive one in search of meaning. The task of the ethnographer is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to take, as it were, the native's point of view, to get inside his head and see the world the way he does, to delineate the ethos of his culture as that ethos is manifested in actual behavior.”

The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz