Jan 30, 2020
Geertz cracks me the fuck up. Anthropologists raise your hands if u agree 😭
Loading...
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from China
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Tunisia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Azerbaijan
seen from Türkiye
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from South Korea
seen from Netherlands
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from India
Geertz cracks me the fuck up. Anthropologists raise your hands if u agree 😭
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Thick Description
Don't you sometimes marvel how patently poorly worded, although true, ideas get accepted and circulate in these unfortunate forms? The example is Geertz's "thick description." Thick? Description? Thick description? It's not even clear unless you read the source. Not to mention, not too mellisonant. Compare to Peter Elbow: "Facts are always dirty with some theory." (Writing Without Teachers, 1998, 117). Similar idea: the very naming of the thing is already an interpretation of it. "Dirty facts," does it not sound good? How could anthropology be seduced and charmed by such stylistic clumsiness, such monster as "thick description"? Now we have "thin description" to pair the thick; it does at least sound better, but it still has this monster of a thing for the source. My guess (or theory) is that no science in reality aspires to be clear. It wants to obfuscate itself to a degree that allows it to preserve the sense of itself as a possessor and a keeper of the arcane knowledge as opposed to the knowledge profane. Hence as if intentionally-awkward concepts that are needlessly obscure. Of course, we do not know for certain why and how some things get picked up and spread like fire while too many other, sometimes "better," things fall into oblivion. My guess is therefore as good as any other. I do not, naturally, equate "thick description" and "dirty facts." The first is a method of ethnographic writing, the second is merely a statement of the embeddedness of things in our perception. I am talking about what seems to me a poor word choice versus a precise word choice. But the more precise, elegant, or simple is not more effective, in this particular and many other cases. Poet Boris Pasternak called the method to which he arrived by the time that he perceived as late in life, "unheard-of simplicity." Есть в опыте больших поэтов Черты естественности той, Что невозможно, их изведав, Не кончить полной немотой. В родстве со всем, что есть, уверясь И знаясь с будущим в быту, Нельзя не впасть к концу, как в ересь, В неслыханную простоту. —Boris Pasternak
What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection—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. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households … writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.
Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, p. 316. AKA the Master of Discourse™
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.
Clifford Geertz
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
I noticed that you tagged your one post with "papa geertz". I've had professors who also referred to anthropologists like "Papa Geertz" or "Papa Franz". Is this an anthropology academia thing? Like if you study long enough eventually all the famous anthropologists become your parental figures or???
LMAO I just made up papa Geertz but typically fatherly terms are given to Franz like Daddy Boas. And yes all early century anthropologists become your adoptive parents like my bisexual moms Mead and Benedict, Daddy Boas, and Papa Geertz. Uncle Foucault. Weird neighbors Whorf and Sapir. Comrade Marx.
you know... i was just trying to get some homework done... just wanted to read my geertz...