#thick description

Romance Is Like That by Liian Varus

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14687941221096600

(Survivor's Epitaph w/ Maroon Moon)

(Geertz, C.  (1973).  The Interpretation of Cultures.  New York: Basic Books.)

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

The Interpretation of Cultures

When elaborated in detail, with thick texture and some lived imaginative time, a speculative fiction can bring to life in the mind one possibility or other, which can then be contemplated as a felt experience, and one’s present actions then adjusted accordingly, influenced by experiences that are fictional but nevertheless real.