Thick+Description+(Lyles)


 * Thick Description** - Concept attributed to Clifford Geertz is a methodological approach that seeks to avoid previous attempts at understanding (in Geertz’s case, of ‘culture’ broadly defined) that focus on the attempt to attribute causality to events witnessed by either the researcher or to the people the researcher observes. In effect, it attempts to draw multiple articulations of the same phenomena to give a picture of the many interconnected variables, social contexts and knowledges that go into the production of any social simulation. As Geertz explains:

“//The concept of culture I espouse, and whole utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself as spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefor not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explications.”// (1973, 5)

Instead of focusing on operationalism and development of increasingly complex systems for measuring various aspects of culture for comparison against an imagined baseline or against other cultures, Thick Description is central to anthropology and ethnography because of the way in which is seeks to give a method by which the researcher seeks to explain how the necessary action of multiple articulation and explanation of context are necessary to make sense of any event. To better describe the situation, he gives an example fo r the the complexity of any given social action:

“//Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the// //other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera, "phenomenalisti////c" observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken fo////r the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way:// //(I) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of////the company.”// (197, pg. 6).

The necessity for thick description as a methodological orientation is made particularly clear in this example where the phenomena- the action that carries meaning, is in many ways indecipherable from a common twitch without the context, coding and understanding of the deliberate nature by which the message is transferred. And from there, a nearly endless series of referential actions are possible. There are twitches, winks, fake winks, parodies of winks, rehearsals of winks and and endless series of references that go on beyond ability to account for. This leads to the sort of reference iterability that can be jokingly referred to as being ‘turtles all the way down’ (which itself is a reference to a reference).

For Science and Technology Studies, Thick Description is used to reference not the totality of culture of all people, but to draw our attention towards the way in which actions make sense within the ‘tangled web’ that is science practice. A lab technician cathing a specialized peice of paper may be an accident, or it may be an intentionaldemonstration of the properties of that paper once it combusts. It may in fact be the reproduction of that effect that is commonly understood or it might be the testing and verification of a proposed property. The meaning of the event is then a complicated interplay of intentionality, agency, practices and interpretation of the observer.

//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.) (1976, pg. 15)//

The interpretation of this ethnography then focuses on what might be considered minute or meaningless bits of action, context and histories because of the importance of that thing for making sense of the ways in which meaning is constructed. Culture is not merely a learned thing or a frame that people see the world through:

//Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior-or, more precisely, social action-that cultural forms find articulation. They find it as well, of course, in various sorts of artifacts, and various states of consciousness; but these draw their meaning from the role they play (Wittgenstein would say their "use") in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships they bear to one another.// (1976, pg. 17)

As a result, even the best ethnography is incomplete due to the fact that it can only capture a few aspects of a given situation given at hand. Thick description, for it’s use, is also holds the person telling the story or writing the research report as it were responsible for part of that interpretation that is being understood and presented.


 * References**

Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in //The Interpretation of Cultures// (Basic Books, 1973)