Thick Description¶
Geertz, C. (1973). Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Thick Description
- Ethnography — the canonical site (Ryle's distinction, Geertz's elaboration): an event such as a ritual contest is unreadable without the stakes, rivalries, and conventions that make it the act it is.
This sourceAdapts Ryle's term and the wink/tic example to argue that ethnography must record the layers of context that make an act's meaning recoverable.
- Ethnography — the canonical site (Ryle's distinction, Geertz's elaboration): an event such as a ritual contest is unreadable without the stakes, rivalries, and conventions that make it the act it is.
Domain-specific¶
- Fieldnotes
- Geertz's insistence on "thick description" — layered, contextually saturated accounts of behaviour that preserve member meaning and the interpretive moves the ethnographer made
This sourceGeertz's originating account of thick versus thin description, built on Ryle's twitch-and-wink example, with ethnographic data framed as the ethnographer's constructions of other people's constructions.
SupportedVerified against the source
- Geertz's insistence on "thick description" — layered, contextually saturated accounts of behaviour that preserve member meaning and the interpretive moves the ethnographer made
- Thin Description
- Thin description, in Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology, is an account that records the surface behaviour of an act but omits the contextual layers — participant meaning, social code, the analyst's interpretive moves — that a reader would need to recognise whether the act is the same kind of thing in a new setting or merely looks similar from the outside.
This sourceGeertz's opening contrast between thin description - the bare behavioural record - and thick description, which reads an act through the code that makes it a wink rather than a twitch. Geertz's opening illustration in 'Thick Description': Ryle's two boys contracting their eyelids, one twitching and one giving a conspiratorial signal, as the defining case of thin versus thick description, with the contrast and the terms credited to Ryle. Geertz's account of thick description as the layered record of the stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures through which cultural acts are produced, perceived and interpreted, against thin description that records only the surface. The wink-versus-twitch example Geertz opens 'Thick Description' with, taking the notion of thick description from Gilbert Ryle.
Supported in partVerified against the source
- Thin description, in Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology, is an account that records the surface behaviour of an act but omits the contextual layers — participant meaning, social code, the analyst's interpretive moves — that a reader would need to recognise whether the act is the same kind of thing in a new setting or merely looks similar from the outside.
Verification¶
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