Geertz

Works

Two essay collections carry the theory; one late book turns the method on itself.

• The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) contains “Thick Description” and “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” which are the two most cited pieces in the discipline's interpretive turn.
• Local Knowledge (1983) extends the argument to law and art and states the case against general comparative theory.
• Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988) reads ethnographies as writing, asking how a text persuades a reader that its author was there — a question that lands on his own work as much as on anyone's.
• Islam Observed (1968) and Negara (1980) are the substantive studies the essays generalise from.

Central ideas

Four moves, all of them consequences of treating culture as public meaning.

• Culture as a semiotic system: meaning is public rather than in anyone's head, which is what makes it available for description at all.
• Thick description, taken from Ryle: the same contraction of an eyelid is a twitch, a wink, a parody of a wink, or a rehearsal of a parody, and nothing in the motion distinguishes them. A thin description reports the motion; a thick one reports the layered structure that makes it an act.
• Deep play: in the Balinese cockfight the wager is status rather than money, and the stakes rise past the point where participation makes sense by any calculation of gain. He reads the event as a story a people tell themselves about themselves — and is explicit that the reading is done over the shoulders of those to whom it belongs.
• Local knowledge: understanding is always from a particular somewhere, so comparison proceeds case by case rather than by subsuming cases under a law.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms that circulate detached from what made them arguments.

• Thick description: description that recovers the structure of significance making an act that act. Not detailed description, and not length.
• Deep play: play whose stakes are high enough that engaging is irrational by any utility calculation, which is why something other than utility must be at stake. Not intensity or absorption.
• The native point of view: in his usage what an ethnographer constructs a reading toward, never something an outsider comes to occupy.

Debates and disagreements

The interpretive turn's own problem is the centre of the argument about him.

• If a culture is a text, what makes one reading better than another? He answered that it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something, and critics have found the answer evasive about the criterion.
• Whether the anthropologist's authorial voice constructs the very point of view it claims to report — pressed hardest at “Deep Play,” where the story the Balinese tell themselves is written by a visitor.
• Whether an account built on meaning can hold power, history and material conditions, which the political-economy tradition in anthropology says it cannot.

Intellectual relationships

He converts a sociological inheritance into a literary method.

• Weber supplies the webs of significance and the case for interpretive social science; the debt is explicit.
• Talcott Parsons was his teacher, and the culture concept he built is a departure from Parsonian systems theory rather than an application of it.
• Gilbert Ryle supplies thick description, from an argument about the difference between a twitch and a wink.
• Ricoeur's model of meaningful action as a text is the philosophical parallel, developed independently and to similar effect.
• The Writing Culture generation extended his attention to ethnography as writing and then turned it on him.
• Talal Asad is the sharpest critic, and the objection is about power rather than about style.

How it changes this reading

Geertz is named in the lineage of the Cultural-anthropological lens.

• He supplies the lens's basic operation: the same act, physically described, can be a different act depending on the structure of significance it sits inside, so describing what someone did requires describing the frame that makes it what it is.
• The part that matters most for this work is the second half of his position — an interpretation is a reading made over the shoulder rather than possession of an inside. A description that claims to have reached the inside has stopped being a reading and become a verdict, which is the failure this work's treatment of profiles is built to avoid.
• It is not evidence about anyone's culture, conduct, or self-understanding.

Useful comparisons

The lens names four figures working at different grains.

• Geertz reads culture as a text and describes the structures of significance that make acts legible.
• Victor Turner watches culture as a process — ritual, liminality, communitas — and describes the phases of a transition.
• Marcel Mauss works structurally on the gift: the obligations to give, receive and reciprocate as a total social fact.
• Edward T. Hall works operationally on proxemics and on high- and low-context communication, at a grain close to measurement.

Where the ideas meet

All four deny that any behaviour is simply natural.

• None treats an outsider's common sense as a neutral baseline for describing conduct.
• All four hold that meaning is public and patterned rather than private and spontaneous.
• Each treats the frame around an act as part of what the act is.

Where they part

This lineage mixes methods that answer to different standards.

• Geertz reads a text; Turner watches a process. A text has a reading and a process has a phase you are in — calling a transition thickly described, or a reading liminal, borrows a word without its apparatus.
• Mauss's total social fact is a structural claim that can be checked against practice; Geertz's is an interpretive claim answerable to the persuasiveness of the reading, which is precisely the objection his critics press.
• Hall's proxemics is near-measurable and Geertz's method is explicitly not. Citing them together for the proposition that culture shapes behaviour flattens a real methodological difference between them.

Limits

• An interpretive account of culture establishes nothing about any person's culture or conduct.
• Thick description is achieved in sustained fieldwork; a written record supplies neither the fieldwork nor the check on it.

Criticisms

The objections are serious and mostly unanswered.

• Asad's critique of the religion-as-a-cultural-system essay is the strongest: defining religion by symbols that establish moods and motivations abstracts it from power and from the institutional history that enforced which meanings could be held.
• Crapanzano argued that the ethnographic voice in “Deep Play” constructs a native point of view no native holds, so the story a people tell themselves is in fact the ethnographer's.
• The political-economy tradition holds that a meaning-centred account cannot carry colonial history, class, or material conditions.
• The method has no clear criterion for a wrong reading, which is the recurring structural complaint against interpretive social science.
• The prose is elegant enough to have been charged with making the argument harder to check rather than easier.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Using thick description to mean detailed or lengthy description, which drops the claim about layered significance that the term exists to make.
• Presenting an interpretation as the native point of view rather than as a reading made over the shoulder — Crapanzano's objection in practice.
• Citing the definition of religion as a cultural system without the objection that it abstracts meaning from power.
• Reading deep play as intense engagement rather than as play whose stakes make participation irrational by utility, which is the whole point of the term.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's culture, meanings, or conduct.
• It cannot convert an interpretation into a fact about the people interpreted.