Thick Discription
If you want to understand
what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or
its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should
look at what the practitioners of it do.
Believing,
with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in
webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
In social anthropology,
what the practioners do is ethnography. And it is
in understanding (what ethnography is, or) more
exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping
what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge.
This, it must immediately
be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point
of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport,
selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields,
keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received
procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate
venture in,
to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick
description."
As interworked systems of construable symbols, culture is a context within which these symbols can be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described.
Understanding a people's
culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. It
renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities[1], it dissolves their
opacity.
It is this maneuver,
usually too casually referred to as "seeing things from the actor's point
of view," too bookishly as "the verstehen approach," or too
technically as "emic analysis,"
Descriptions of a certain culture must be cast in terms of the
constructions we imagine them to place upon what they live through,
the formulae they use to define what happens to them[2]. What it does not mean is
that such descriptions of cultures are themselves part of the reality they are
ostensibly describing; they are anthropological-that is, part of a developing system of scientific analysis. They must be cast in terms of the interpretations
to which persons of a particular denomination subject their experience, because
that is what they profess to be descriptions of. (Summary: Descriptions of a cultural reality are not reality
however, they are a part of a developing system of scientific analysis. Descriptions
are anthropological-that is, part of a developing system of scientific analysis)
Normally, it is not
necessary to point out quite so laboriously that the object
of study is one thing and the study of it another. But, as, in the study of culture, analysis penetrates into the
very body of the object-that is, we begin with our own interpretations of what
our informants are up to, or think they are up to, and then systematize
those-the line between (Moroccan) culture as a natural fact and (Moroccan)
culture as a theoretical entity tends to get blurred. All the more so,
as the latter is presented in the form of an actor's-eye description (from the
point of view of the native) of (Moroccan) conceptions of everything from
violence, honor, divinity, and justice, to tribe, property, patronage, and chiefship.
Culture
exists in the trading post, the hill fort, anthropology exists in the book, the
article,
the lecture, the museum display, or, sometimes nowadays, the film. To become
aware of it is to realize that the line between
mode of representation and substantive content is as undrawable in
cultural analysis as it is in painting; and that fact in turn seems to threaten the objective status of anthropological
knowledge by suggesting that its source is not social reality but scholarly
artifice.
Culture is purely a symbolic system in its own terms by isolating its elements[3] i.e. traditions[4], specifying the internal relationships among those elements, and then characterizing the whole system in some general way-according to the core symbols around which it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological principles upon which it is based.
The anthropologist
usually makes broad and abstract analyses based on very detailed studies of
small, specific things. He deals with the same big issues—like power, change,
faith, and love—that other scholars do, but in less obvious settings. These big
concepts become more relatable in these everyday contexts, which is beneficial
because there are already plenty of deep, complex ideas in the world. (summary
frm pg 21)
Anthropologists often
collect detailed stories and observations about specific cultures. However,
turning these small-scale studies into broader understandings of entire
nations, eras, continents, or civilizations is a challenging task. Many
anthropologists have struggled to develop methods that can reliably connect
local details to larger-scale patterns. In fact, their own models for doing
this may have actually hindered their efforts. This has been a major problem
for anthropology, and it's one that critics from other fields have been quick
to point out.
The idea that small towns
and villages can represent the entire essence of a nation, civilization, or
religion is simply wrong. These places have their own unique way of life, but
they don't represent the whole picture. If small-scale studies were only valuable
because they could capture the entire world in a small space, they wouldn't be
very useful.
One can add a dimension-one much needed in the present climate of
size-up-and solve social science; but that is all. There is a certain value, if
you are going to run on about the exploitation of the masses in having seen a
Javanese sharecropper turning earth in a tropical downpour or a Moroccan tailor
embroidering kaftans by the light of a twenty-watt bulb. But the notion that
this gives you the thing entire (and elevates you to some moral vantage ground
from which you can look down upon the ethically less privileged) is an idea
which only someone too long in the bush could possibly entertain.
Summary: This can add something new and valuable to
social science, which is often focused on quick solutions and generalizations. Seeing
people in different cultures working in difficult conditions can be valuable.
However, it's important to remember that this doesn't give you a complete
understanding of their lives or their experiences. It also doesn't give you the
right to judge them or feel superior to them.
The very idea that the
microenvironments in which ethnographic studies are conducted are labeled as
‘natural laboratories’ is inherently misleading and semiotically
oxymoronic. This is because in
laboratory environment scientists control variables.
Some famous studies
claimed to find unusual things in different cultures, like reversed gender
roles or a lack of aggression. However, these studies are not scientifically
proven facts. They are interpretations, like any other interpretation, and they
don't have any special authority. Ethnographic findings are just observations
from different cultures. They are not more or less important than other kinds
of information, and they can teach us a lot about social theory.
protracted descriptions of distant sheep raids or any
other ways in which people of the study area operate find their relevance as
they provide us with real world examples to study. these ethnographic findings
become crucial in their specificity and situatedness/circumstantiality. Such
qualitative descriptions produced over long term in a specific highly
participative environment helps us understand big social concepts like
legitimacy, modernization, integration, conflict, charisma, structure, and
meaning in a more realistic and creative way.
The microscopic (ever changing, circumstantial),
nature of an ethnographic study presents us with real and critical
methodological problems that are not to be considered as world in a teacup. It
is to be resolved by realizing that social actions are comments on more than
themselves; that where an interpretation comes from does not determine where it
can be impelled to go. Small facts speak to large issues, winks to
epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they are made to.
The besetting[5] sin of interpretive
approaches to anything-literature, dreams, symptoms, culture-is that they tend
to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to
escape systematic modes of assessment. You either grasp its interpretation or
you don’t.
Imprisoned in the
immediacy of its own detail, it is presented as self-validating, or, worse, as
validated by the supposedly developed sensitivities of the person who presents
it; any attempt to cast what it says in terms other
than its own is regarded as a travesty-as, the anthropologist's severest
term of moral abuse, ethnocentric.
Summary: Ethnographers
sometimes think their observations are enough on their own. They may think that
anyone who disagrees is being ethnocentric, or judging other cultures from
their own point of view.
There is no reason why
the conceptual structure of a cultural interpretation should be any less
formulable.
At the same time, it must
be admitted that there are a number of characteristics of cultural
interpretation which make the theoretical development of it more than usually
difficult.
1.
the need for theory to stay rather closer
to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give
themselves over to imaginative abstraction. (Only short flights of
ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; longer ones tend to drift
off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry.)
2.
The whole point of a semiotic[6] approach to culture is to
aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so
that we can, in some extended sense of the term, converse with them. (The
tension between the pull of this need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of
symbolic action and the requirements of technical advance in the theory of
culture, between the need to grasp and the need to analyze, is, as a result,
both necessarily great and essentially irremovable. Indeed,
the further theoretical development goes, the deeper the tension gets.)
“Culture is most effectively treated, the argument
goes, purely as a symbolic system (the catch phrase is, "in its own
terms"), by isolating its elements, specifying the internal relationships
among those elements, and then characterizing the whole system in some general
way-according to the core symbols around which it is organized, the underlying
structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological principles
upon which it is based.”
“Cultural theory is not its own master. As
it is unseverable from the immediacies thick description presents, its freedom
to shape itself in terms of its internal logic is rather limited. What
generality it contrives[7]
to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its
abstractions.”
Summary: Cultural theory can't be separate from the specific details that ethnographers observe. It has to be based on these details and can't be completely abstract. The value of cultural theory comes from how carefully it examines these details, not from how broad its ideas are
3.
Our knowledge of
culture grows in spurts. Rather than illustration of the constructions
of cumulative findings, cultural analysis breaks up into a series of
disconnected yet coherent sequence of stories. Studies do build on other
studies, not in the sense that they take up where the others leave off, but in
the sense that, better informed and better conceptualized, they plunge more
deeply into the same things.
4.
A "General Theory of Cultural
Interpretation." appears to be of little profit, because the essential
task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make
thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize
within them.
5.
In the study of culture the signifiers[8] (any palpable act) are not
symptoms, but symbolic acts, and the aim is not therapy but the analysis of
social discourse[9].
Cultural theory doesn't
predict the future at least in a strict sense. This limitation is misunderstood
as it is taken to mean that the cultural interpretation is post facto[10]. but it helps us
understand the past and present. It needs to be able to explain new things that
happen in the future.
When we study cultures,
we start with a lot of questions and confusion. We use ideas from other studies
to help us understand what we're seeing. If these ideas are helpful, we keep
using them and developing them. If they're not helpful, we stop using them.
"In cultural
studies, we often talk about 'description' and 'explanation.' 'Description' is about understanding what people are doing and
why they're doing it. 'Explanation' is about
understanding what these actions mean for the whole society. It's
important to understand both how people think and act, and why they do things
the way they do. We also need to develop a way of explaining these things that
focuses on culture and how it affects people's behavior.
The aim is to draw large
conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad
assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by
engaging them exactly with complex specifics.
It is not only
interpretation that goes all the way down to the most immediate observational
level: the theory upon which such interpretation conceptually depends does so
also.
Cultural analysis is
intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the
less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are
its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand
is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are
not quite getting it right.
There are a number of
ways to escape this-turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it
into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it,
turning it into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact
is that to commit oneself to a semiotic concept of culture and an interpretive
approach to the study of it is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic
assertion as, to borrow W. B. Gallie's by now famous phrase, "essentially
contestable."
Interpretive
anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of
consensus than by a refinement of debate.
Monologues are of little
value here, because there are no conclusions to be reported; there is merely a
discussion to be sustained.
[1] quotidian,
mundain everyday ness
[2] (simplified
version) To describe a culture, we need to consider how we think they interpret
their own experiences and the ways they explain what happens to them. (my understanding of their interpretation of their culture)
[3] Culture
can be broken down into several key elements that help define and distinguish
different societies. Here are some of the main elements of culture: Norms (rules
and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members. Norms
can include customs, traditions, and etiquette), Language,
Symbols (objects, gestures, sounds, or images
that have a culturally embedded meaning), Values and
Beliefs (shared principles), Rituals and
Ceremonies, Art and Literature, Social Organization (family, kinship,
and social hierarchies), Economic Systems (how
resources are distributed), Government and Politics (organization
of power and authority), Food and Cuisine These
elements interact with each other to create the rich tapestry of human culture.
[4]
Talal Asad defines tradition as a set of prescriptive discourses, taught and
transmitted, that draw their legitimacy, power and meaning from history. They
thereby found social cohesion through shared practices articulating the past,
present and future of the group
[5] The
term “besetting” generally refers to something that troubles or threatens
persistently
[6] Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, and how they are used to create meaning. When applied to culture, a semiotic approach views culture as a vast system of signs and symbols that people use to communicate and understand the world around them.
The term semiotics is derived
from the Greek words semeio (interpreter of sign) and tikos (pertaining to).
The main proponents of this theory were Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a
Swiss linguist who studied the meaning of signs within a particular group or
society, and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), an American philosopher and
logician who studied how signs shape our individual understanding of physical
reality.
Key concepts in a semiotic approach to culture
include:
a. Signs:
Anything that stands for something else, including words, images, objects, or
actions.
b. Signifiers:
The physical form of a sign (e.g., the word "cat").
c.
Signified: The concept or meaning associated
with the signifier (e.g., the actual animal "cat").
d. Codes:
Systems of rules that govern the interpretation of signs within a culture.
Cultural Semiotics explores how these signs and
symbols are used to create and maintain cultural identity, values, and beliefs.
It examines how cultural meanings are produced, shared, and interpreted within
specific contexts.
[7] to
create or bring about something by deliberate use of skill and artifice.
[8]
Our imaginations
[9]
Social discourse refers to the communication and exchange of ideas within a
society. It encompasses a wide range of interactions, including conversations,
debates, written texts, and media messages. Social discourse shapes our
understanding of the world, our beliefs, and our relationships with others.
Key aspects of social discourse include: a) Language
and communication (b)Distribution of power and authority within a society, and
how this influences discourse. (c)The shared beliefs and values that shape
social discourse. (d) Specific circumstances in which discourse takes place,
including cultural, historical factors.
Social discourse plays a crucial role in shaping
society in several ways: (a) Creating shared meanings, Challenging power
structures, Reproducing social inequalities. (b) By studying social discourse,
we can gain a better understanding of how society works and how we can shape it
for the better.
[10] This
term, derived from Latin, means “after the fact.” In legal terms, it is often
used in the context of ex post facto laws, which are laws that change the legal
consequences of actions that were committed before the enactment of the law.
The U.S. Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws in criminal cases, meaning
that a person cannot be punished under a law that was passed after their
actions were committed
[11] Subjectivism
is a philosophical doctrine that emphasizes the role of individual perception
and experience in the formation of knowledge and truth.
[12] the
practice or adherence to the principles of a mystical and esoteric system (in Judaism)
Disclaimer: This article is in the making.
Comments
Post a Comment