Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” questions for discussion, sections I and II

1. In his opening paragraph Geertz refers to “positive science” (p. 3). To what does “positive science” refer? Where can it be found? What is the opposite, or “other,” of “positive science”?

2. What does Geertz mean when he refers to “cutting . . . the culture concept down to size” (p. 4). Why would he want to do that?

3. Why does Geertz mention E. B. Tylor (p. 4)? Who was he? What did Tylor mean when he defined culture as the “most complex whole”?

4. In one sentence can you explain the question Geertz raises in his description of Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man (pp. 4-5)?

5. Do any of Kluckhohn’s definitions of culture seem particularly engaging to you? If so, which ones?

The most famous lines in Geertz’s essay come near the end of the short first section (p. 5):

The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. 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.

6. What does “semiotic” mean? What could Geertz have in mind when he says that culture is “semiotic”? Can you explain how a “semiotic” concept of culture would differ from each of the understandings of culture set forth in Kluckhohn’s book?

7. Who was Max Weber? Why is he remembered?

8. What do you think Geertz means by “webs of significance”?

9. Can you think of examples from your own experience that demonstrate that culture consists of “webs of significance”?

10. If Geertz is right, what is the significance of the idea that we are “suspended” in these webs? What is the significance that they are “of [our] own making”?

11. Most of the participants in this seminar have read and discussed in earlier seminars the work of Edward Said and Michel Foucault. How does Geertz’s understanding here converge with or diverge from understandings of culture in the work of those writers? List at least three ways these understandings are alike or different.

12. What do you think Geertz means in distinguishing between “an experimental science in search of law” and “an interpretive [science] in search of meaning”? Why is this an important distinction? How would the study of culture proceed if it is an “experimental science”? What could the study of culture as an “interpretive science” mean? Interpretation of what?

13. Geertz is an anthropologist, and not many would disagree with him that what anthropologists do, or at least what some kinds of anthropologists, is ethnography. In your own words what are “anthropology” and “ethnography”? What are the words for these concepts in Japanese? How would you describe in English the concepts to which the Japanese words refer?

14. Since we are neither anthropologists nor ethnologists, or not mainly anthropologists or ethnologists, why would we be reading about the nature of anthropology and ethnology in a graduation seminar in the Faculty of Policy Studies? Of what possible use could it be?

15. What is the point of Geertz’s long example, adapted from the work of Gilbert Ryle, of “twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, [and] rehearsals of parodies” (pp. 6-7)?

16. How might these twitches, winks, and so on be analyzed if we understand the study of culture as an “experimental science”? How does our analysis change if we believe that the study of culture is “interpretive”?

17. Read the passage from Geertz’s field journal (pp. 7-9) carefully. Read it again. Can you describe in three or four sentences what happens? What does Geertz mean at the end of the passage when he notes “how extraordinarily ‘thick’” even such an “elemental” ethnographic description must be? What are the implications of the “thickness” of this description for our non-anthropological studies in a Faculty such as FPS?

18. What does Geertz mean when he says that “what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to”? What does this remind you of that you have read before?

19. What is the nature of what we learn when Geertz finally locates the story recounted in his field notes, when he tells us (p. 9) that the “little drama took place in the highlands of central Morocco in 1912—and was recounted there in 1968”? What does this remind you of that you have read before?

20. What does Geertz mean when he writes (p. 9) of a “view of anthropological research as rather more of an observational and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is,” that “[r]ight down at the factual base” we are

already explicating: and worse, explicating explications. Winks upon winks upon winks[?]

If he is right, what are the implications for anthropology? for the social sciences in general? for our own studies?

21. What does Geertz mean by the phrase “frames of interpretation” (p. 9)? What do these frames have to do with culture?

22. What does Geertz mean when he writes (pp. 9-10) that “ethnography is thick description”? Why should we care, when what we are doing in this course is not primarily ethnography?

23. Finally, in what way is coming to understand a culture like

trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound [i.e., in the written code of a language] but in transient examples of shaped behavior (p. 10)?

If Geertz is right, what are the implications for our ways of coming to understand a particular culture, our own or some other? What about our ways of trying to describe that culture?