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Geertz ″Thick Description″
A thick overview of human social interactions in the social sciences and
associated areas explains physical actions and their contexts, which can be best
interpreted from an outside person. It tracks the subjective explanations and meanings
of other social scholars' behavior, making the data obtained more precious for the
experiments. In his book “The Interpretation of Cultures (1973),” Anthropologist Clifford
Geertz nevertheless established the prevalent way it is used today to characterize his
ethnography system. Since then, the term and technique have gained a common
currency in social sciences and the context of a literary criticism known as modern
historicism. The Thick Definition highlighted a more analytical approach, but the primary
approach used to be observation alone. In Geertz's opinion, the perception was divided
from interpretation. This paper provides a thick definition of Geertz by addressing
questions in great detail. One talks about something, who, why, how, when, and when
and finally with the original, intimate, and imaginative thinking.
Geertz illustrated it with a quick example to make more sense of the thick
description: "The gap from a twitch to a wink is huge. By taking your eyelids intentionally
while a public code appears in which a conspiracy is warning pulses. A spot of conduct,
a spot of tradition, and —voila! A gesture."
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Geertz gives a clear example of an action in this brief but striking passage, which
can only be explained by thorough explanation. All three children are physically active,
including the winker, the twitcher, and the parodist (Henrietta 166-168). However,
considering the social and cultural situation in which each kid finds himself, the same
actions can mean very different things. Geertz argued that the ethnographer has had to
dive into to find out how you want to explain actions and extension community
adequately (Henrietta 170-172). That is something we don't know.
After Ryle's work, the term was re-popularized by the American anthropologist
Clifford Geertz. Geertz's critics of anthropological approaches still exist and sought
fundamental truths, and Theory was known for his symbolic and interpretation work. He
rejected comprehensive human behavioral models and favored methodologies that
stress community regarding how people perceived and observed life (Henrietta 171). He
synthesized his approach in his 1973 book "Thick Description: Toward a Cultural
Interpretive Theory."
A more empirical approach was highlighted by the thick definition, while
observation alone was the key. In Geertz's opinion, observations were isolated from
interpretation methods (Henrietta 172). An analysis aims. An analysis aims to identify
the essential mechanisms and codes. This study starts with the distinction between all
persons present and an integrative synthesis responsible for generated behavior. Thick
explanations of the whole scenario are regarded as descriptors to promote the findings'
general interpretation (Henrietta 174). The results are not the product of a dense
definition but rather the study of the "thickly presented" materials, ideas, or individuals.
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Ethnographic evidence may depend on the study group's existence by
understanding how individuals remember events about each other and society's general
structure in a particular place or period. In their practice today, multiple disciplines
adopted a thick classification (Henrietta 181). Geertz is trying to find a "web of sense."
These theories were incompatible with the ethnography of the times, where
ethnography was seen as systematic analyzes of different nations, as races, and as
'other' categories. For Geertz, the community should be viewed as symbolic so that
findings may be linked to greater significance.
Conclusively, an extensive anthropological interpretation of the study of cultures
can lead to differences of understanding. Given that societies are diverse and evolving,
Geertz often underlines the importance of talking to and not thinking about ethnographic
study topics. This method is essential to deal with a culture's actual meaning. Geertz,
therefore, points out that interpretation works allow ethnographers to talk to the student.
Geertz has a respected style of straightforward, open prose compose for
groundbreaking field methods. For three decades, he was called "the most important
cultural anthropologist in the U.S." Thus, to understand culture as a structure of
interpretation, interpretive methodologies were essential. The influence of Geertz in
social sciences, as the so-called interpretive transform, is thus connected with "a major
cultural change." The interpretive turn was firmly based on cultural anthropology
methods in social sciences. In doing so, the interpretive lens was transitioned from
structural approaches to meaning.
The interpretive turn contributed to the awareness of truth, language, and culture
through meaning and textual material. All this was supposed to interpret the specific
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practices of the populations being investigated in stronger anthropology. In addition to
the Claude Lévi-Strauss hypotheses, Geertz's broad definition methodology has mainly
become recognized as a form of symbolic anthropology, enlisted as an unnecessarily
technocratic working antibiotic, mechanical way to interpret societies, organizations, and
historical environments. The descriptive ethnography techniques merged in a renewing
field analysis to achieve a constant objective: the research focus "with"' Geertz
influenced by other scholars. Despite its dissemination among disciplines, however,
some scholars were skeptical about their ability by accumulating vast volumes of data to
interpret their meaning somehow. They also wondered if these data could naturally
provide a whole community.
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Work cited
Henrietta L. Moore (ed.) _Todd Sanders (ed.) - Anthropology, in Theory, _ Issues in
Epistemology-Wiley-Blackwell (2014) (1)
