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The Labyrinth of Culture: How Clifford Geertz Reshaped Anthropology through Thick Description?
In social sciences and related fields, thick description is a way of describing human social actions that not only focuses on physical actions, but also on the context of these actions and the interpretations of the participants, allowing external observers to better understand Understand these behaviors well. In his 1973 book The Interpretation of Culture, Clifford Geertz explored the concept of "thick description" in depth and reshaped anthropological research methods.
Thick descriptions go beyond observing behavior and require understanding the motivations for individual actions and the meaning of those actions in the eyes of other observers in the community.
Thick descriptions were originally proposed by the 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In his work, Ryle distinguished between "thin description", which contains only superficial observations, and "thick description," which must include contextual information about the behavior, which requires a deep understanding of the individual's motivations and the perceptions of others in the social environment. This method arose precisely because the ethnographic school of the time began to emphasize detailed attention to everyday events.
Many early anthropologists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski, also emphasized the importance of local perspectives. Malinowski mentioned in "Agnot in the Western Pacific" in 1922 that anthropologists should try to understand the relationship between the appearance of ethnographic research subjects and their world.
Gertz questioned the universal truths and theories of anthropology. He advocated emphasizing people's life experience from a cultural perspective.
Geertz reflects on and reintroduces the concept of thick description, emphasizing that this approach requires analysis of what is observed, not just recording. By identifying the participants, Geertz hopes to assemble a holistic view that explains behavior. This kind of analysis process allows thick descriptions to fully reveal all the details of a situation, which helps the researcher gain an overall understanding of the findings.
How participants recognize each other's behavior in a specific time and space has become the core of anthropological research.
Gertz believes that culture is a system of symbols, and the meaning of observed behavior must be connected with deeper cultural meanings. Unlike Edward Burnett Tylor's concept of culture, Geertz believed that culture could not always be reduced to a "complex whole" but was a more dynamic and changing phenomenon. Therefore, ethnographic observation must rely on the cultural background of the research subjects to understand how participants know and interact with each other within the social structure.
Today, every discipline practices the idea of thick description in its research. Geertz's emphasis on the need to explore "webs of meaning" contrasted with definitions of ethnography in anthropology textbooks of the time, which relied primarily on the systematic observation of different ethnic groups.
Geertz contributed to the explanatory turn in the social sciences, making the process of understanding culture more complex.
With the symbolic emphasis on culture, ethnographic research has gradually transformed into a more subjective exploration. Geertz's thickly descriptive approach was seen as a means to combat an overly technical and mechanistic understanding of culture, emphasizing the need for researchers to immerse themselves in the lives of participants in order to report these social behaviors more authentically. However, this method also faces challenges, with some scholars questioning its ability to truly explain meaning, particularly in providing a comprehensive portrait of a society given the large amounts of data.
Geertz's contributions were not limited to methodology. He changed anthropology's traditional view of culture and promoted a research orientation that focused more on subjective interpretation and textual analysis. This also gives many future researchers a new framework for cultural analysis.
Under the influence of Geertz, the development trend of anthropology began to pay attention to the deep structure behind cultural meaning, allowing people to rethink the diversity and complexity of cultural behavior. Geertz moved anthropology out of a simple observational framework and into a cultural labyrinth full of interpretive possibilities. How will this change affect our understanding of culture today?
