The act of winking involves twitching one’s eye muscles so that the lids of the eye blink.Ī “twitch” and a “wink” thus describe the same physical movement. Geertz differentiates these two descriptions using the example of “winking.” This term coincides with its antonym, “thin” description. Geertz uses Gilbert Ryles‘ term “thick description” to describe the intellectual effort of anthropology (6). This makes the job of the anthropologist (or ethnographer) that of writing (Geertz prefers “inscribing”) down interpretations of events, or, social actions.
In order to understand culture, one needs to understand what different actions and behaviors mean and why they mean what they mean in a specific context or how they have come to mean what they mean. This new semiotic understanding of culture makes the job of the anthropologist or ethnographer one of interpreting behaviors, actions, and events within networks of meaning:īelieving, 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 a law but an interpretive one in search of meaning (5).Ĭulture, in this light, is seen not as a law governing human behavior but a “context in which behaviors can intelligibly be described” (14).
Geertz’s groundbreaking collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), narrows the definition of culture by wedding it to semiotics, the study of signs. Otherwise, it would follow the fate of other useful concepts that have fallen out of vogue and become anachronistic. In order to preserve the usefulness of this concept, he claimed, culture needed to be limited, specified, focused, and contained. He called the confusion over how to define culture a “conceptual morass” (4). In the 1970s, however, Anthropologist Clifford Geertz saw that the diffuse way other Anthropologists and ethnographers defined culture began to obscure its usefulness.
It helped establish the discipline and remains a generative way to talk about and understand human life. The notion of culture has been enormously useful to Anthropology.
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