标签： Thick Description 深描 Geertz 格尔茨 文化人类学

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
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The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, 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.

It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.

II

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.

In anthropology, or anyway 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 to- 
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-ward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge.

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. "

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But the point is that between what Ryle calls the "thin description" of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher . . .) is doing ("rapidly contracting his right eyelids") and the "thick description" of what he is doing ("practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent i nto thinking a conspiracy is in motion") lies the object of ethnography:

a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures .

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In finished anthropological writings, including those collected here, this fact-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-is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined.

Right down at the factual base, the hard rock, insofar as there is any, of the whole enterprise, we are already explicating: and worse, explicating explications. Winks upon winks upon winks.

Analysis, then , is sorting out the structures of signification... and determining their social ground and import.

The point for now is only that ethnography

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is thick description.

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with...is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render.

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Culture, this acted document, thus is public, like a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid.

Though ideational, it does not exist in someone's head ; though unphysical, it is not an occult entity.

Once human behavior is seen as (most of the time ; there are true twitches) symbolic action - action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies-the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of m i nd, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense.

The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that, in their occurrence and through their agency, is getting said.

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But though both these confusions still exist, and doubtless will be always with us, the main source of theoretical muddlement in contemporary anthropology is a view which developed in reaction to them and is right now very widely held-namely, that, to quote Ward Goodenough, perhaps its leading proponent, "culture [is located] in the minds and hearts of men ."

Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive anthropology (a terminological wavering which reflects a deeper uncertainty), this school of thought holds that culture is composed of psychological structures by means of which individuals or groups of individuals guide their behavior.

As, on first glance, this approach may look close enough to the one being developed here to be mistaken for it, it is useful to be explicit as to what divides them.

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Culture is public because meaning is.

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IV

We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them.

We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more 
difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized.

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Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.

As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, 
behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed ; it is a context, something within which they can be intell igibly-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, 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 "ernie analysis,"

Nothing is more necessary to comprehendi ng what anthropological interpretation is, and the degree to which it is interpretation, than an exact understanding of what it means -and what it does not mean-to say that our formulations of other peoples' symbol systems must be actor-oriented.

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What it means is that descriptions of Berber, Jewish, or French culture must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine Berbers, Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through, the formulae they use to define what happens to them.

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 ; they are anthropological because it is, in fact, anthropologists who profess them.

In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations; and second and third order ones to boot.

(By definition, only a "native" makes first order ones: it's his culture.)

They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are "something made," "something fashioned".

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It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.

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Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior--or, more precisely, social action-that cultural forms find articulation.

Whatever, or wherever, symbol systems "in their own terms" may be, we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events, not by arranging abstracted entities into unified patterns.

A further implication of this is that coherence cannot be the major test of validity for a cultural description.

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Nothing has done more, I think, to discredit cultural analysis than the construction of impeccable depictions of formal order in whose actual existence nobody can quite believe.

If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens... is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant.

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It is to demonstrate what a piece of anthropological interpretation consists in: tracing the curve of a social discourse ; fixing it into an inspectable form .

The ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse ; he writes it down.

In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.

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Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape.

VI

So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description:

it is interpretive;

what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse;

and the interpreting involved consists in try ing to rescue the "said" of such discourse from its perishi ng occasions and fix it in perusable terms.

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But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic of such description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic.

This is not to say that there are no large-scale anthropological interpretations of whole societies, civilizations, world events, and so on.

Indeed, it is such extension of our analyses to wider contexts that, along with their theoretical implications, recommends them to general attention and justifies our constructing them.

It is merely to say that the anthropologist characteristically approaches such broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters.

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VII

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.

The first is 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.

• The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is, as I have said, 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.

• This is the first condition for

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  cultural theory: it 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 to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions.

• And from this follows a peculiarity in the way, as a simple matter of empirical fact, our knowledge of culture . . . cultures . . . a culture . . . grows: in spurts.

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• 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.
• In the study of culture the signifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symptoms, but symbolic acts or clusters of symbolic acts, and the aim is not therapy but the analysis of social discourse.

Thus we are lead to the second condition of cultural theory: it is not, at least in the strict meani ng of the term, predictive.

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Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects' acts, the "said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior.

In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself -that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be expressed.

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Thus 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.

It is an argument that to rework the pattern of social relationships is to rearrange the coordinates of the experienced world.

Society's forms are culture's substance.

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Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

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."

Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate.

My own position in the midst of all this has been to try to resist sub-

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jectivism on the one hand and cabbalism on the other, to try to keep the analysis of symbolic forms as closely tied as I could to concrete social events and occasions, the public world of common life, and to organize it in such a way that the connections between theoretical formulations and descriptive interpretations were unobscured by appeals to dark sciences.

The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consuitable record of what man has said .

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