Thick Description #1 - Geertz's Bildung

Image taken from www.earthstoriez.com

To research or evaluate, it’s necessary to offer a perspective (in text or image, for example), which means looking, seeing, listening, describing, speaking, and/or writing from a position. Critiques of a positionality could take this into difficult epistemological areas, which I’m not trying to engage with here. This post is about thick description, a type of ethnographic writing where a witness describes a context, including detail and nuance, that gives the reader a deeper understanding of what it's like to be in that situation in a specific moment. Events are described from a position; they are subjective. I’ll write a few posts about thick description, but in this first one, I’ll talk about some of the history behind this method (mainly around Clifford Geertz).

This form of writing interests me for a few reasons. It was going to be a method I used in my PhD research - and in some ways it was - but never made the cut for my final submission. I have a slight hangover from my PhD and want to process some of the work I did during that time before it goes completely cold. Also, thick description informed Sophie Hope and me when we recruited Fieldnote Diarists for BE PART. You can read more about BE PART’s intentions and research in the report and about a writing project that stemmed from the fieldnote diaries called Whispers and Echoes here. Again, I feel a hangover from BE PART, so I want to process what went on then in combination with my current work as a professional evaluator on art and cultural projects. Which brings me to yet another reason for writing these posts, my involvement with the brilliant people behind the Disrupt Toolkit, where I came across the Old Fire Station (OFS) and something they developed called the Storytelling Evaluation Method. There are strong links between narrativising people’s experiences of cultural participation to evaluate a project and the first-person description central to thick description. Some of my colleagues and I are trying to use methods like this in our work so that the value of culture can be presented through the voices of those who take part in it and create it, rather than through abstracted, generalised metrics that focus on received ideas of what is valuable. 

Thick description is interesting methodologically as it poses several theoretical questions: what does it mean to be inside and/or outside a social context? If a context is described in enough detail, can it be truly represented in text? Does writing about a context always already include some kind of analysis? To put that another way, does interpretation and description step over an analytic line at some point? Is that line drawn through detail or prior knowledge? These are the types of questions I want to explore in subsequent posts, but first, I’ll give a brief history of the term via Clifford Geertz (often cited as its pioneer).  

Geertz

Thick description is a term associated with the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He sourced the phrase from the analytic philosopher, Gilbert Ryle (1971), who coined the term in his essay The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing?. Ryle intended to highlight that an action seldom makes sense unless we situate it within several other social conventions. Along with many other examples, he describes the distinction between an eye twitch and a wink (Geertz, 1973; Ryle, 1971). On the surface, they are the same action, but in our culture, winking carries connotations far beyond an eye twitch. The eye movement only offers a thin description, whereas a “thick description is [a] many-layered sandwich, of which only the bottom slice is catered for by the thinnest description" (Ryle, 1971, p.494). As Jason Springs (2008) says, "understanding tends to be ad hoc, textured and moment-to-moment" (p.942) and can be felt in moments of getting a joke or interpreting a wink, that is to say, understanding a given action also means having a familiarity with a given culture. Through his adoption of the term, Geertz has an eye on a situation's social and practical background, offering a form of cultural description based on practice (Springs, 2008, p.947).

Cockfight

To display the effect of Geertz’s thick descriptions, I will draw on his essay Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight (Geertz, 1972). As the title suggests, this is an anthropological account of life in some Balinese villages, described through the practice(s) of cockfighting (gambling is also an important factor). What I find particularly compelling is not only the literary tension and excitement he manages to infuse into the text but also the level of personal detail included. This is not just a description of a certain practice and the significance he feels and observes; it also offers a key to understanding much wider social relations, not only in Bali but also in Western cultures. Geertz's engagement with the Balinese context and his emotional and often existential use of language to animate his experience render a truly reflective text.

At the start of his account, Geertz describes the feeling of going unnoticed, a characteristic of an outsider to a Balinese Village. At some point, he is welcomed and goes from feeling like a “gust-of-wind” to being regarded as human (Geertz, 1972, p.57). He then says:

My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of-wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school (Geertz, 1972, p.57).

At this point, we have already read some details about Geertz's experience of Balinese culture: until accepted, you are treated coldly, some people are never accepted, and one has to be born in Bali to be considered Balinese. More than describing the context of the foreign culture, Geertz also describes what it feels like for him to be there. His and his wife’s feeling of discomfort is the frame in which the main subject of the text is introduced. Later, in a description of the fight, we read:

[T]he cocks fly almost immediately at one another in a wing-beating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of animal fury so pure, so absolute, and in its own way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate (Geertz, 1972, p.63).

The above passage employs highly Western terms and concepts. The absolute purity of abstract beauty in relation to a Platonic object is heavily anchored in a Eurocentric theoretical tradition. Geertz is describing an experience in his own terms; these passages do not judge or even describe elements of Balinese culture, they are expressive of Geertz’s position from his own cultural perspective. When he does directly address the significance of the cockfights (tetadjen; sabungan), he pays far more attention to Balinese linguistic usage, allowing the related terms to highlight the wider cultural significance of the cockfights.

Sabung, the word for cock (and one which appears in inscriptions as early as A.D. 922), is used metaphorically to mean "hero," "warrior," "champion," " man of parts," "political” “candidate," "bachelor," "dandy, " "lady-killer," or "tough guy” (Geertz, 1972, p.60).

This only serves as an introduction to a section outlining the myriad connotations that the cock and cockfights have in the island's culture, culminating in his statement:

[I]n seeking earthly analogues for heaven and hell, the Balinese compare the former to the mood of a man whose cock has just won, the latter to that of a man whose cock has just lost (Geertz, 1972, p.62).

Sadly, this is not the place for a detailed recounting of Balinese Cockfights told through the eyes of Clifford Geertz; my aim is not to comment on Balinese cultural practices. The main aspect of Geertz’s text I would like to draw out is the continual toing-and-froing between description and self-reflective statement. There are passages regarding the cockfights where he outlines the importance of gambling and the significance of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ betting games. The depth of the game stems from the complex overlapping of economic and symbolic practices that mirror much more general Balinese social dynamics. He then attributes the kinds of feelings caught by the cockfights - “death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance” (Geertz, 1972, p.79) – to Western forms of literary culture (Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare), claiming that both writers represent the essential nature of such feelings. The cockfight acts as a text, but one written in “feathers, blood, crowds, and money” (Geertz, 1972, p.72). Geertz attempts to read Balinese culture through his own cultural lens, that of Western texts he has found personally significant.

Critiques

Towards the end of the text, Geertz says “[t]he culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Geertz, 1972, p.86). This is taken up by Dwight Conquergood (2004) to highlight a power imbalance between the researcher's gaze and the cultural other, there to be passively viewed. He claims "Geertz figures culture as a stiff, awkward reading room" (Conquergood, 2004, p.316) and asks, following Raymond Williams' (1977) concept of ‘structure of feeling’, researchers be pulled into an alternative way of knowing that might "exceed cognitive control" (Conquergood, 2004, p.316). Although I do not contest post-colonial arguments that place Western anthropology on ethically dubious grounds, I do not think that is what Geertz is doing through his thick description, or with his culture as text metaphor.^[1] Conquergood (2004) asks that researchers not maintain a traditional divide between theory and practice, claiming this is to cut oneself off “from the nourishing ground of participatory experience" (p.320). Geertz’s highly personal and at times poetic style of thick description may not count as participation within another culture's practice, but it brings forth elements of his own culture and frames them in terms of the culture he is trying to understand. To read an Other, one must also be able to read oneself. Western academic tradition is a literary practice, and I read Geertz as bringing that tradition to Bali more than him reducing Balinese practices to a text. The metaphor describes the practice he is performing as much as anything he is trying to describe. For a textual description to be a reflexive research method, the author has to acknowledge their position as the author.

John L. Jackson Jr. (2013) complains that the idea of thick description exhibits a kind of arrogance, that the term is used as a metaphor for attempts at “rich, rigorous, and even full social knowing” (p.13). He contends that the thickness is probably far thinner than academics give it credit for. Thin description, on the other hand, serves as a reminder of an academic tendency to think Others can be fully, or thickly, known and that any description served as research of a group will be serving some kind of ideological end (Jackson, 2013, p.16). Reading Jackson’s account, I get the impression that thick description becomes a stand-in for academic anthropology’s disciplinary rigidity. For Jackson, Geertz represents the canon and makes him a prime theoretical target to distance himself from (this may also apply to Conquergood’s critique). Having said this, thick or thin, Jackson offers a very lucid description that portrays his view of the subject by placing himself within the narrative.

Jackson (2013) references Trinh Minh-ha’s idea that ethnographic research is always a relationship to the infinite and therefore attempts to bring order to cultural description are foolhardy and arrogant (p.149-150). To bolster his argument, Jackson draws on Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges' refutation that any hyperthick description will always fail (Jackson, 2013, p.152). Through this argument, he displays a deep culturedness, or Bildung to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s terms, that portrays his education, his cultural perspectives, and his underlying aims to break new theoretical ground; in other words, it offers a thick description (or equivalent term) of his project. As with Geertz, Jackson, and Conquergood’s use of cultural phenomena to describe a situation brings them as writers into the picture; their eruditeness seems to tell a story about them as they tell stories about others. Using literature or other art forms in a description is useful to gain a clear picture of how one might understand a context because, for me at least, those texts have helped me form and come to terms with my own perspective.

^[1] Conquergood’s film ‘Heart Broken in Half’ (1990) is an incredible insight into the life of street gangs in Chicago, and treats its subject matter in a highly open and sensitive fashion. However, when Conquergood narrates images of graffiti, explaining the significance of various symbols, Geertz’s metaphor surely applies.

References

Conquergood, D., 2004. Interventions and Radical Research, in: Bial, H. (Ed.),. Routledge, London, pp. 311–322.

Conquergood, D., 1990. The Heart Broken In Half, Northwestern University, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Humanities Council. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EtkU4anv5A

Geertz, C., 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, New York.

Geertz, C., 1972. Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight. Daedalus Fall

.

Jackson, John. L. Jr., 2013. Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Ryle, G., 1971. The Thinking of Thoughts: What is “Le Penseur” Doing?, in: Collected Papers: 1929-1968. Hutchinson, London, pp. 480–496.

Springs, J.A., 2008. What Cultural Theorists of Religion Have to Learn from Wittgenstein; Or, How to Read Geertz as a Practice Theorist. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, 934–969.

Williams, R., 1977. Marxism and Literary Studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford.