This is in contrast to “thin description,” a bare listing of observed facts and events. Beyond the practicalities of data-gathering, ethnography really consists of “thick description,” that is, description enriched with interpretation. The analysis of culture is the analysis of meaning, so anthropology has to be an interpretive practice rather than an experimental science, more like literary criticism than “objective” observation. Per Max Weber, humans are suspended in webs of significance we ourselves have spun. Geertz argues for a semiotic concept of culture. Clifford Geertz is a rare bird, a humanities scholar who can actually write. 3-30, 1973īefore we get into the heavy stuff, let me just recommend this book as a pleasure to read, the sexist pronouns notwithstanding. “Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture.” In The Interpretation Of Cultures. In anthropology, as in novels, everything matters – the colour of a hat, the onset of the first menses, the name of the child, the rituals of social visiting.Note-taking for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson

Reading about cock-fighting in Bali sharpens how well we see our own patterns of relationship, our own social ritual it draws the mind's camera back into a long shot, before plunging again into the thick of the detail. I suppose they seem to mirror the work that novels do, describing and analysing the precious minutiae of human interaction in particular worlds. And these shaping beliefs will always be at work in the stories we write, however obliquely, or at whatever level of conscious or unconscious deployment. From those books we derive the framework of our beliefs, the underpinning convictions thatform our mindset and play through and around the witnessing, empathetic, dreaming parts of our perception.

But books of ideas can be significant in a novelist's formation too - history or science or philosophy or whatever, depending on taste and training and accidental encounter. If you mapped out a novelist's history in books, beloved and influential fictions would have to loom large in the foreground.

The interpretation of cultures