Thick Description Quotes

“Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perception of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other”
― Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.

“You either grasp an interpretation or you do not, see the point of it or you do not, accept it or you do not. Imprisoned in the immediacy of its own detail, it is presented as self-validating, or, worse, as validated by the supposedly developed sensitivities of the person who presents it;”
― Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.

“Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . .); they study in villages.”
― Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.

“...the difference, however un-photographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. [...] A mere twitch, on the other hand, is neither a failure nor a success; it has no intended recipient; it is not meant to be unwitnessed by anybody; it carries no message. It may be a symptom but it is not a signal. The winker could not not know that he was winking; but the victim of the twitch might be quite unaware of his twitch. The winker can tell what he was trying to do; the twitcher will deny that he was trying to do anything.”
― Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.