The Interpretation of Cultures

For Geertz, culture is webs of meanings, so cultural analysis is a search for meaning. Like ethnography, anthropology relies on “thick description”—a term Geertz explains by citing a passage describing a conflictual encounter among French, Jewish, Berber, and Marmushan traders. He uses the passage initially to illustrate that anthropology is viewed as more observational than analytical, and he returns to the passage to support his claim that culture analysis is about finding meaning. 

One debate that obscures the purpose of anthropology is whether culture is subjective or objective. There are three reasons for the confusion. One is that the debate imagines culture as self-contained and superorganic, or what Geertz calls reifying culture. Two is the claim that culture is a pattern of behavioral events in an identifiable community, a view that Geertz finds reductive. Three is the idea that culture is in the minds and hearts of men. This third school of thought, sometimes referred to as ethnoscience, competitional analysis, or cognitive anthropology, is based on the idea that a society’s culture “consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (11). 

Ethnoscience leads to the belief that a set of cultural rules, which, if followed, can allow one to pass for a native. For Geertz, this is problematic because culture involves mental phenomena that cannot be systematized in the same way as math or logic. The aim of cultural analysis is not for the ethnographer to become or mimic a people, but rather to converse with them. That is, “the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse” (14). 

As a system of symbols, culture “is a context, something within which [symbols] can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described” (14). Anthropological writing is itself an interpretation, a construction of the ethnographer that attempts to make people accessible by “setting them in the frame of their own banalities” (14) or bringing out the meaning of their simultaneous ordinariness and particularity. Thus, cultural analysis requires attending to the flow of behavior, as opposed to trying to arrange abstract entities into unified patterns. When an anthropologist “observes, records, analyzes,” (20), three activities that are not distinct in anthropological writing, they are “guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses” (20). 

Geertz provides four characteristics of thick description: First, it is interpretive; second, it interprets the flow of social discourse; third, it tries to put this discourse into clear terms; and fourth, it is microscopic. Geertz gives a lot of attention to the microscopic characteristic because while it’s true that anthropologists draw “broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters” (21), dominant anthropological models based on the microscopic characteristic undermine efforts to move from the local to the general. 

Moving from local to general relates to another difficulty in cultural analysis—the development of theory. Interpretive approaches across various disciplines share a tendency “to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus, to escape systematic modes of assessment” (24).

The difficulty of developing anthropology theory arises from two characteristics of cultural interpretation. First, theory in cultural analysis requires staying close to the ground and avoiding abstractions: “What generality it contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions” (25). This is why ethnoscientific approaches and dominant models based on microscopy are inadequate: Abstraction requires a linear flow of thought that cultural analysis cannot have. Cultural analysis is circular; new studies do “not take up where the others leave off” (25), but instead approach the same things over and over from a “better informed and better conceptualized” (25) perspective. Second, although cultural theory, unlike experiment- and observation-based sciences, is not predictive, the theoretical frameworks derived from previous interpretations “must be capable of continuing to yield defensible interpretations as new social phenomena swim into view” (27). This suggests that if a previous framework is found to be useless in a new related cultural context, it must be abandoned.

Therefore, anthropology as an interpretive endeavor must also refine the search for meaning. Although this would suggest a need for going deeper and deeper into the origins of a cultural system, Geertz warns that getting lost in the search for origins can be resisted by focusing on the hard surfaces—politics, economics, social stratification—and the biological and physical necessities of the people in society. Staying close to the ground and paying attention to the webs of connection, as opposed to relying on abstractions and trying to understand a linear path of origins, allows anthropologists to derive meaning from concrete aspects of social life as they relate to the “symbolic dimensions of social action” (30). That is, cultural analysis adds to the human discourse by placing these concrete realities and symbolic dimensions in a meaningful frame.