The course of Geertz’s approach was set out in “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” the introductory essay to the collection, The Interpretation of Cultures. The essay clearly and forcefully outlines Geertz’s view of culture and the nature of anthropological insights. After reviewing the multiple definitions of the word “culture,” Geertz states his own position: 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. (1973:5)
This is a key, widely quoted passage (for example, Barrett 1991) with a complex series of implications. In a 1990 interview Geertz said, “That’s exactly what I still think. It’s just that I didn’t know exactly what I was getting myself into by thinking it” (Johnson and Ross 1991:151). Semiotics is the analysis of signs and symbols, and Geertz argues that cultural behavior is the interactive creation of meaning with signs: “Human behavior is seen as . . . symbolic action—action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies” (1973:10). The relevant questions concern the meanings of such signs, as Geertz contends, Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. (1973:10)
In The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz outlined the notion of thick description, which draws on the work of Gilbert Ryle, especially his “winking” analogy. Ryle used a seemingly silly example—the difference between a twitching eyelid and a winking eye—to show that these similar behaviors were different because the wink communicated meaning and the twitch did not.
Building on that difference, Ryle points out that one could see parodies of winks, practice parodies of winks, fake winks, and so on, producing multiple possibilities with even such a simple form of communication; unraveling and identifying those contexts and meanings requires “thick description.”
Geertz argued that this is precisely what ethnographic writing does, except most of the time we are unaware of it. To make that point, Geertz reproduced an account from his Moroccan field notes, which, quoted raw, is readable but cannot be understood until it is interpreted: In finished anthropological writings . . . 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. (Even to reveal that this little drama [from his field
notes] took place in the highlands of central Morocco in 1912— and was recounted there in 1968—is to determine much of our understanding of it.) There is nothing particularly wrong with this, and it is in any case inevitable. But it does lead to a view of anthropological research as rather more of an observational
and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is.(1973:9)
Asserting that “culture, this acted document, thus is public,” Geertz argued that debates over whether culture is materialist or idealist, subjective or objective are misconceived: culture consists of created signs that are behaviors, and anthropology’s task is “sorting out the structures of signification” in order to determine “their social ground and import” (1973:9–10). What makes other cultures different is “a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs,” and the goal of anthropological analysis is to make those signs interpretable (Geertz 1973:13).
Geertz distinguished this point of view from other conceptions of culture. Obviously, a semiotic emphasis does not give priority to technology or infrastructure or any other conception of the nature/culture interface as do materialists like White or Harris. Equally, culture does not exist in some superorganic realm
subject to forces and objectives of its own as Kroeber suggested; culture cannot be reified. Neither is culture “brute behavior” or “mental construct” subject to schematic analyses or reducible to ethnographic algorithms. Just as a Beethoven quartet is not the same as the score, the knowledge of it, the understanding of a group of musicians, a particular performance of it, or a transcendent force, but rather is irreducibly a piece of music, culture consists of “socially established structures of meaning” with which
people communicate (Geertz 1973:11–12); it is inseparable from symbolic social discourse.