Thick Description

Definition

Thick description is Clifford Geertz's term, adopted by Hans Medick (and, in a looser register, by Dorothee Wierling and Wolfgang Kaschuba) for the interpretive-anthropological method of reconstructing "anything that is new, strange, unknown, and hard to interpret in the cultural 'texts' to be explored," keeping "in full mind, and in the most comprehensive manner possible" the multiplicity and hierarchy of meanings a cultural practice carries (Medick, pp. 51–52). Its necessity arises from the "binary problematic of Otherness": the ethnographer can only read cultural texts "over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong" (Geertz, quoted p. 52), so thick description "betokens humility" while being "methodologically more sophisticated—and more open to taking risks." It is sharply opposed to "hypothesis-testing" research, "where what is alien and other is all too quickly reduced to the familiar." For Medick, thick description is the model for a social history that would recover the "informal logic of actual life" (p. 53).

Key Thinkers

• Clifford Geertz — the originator: "thick description," the cultural text, and "all experience is construed experience."
• Hans Medick — the chapter that imports thick description into social history (no author page yet — see log).
• Dorothee Wierling — uses "thick descriptive" techniques to grasp gender relations in everyday contexts (no author page yet — see log).
• Wolfgang Kaschuba — calls for "detailed analysis and the 'thick description' of concrete situations, contexts, figurations, experiences" (no author page yet — see log).

Related Concepts

• Historical Anthropology — the larger project thick description serves.
• Alltagsgeschichte — the historiography that adopts the method.
• Otherness — the methodological problem (the inaccessibility of the other's experience) that generates the method.
• Interpretation — the interpretive turn in anthropology and history.
• Microhistory — the scale at which thick description operates.
• Everyday Life — the lived texture thick description tries to preserve.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Medick's "The Limits of 'Participant Observation' and the Meaning of 'Thick Description'" (pp. 50–53); the Geertz quotation on generality growing "out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions"; the application to Sewell, Isaac, Sahlins and Mintz.

Open Questions

• Is thick description an alternative to theory or a disguised theory? Geertz says theory "is not its own master" — is that a method or a refusal of explanation?
• Can thick description survive the archive, where the ethnographer's living interlocutors are absent and the sources were produced by hostile observers?