Dense description

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Thick Description (English. Thick description ) is the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed theoretical concept to understanding a culture . The term goes back to the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle , from whom Geertz was inspired.

description

Based on a criticism of the eclecticism of the concept of culture, Geertz developed the dense description as a special form of intellectual effort in the context of interpretive ethnology . This mental effort relates primarily to the fact that the researcher includes his own role and approach in the description and interpretation . According to Geertz, there is no such thing as pure data; our expectations and background knowledge have always flowed into this data. Although the anthropologist collects a lot of data, the impression must not be created that collecting data is the main task of the ethnologist, rather it is the interpretation of these data and artifacts .

For Geertz, ethnology means a “dense description”. The ethnological approach to a social phenomenon should not lead to an objective generalized theory, but to a “dense description”, that is, an exact interpretation of the one phenomenon. From this individual case he tries to draw generalized conclusions. Geertz does not want to come to results methodically in the sense of a natural science, but to make assumptions and assessments. The ethnographic analysis shows the course of social events. "Interpreting consists in snatching what has been" said "[...] from the fleeting moment." The textual form for this is not that of a large monograph, but of an essay.

According to Geertz, the task of the ethnologist is on the one hand to uncover structures of ideas that determine the behavior of the subjects in the respective context and on the other hand to develop an analytical conceptual system that is suitable for establishing the typical properties of the structures in relation to other determinants of human behavior. Geertz developed the dense description on the basis of a semiotic concept of culture.

See also

literature

  • Clifford Geertz: Density Description. Contributions to understanding of cultural systems. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2003 (Original English text: Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In: The Interpretation of Culture. Selected Essays, 1973)
  • Jan Roidner: Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), "Dense description. Comments on an interpretative theory of culture" (1973). In: KulturPoetik, Vol. 11, H. 1, 2011, pp. 111-119

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Geertz, Clifford: density description. Contributions to understanding of cultural systems. 2nd Edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2003, p. 30 .