Thick description

Thick description interprets observed action by explaining the cultural context that makes it meaningful, rather than merely recording behavior.

Thin description: A factual account of behavior that records what happened without interpreting its cultural meaning. It names the bare behavioral account that thick description extends.
Clifford Geertz: An American anthropologist known for interpretive anthropology and the influential essay “Thick Description.” Geertz developed the approach as a model for interpreting culture.
Winking: The deliberate closing and reopening of one eye, which can communicate different intentions in context. Geertz uses a wink to show why identical bodily movements can carry different meanings.
Positivism: A philosophy of knowledge that privileges observable evidence and lawlike explanation modeled on the natural sciences. Its emphasis on observable regularities contrasts with interpreting particular cultural meanings.
Interpretation: The process of assigning meaning to signs, actions, or texts. Thick description is a form of interpretation grounded in cultural context.
Gilbert Ryle: A British philosopher whose distinction between thin and thick descriptions illustrated how actions acquire meaning. His account of a wink supplied Geertz’s key example of layered action.
Intentionality: The quality of being directed toward or about something, including purposes behind actions and mental states. Interpreting action requires distinguishing deliberate signals from involuntary movements.
Functionalism: An approach that explains social practices by the roles they perform in maintaining a social system. It asks what practices do for social systems, rather than chiefly what they mean.
Ethnography: The systematic study and written description of a culture through sustained engagement with its members. Ethnographic accounts often use contextual interpretation to explain observed practices.
Interpretive anthropology: An approach to anthropology that studies culture as a system of meanings expressed through symbols and practices. Thick description became a defining method within this approach.

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