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Thick Description

In the fields of anthropology, sociology, religious studies,and human and organizational development,a thick description of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider.Today, "thick description" is used in a variety of fields, including the type of literary criticism known as New Historicism.Recent developments in cultural anthropology view culture as an amalgamation of the distinctive sets of signifying systems.Clifford Geertz calls it 'thick description'.In the light of New Historicism, it examines a cultural production in order to discover the meanings of that cultural event as well as the social conventions that were responsible for the production of that event. It views historical issues through a human 'lens'.It is a close reading to discover within the overall cultural system, the network of conventions, codes, and modes of thinking with which the particular item is implicated and which invest the item with those meanings.The term was introduced by the 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle and later developed by a anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) to describe his own method of doing ethnography (Geertz 1973:5-6, 9-10). Since then, the term and the methodology it represents has gained currency in the social sciences and beyond. In his essay "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture"(1973), Geertz explains that he adopted the term from philosopher Gilbert Ryle, specifically from his lecture "What is le Penseur doing?" Geertz's "thick description"approach has become increasingly recognized as a method of symbolic anthropology, enlisted as a working antidote to overly technocratic,mechanistic means of  understandingcultures,organizations,andhistorical settings.

Edited by Sarbadaman Gop 
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