1. Clifford Geertz  Culture  Postmodernism  Meaning

2. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES  Clifford Geertz was born in 1926 (almost twenty years younger than Levi-Strauss and twenty five years younger than Evans- Pritchard), a representative of a new generation of anthropologists…  He studied English (that may justify his later view that culture is a kind of text) and philosophy and then participated on some social research programs on development in Indonesia.  His monographs include: The Religion of Java (1960), Agricultural Involution (1963)), Paddlers and Princes (1963), The social History of an Indonesian Town (1965)).  This high rate of academic productivity, helped him gain wider recognition, and became professor at Chicago. Later, Geertz, moved to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.

3.  Geertz managed to escape from the limitations which constrained the previous generations of anthropologists. He did fieldwork in the postcolonial era: there were no isolated communities left, no simple structures to be identified, no easily manifested functions… A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE

4. THICK DESCRIPTION  Good ethnographic description is not mere description. It can be a very powerful text full of meanings: too many meanings one may say. As Clifford Geertz argues, ethnographic description can be “extraordinarily ‘thick’”…  This expression: ‘a thick description’ is among the most widely quoted expressions in anthropology… It is the first part of the title of an essay by Clifford Geertz, called ‘Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture’.

5. An Example  Geertz borrows the concept of ‘thick description’ by Gilbert Ryle, along with a very simple example: the differentiation between a ‘twitch’ and a ‘wink’. Two boys may rapidly contracting their eyelids. In the first case the contraction may be just involuntary. In the second case the contraction may signify a conspiratorial message: ‘come on lets steal the ice- cream from the third boy in front of us’…

6. A web of meanings  As Geertz observes there is a vast difference between a twitch and wink. There is a difference, which involves meaning, social codes, special interpretations. Culture includes many meanings and meanings ask for interpretations. Geertz’s understanding of culture reflects a semiotic approach: Culture is made up of webs of meaning, webs of significance. Meaning and significance created by people. The job of the anthropologist, the culture-analyst is to interpret this meaning…

7. Culture is context  Culture for Geertz, is not a reified entity, like Durkheim’s conception of society: “culture is not a power”, he says, “not something to which social events… or processes can be causally attributed”; “culture is a context”, a context “within which” actions and events and processes “can be intelligibly, ‘thickly’ described”.

8. Incomplete Interpretations  Because ethnography is about ‘making sense of meanings’, the anthropologist’s interpretation does not reveal absolute truths. The anthropologist’s understanding may be deep or more sallow… The success of an interpretation is a matter of degree not a matter of absolute representation… It is a matter of distinguishing “winks from twitches, real winks from mimicked ones”.  “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete”, argues Geertz, “the more deeply it goes the less complete it is”… (:29)