Note-taking for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson
Geertz, C. “Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture.” In The Interpretation Of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-30, 1973
Before we get into the heavy stuff, let me just recommend this book as a pleasure to read, the sexist pronouns notwithstanding. Clifford Geertz is a rare bird, a humanities scholar who can actually write. He’s even funny, in a dry academic way.
Geertz argues for a semiotic concept of culture. Per Max Weber, humans are suspended in webs of significance we ourselves have spun. For Geertz, the webs consist of culture. The analysis of culture is the analysis of meaning, so anthropology has to be an interpretive practice rather than an experimental science, more like literary criticism than “objective” observation. Beyond the practicalities of data-gathering, ethnography really consists of “thick description,” that is, description enriched with interpretation. This is in contrast to “thin description,” a bare listing of observed facts and events. Michael Crichton does thin description. Virginia Woolf does thick description.
The object of ethnography is
a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids.
Anthropological “data” are our interpretations of our subjects’ interpretations of themselves and each other. Rather than proving or disproving general theories of culture, we work to “distinguish unlike frames of interpretation.”
Ethnography “is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit.” It’s like trying to reconstruct the life of Jesus from a few crumbling and partial texts, all of which contradict each other. Culture is an “acted document,” public behavior that emerges from layers of shared but invisible meaning. Culture is ideational, but not imaginary; it acts on us in real and observable ways. There is no meaningful separation between our frame of mind and our behavior.
Geertz warns against the cognitivist fallacy, that culture consists of mental phenomena that we can analyze formally and logically. And culture does not cause our behavior; it is a context for it. Since we can only understand culture by means of interpretation, the distinction between culture as a fact of the world and culture as a theoretical entity is blurry at best. Anthropological writings are interpretations of interpretations of interpretations, and in that sense are “fictions”—not in the sense that they are counterfactual (we hope), but in the original sense of the word, things that are constructed. We need to involve our imagination in constructing our interpretive fictions.
In anthropology, “the locus of study is not the object of study.” We are not just cataloging the specific behaviors of specific people; we are trying to learn something more general. But anthropological theory can’t generalize too far beyond any specific case. Instead, we generalize within cases, the way that physicians make clinical inferences to reach diagnoses.
Rather than beginning with a set of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law, such inference begins with a set of (presumptive) signifiers and attempts to place them within an intelligible frame. Measures are matched to theoretical predictions, but symptoms (even when they are measured) are scanned for theoretical peculiarities—that is, they are diagnosed.
Like medicine, cultural theory is only very weakly predictive. Doctors can’t predict whether you will get measles; they can decide whether you have them, and maybe whether you’re likely to get them. Like medical diagnosis, cultural analysis is trying to make sense of unfathomably complex situations and is intrinsically incomplete. Does that mean that anthropologists can’t be objective? Geertz argues that while we can’t be perfectly objective, that doesn’t mean we stop trying. A perfectly sterile environment is unattainable, but that doesn’t mean you just “conduct surgery in a sewer.” We need to do our best to interpret with as much intellectual integrity as we can.
McDermott & Varenne, Culture as Disability, Anthropology and Education Quarterly,Vol 26(3), Sept,1995. 324-348.
McDermott and Varenne discuss the ways in which culture can create disability. We might think that disability is an objective fact, an observable inability to handle a problem or situation of some kind. But when we label a person as disabled, we create more difficulties for them.
Cultural analysis shows that disability refers most precisely to inadequate performances only on tasks that are arbitrarily circumscribed from daily life. Disabilities are less the property of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus.
The authors refer to a commonly held definition of culture as
containers of coherence that mark off different kinds of people living in their various ways, each kind separated from the others by a particular version of coherence, a particular way of making sense and meaning.
The problem with seeing culture as a container is that the container is always leaky. There are no cultural categories or groups that exist in isolation. Even rainforest tribes have some connections to the outside world, or otherwise we wouldn’t know they exist.
McDermott and Varenne describe culture as “a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well-structured tools already available.” The violence of this image is intentional. If we understand culture as a toolkit of knowledge that people need for living together, then we will tend to focus on how some people have more tools at their disposal than others. But the toolkits themselves are cultural fabrications, and so, therefore, are disabilities. For example, Martha’s Vineyard historically had a large deaf population, and everyone learned sign language as a matter of course. In such a context, is deafness a disability at all? Martha’s Vineyard made no effort to sort deaf from hearing people institutionally. The authors point out that because deaf people received special schooling, they were likely to be better educated than their hearing neighbors, making deafness a positive social advantage. Even in mainstream society, some deaf people reject cochlear implants because they experience their membership in the deaf community as being more valuable and important than hearing.
Once we start making social distinctions based on ability, we inevitably punish people who lack that ability. Making distinctions can burden people more than the lack of ability itself.
Those who are locked out of the building suffer because others are inside; those who are shut off from learning suffer because others are shown to be in the know; those who are degraded make possible the perceived purity of those momentarily spared. Perceptions of ability organize perceptions of disability and vice versa. We might just as well say: No ability, no disability. No disability, no ability.
To be diagnosed with a disability in our society is a life-changing event, a fundamental and permanent change in our identity and our status.
Deprivationism is an academically discredited way of thinking, but it retains its hold on our common sense. If you have an impoverished upbringing, doesn’t that naturally disadvantage you in life? But this is not the only way to think about social difference. For example, you could see black children as having a poverty of language development because of their failure to speak and write “correct” English. But you could also see them as having mastery of an alternative way of speaking, African American Vernacular English, with different but equally valid grammatical rules and customs. Speakers of AAVE are only linguistically impoverished because we institutionally deem them to be so, not because they have any difficulty communicating or expressing themselves.
The authors describe the “anthropological instinct” as the liberal truism that it’s arrogant to think that we know better than people in other cultures, and that their knowledge is we are arrogant to think we know better than people in other cultures. This is better than deprivationism, but it still has limitations.
The problem with the anthropological instinct is that in its rush to appreciate how a culture works, it invites only an account of how the culture works well. When applied to a minority community, where cases of things not working too well are unfortunately easy to document by applying mainstream standards, there is a tendency to blame the people in the minority groups for not having enough culture to have an easier and more recognizable life.
Being poor in America is not a failure to be part of American society. It is one of many perfectly normal and ordinary ways of being, just as being middle class or rich are. Being poor isn’t easy or enjoyable, but it is fully part of our culture.
The authors ask us to reconsider apparent biological disorders like alcoholism, autism, and schizophrenia as really being cultural fabrications. It is easier to see the culturally constructed nature of more intrinsically social disorders like anorexia, depression, alienation and gender dysphoria.
Schools have become enormously important sorting mechanisms in American society, and measured school performance reproduces political and class hierarchy. Grades and testing put all of us in competition for the artificially scarce resource of top scores. “Learning disabilities” are a symptom of a system that requires everyone to do better than everyone else. There need to be losers in this system, and while it seems compassionate to define the losers as disabled through no fault of their own, the stigma remains. There is nothing inevitable about the way we handle neurological diversity in schools. A kid may not be able to perform arbitrary tasks in artificial environments, but does that really predict or determine their ability to function in real life? Does performance on standardized tests measure anything beyond the ability to perform on standardized tests? Or are we just creating failure as artificially as we reward success?
By sorting people according to their academic performance, we enforce a bell-shaped performance curve, and we require failure from everyone on the left side of the curve.
If social structuring processes in America must be fed by repeated identifications of failure in school and school-like institutions, then American education will continue acquiring people for its positions of failure. America will have its disabilities.
Differences in cognitive and social function among humans are real. But the stigma and burden we assign to those differences is something we create.