thick description


thick description

(ANTHROPOLOGY) the provision of’densely textured facts’ about a social context, on the basis of which more general assertions about the role of culture in social life can be sustained (C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973). Like the ETHNOMETHODOLOGISTS, Geertz's interpretive anthropology regards a minute attention to the fine details of everyday social life as the only feasible basis for more extended generalizations, but he makes no assumption that any ‘thick description’, however detailed, can ever be complete.