Week 2 Reading
Geertz
Summary:
Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose.
“culture 1s not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly——described.
“Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. (The more I manage to follow what the Moroccans are up to, the more logical, and the more singular, they seem.) It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.”
“ Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . . ); they study in villages. You can study different things in different places, and some things—-for example, what colonial domination does to established frames of moral expectation—you can best study in confined localities. But that doesn’t make the place what it is you are studying.
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse. questions, is what being an ethnographer is like. |
Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate.
Why is the study of culture important for the 'search for meaning'?
Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning
It is crucial to gain understanding of other cultures as there are differences amongst us that can potentially corrupt our understanding of one another. Communication may be stunted or misinterpreted if humans vary in their intentions and others who behave differently are unaware of these differences.
“Society’s forms are culture’s substance.”
“Social conflict is not something that happens when, out of weakness, indefiniteness, obsolescence, or neglect, cultural forms cease to operate, but rather something which happens when, like burlesqued winks, such forms are pressed by unusual situations or unusual intentions to operate in un- | usual ways—”
its important to study culture to understand why people have different meanings and interpretations of things. there are many different cultures in the world and by studying a cultures values and beliefs we can understand why different communities live differently and have different interpretations of things
By understanding culture and questioning it, we are able to boil down the reasons we act the way we do, as culture shapes us and how we act. By understanding the reasoning behind our actions, we can then look for meaning in those actions.
Culture is public because meaning is.
We must analyse the ‘webs’ of culture in order to understand why we do anything, this, in turn, will help us explain both individual behaviours and therefore that of society.
Culture is important to study and understand to avoid miscommunication and offence between people which can result in conflict and negative consequence
culture helps provide context to how people behave due to sociatal norms. it also helps with miscommunication.
Try to identify the different passages where Geertz discusses 'thick description' and think of its meaning/features based on those passages.
“The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast”
Learned behaviour varies - actions should be interpreted with not only what is visible to the eye but with an empirical basis.
Berber horsemen, Jewish peddlers, French Legionnaires
“What tripped Cohen up, and with him the | whole, ancient pattern of social and economic relationships within which he functioned, was a confusion of tongues.”
“Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour”
Thick description features trying to understand behaviours that don’t necessarily align with ours to improve our understanding of culture and to avoid “a confusion of toungues”
“Looking at the ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as has so often been claimed, the arbitrariness of human behavior (there is nothing especially arbitrary about taking sheep theft for insolence in Morocco), but the degree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed.”
Thick description is when there are several layers of meaning that you can ony understand with complex- like an onion. What ethnographers use - the different layers of meaning.
Using own perspective to understand other peoples perspectives.
There is always subjectivity because we approach research with positionality and our personal bias- you can never fully grasp the natives point of view because it remains your understanding.
winking passage - means that people have differing interpretations of the same action depending on their culture and socialization
What does the example of the wink aim reveal about thick description?
There are multiple ways to interpret a singular action
The same actions can have different meanings depending on the individuals personal intent.
It is crucial to take context into account when conducting research as things can otherwise be misunderstood.
Ethnographic description is interpretative
Complexities in every action are “practically without end”, and every action has context and meaning behind it.
Text by Mills:
Summary:
- What does he mean by the 'study of the intersection of biography and history'?
How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves”
It is beneficial to study biography and history together as one cannot function without the other- History shapes biography
The relationship between personal life (Biography) and the world around humans over time (History) in relation to how they affect and influence one another. An example would be how British culture has changed over history and influenced the social norms and the behavioural patterns of British people
how society and history shape us as individuals. We can only understand individuals and society by looking at the historical context/time period, as well as the personal experience of the individual. Mills argues that private troubles are always related to wider public issues like unemployment, historical events also impact us as individuals
- What is the difference between a private and a public issue?
Private issues are concerned with the individual and the self and is exclusive to an indivduals social life whereas a public issue transcends these limits and involves itself with society as a whole
- Why are sociologists interested in researching public issues?
Public issues contribute to private issues- understanding public issues can not only have a great impact on the lives of individuals but it can also help us understand flawed concepts and infrastructures within society so that structural changes within institutions can be made as improvements.
Public issues are a catalyst to private issues, public issues are merely the bigger picture, whereas private issues lie in the hands of the individual.(despite being created by societal flaws)
Recent developments in science have raised more moral questions than they have solved. Instead sociologists believe that men yearn for a a shift towards the science of public issue as well as an exploration of our social and historical reality. Humans want not to pursue physical science, but to gather a big picture of our public issues as this research is more beneficial to understanding themselves and their troubles as opposed to the likes of scientific developments of weaponry.
Issues are structural, and to solve them you need to consider political and economic issues that affect others. To do this, you must study areas of life as institutions, including the family and education. Problems in one sector cannot be considered without considering every other sector
public issues provide more context to have an individual acts or how they are treated - Mills touches on unemployment where if one man was unemployed it may be due to his character rather than if millions were unemployed it touches more on structual issues - this shows how context helps lead to understanding and public issues help with the explanation.
we can tackle personal troubles when we tackle public issues, which are what our troubles stem from