The Interpretation of Cultures

For Geertz, culture is webs of meanings, so cultural analysis is a search for meaning. Like ethnography, anthropology relies on “thick description”—a term Geertz explains by citing a passage describing a conflictual encounter among French, Jewish, Berber, and Marmushan traders. He uses the passage initially to illustrate that anthropology is viewed as more observational than analytical, and he returns to the passage to support his claim that culture analysis is about finding meaning. 

One debate that obscures the purpose of anthropology is whether culture is subjective or objective. There are three reasons for the confusion. One is that the debate imagines culture as self-contained and superorganic, or what Geertz calls reifying culture. Two is the claim that culture is a pattern of behavioral events in an identifiable community, a view that Geertz finds reductive. Three is the idea that culture is in the minds and hearts of men. This third school of thought, sometimes referred to as ethnoscience, competitional analysis, or cognitive anthropology, is based on the idea that a society’s culture “consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (11).