"... : if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.
In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners (sic) do is ethnography. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise.
What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description." ~ Clifford Geertz (1973: 5-6) [Quote from his book, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books]Gilbert Ryle's concept of thick description, as popularized in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology by Clifford Geertz (see, also, this article), refers to the successive addition of layer upon layer of detail to a phenomenon or process or event being described -- building up from 'literal' (or simple or lay) to 'thin' (or journalistic) to thick (or 'deep' or scholarly) description -- such that, true to the second law of dialectics, the quantum (quantity) of descriptions progressively transforms into a qualitative synthesis of the 'totality' of aspects of the phenomenon in question. It is like adding pixels and mega-pixels, one measured 'spread' after another, to a picture until one achieves the highest possible level of clarity, or picture quality.
Thick description is widely accepted as a major qualitative data analysis method or technique. However, I have preferred to use the concept synthesis in the above definition, as it more satisfactorily captures what for me is the core purpose of thick description. There is debate, however, concerning the relative merits of analysis and synthesis in pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
Analysis, an anchor concept in both quantitative and qualitative research, which is used routinely and unquestioningly by nearly all scientists (natural and social), does not seem to be quite apt here. B.N Ghosh (1985: 23), for example, has suggested that “analysis plays a more important role than synthesis” during “the initial stages of a science”; but “as the science becomes more and more progressive, synthesis plays a more and more important role. But in every science both the methods are used simultaneously.” He (1985: 24) adds that:
“A science aims at
not only arriving at the truth but also at expounding the truth. A synthetic
method is necessarily expository because it puts together the elements of a
phenomenon in a systematic manner. In synthesis, exposition is possible because
the entire elements are completely known and, as such, they can easily be arranged
in an orderly way. The discovery of truth, however, is made possible by the
method of analysis.”
I think that the aim and effect of thick description is to expound in 'full' the details, the 'totality', of the object of description. However, the end-product of thick description cannot be touted as a "complete" exposition of that which is (to be or has been) described; and I suspect that thick description was never intended for such a purpose.
NOTE: For more on thick description read:
1.This article by Joseph Ponterotto
2. Fei-Wen Liu's article
PS: Quote at the top added on September 11, 2015
NOTE: For more on thick description read:
1.This article by Joseph Ponterotto
2. Fei-Wen Liu's article
PS: Quote at the top added on September 11, 2015
