Geertz

• Object of ethnography:  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 in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids (7)

• Our data is really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.  This data is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea is directly examined (9).

• Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript —foreign, faded, full of elllipses, incoherencies, suspicious amendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient exmaples of shaped behavior (10)

• Culture, an acted document, is public.  (10)  Culture is public because meaning is.  Culture is a context, something within which social events, behaviors, institutions, process can be thickly described.  Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. (14)

I disagree with the first two sentences!

• Human behavior is symbolic action and it’s about “what is getting said”?

• “Cognitivist fallacy” – Culture consists of formal methods similar to those of mathematics and logic

• A good interpretation of anything “takes us into heart”

***What does that mean?***

• Ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse;  he writes it down, turning it from a passing event into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted (19)

In other words, an ethnographer creates a working memory of something.

• Cultural analysis is guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape. (20)

That’s funny, I was just thinking of creating this map of thinkers in Anthropology.

I think the best way, and probably primary way we remember and learn things is through a spatial orientation.  Maps are a pragmatic tool to navigate, not so much a comprehensive summation of meanings.

• Anthropologists don’t study villages;  they study in villages (22)

• The important thing about anthropologists’ findings is their complex specificness, their circumstantiality.  Long-term, qualitative, highly participative enables us to think both ABOUT them and WITH them (23)
• The task of theory is to make thick description possible and to generalize within cases

• Anthropology is more diagnostics than prognostication

• In ethnography, theory provides a vocabulary about what symbolic action has to say about itself, the role of culture in human life

• Cultural analysis is incomplete

• There’s no monologue, it’s just discussion were maintaining