Don Seeman (Module 1a): Clifford Geertz: How thick does it get? (Model Blog)

In the advance reading for this class, anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains the philosophical background to ethnography as a research method. Though he tells a complex story about intrigue and sheep-stealing from his fieldwork in Morocco, probably the simplest way to understand what Geertz has to say is through his own analogy of “the wink.” It goes something like this: I see what looks like a wink. But how do I know what it really means? After all, it could be a sign of some shared joke, a sexual innuendo, an unconscious twitch, or it could be directed towards someone else or mean something else entirely that I have not yet discovered (a pre-arranged code for an attack). The only way I can parse this most basic meaning-making, according to Geertz, is through the use of context clues (do I know the person, what is our previous relationship like, what else is going on in the social field and, importantly, are there some shared cultural meanings to winking that I need to know about?). But if this is true even of some simple gesture like a wink, how much more so the complex and nuanced words and behaviors that people use in everyday life! How can I ever be sure I understand what is really going on, especially as shared experience between people or shared cultural background wanes?G

Geertz’s answer to that question is: Ethnography (also known as anthropological fieldwork or participant observation). By increasing the time and intimacy of the relationship between the researcher and the phenomenon they are studying it becomes easier to recognize context clues and more likely to read them correctly. I need to learn not only the local language but the local culture, body language, history of individuals and structural relations between them (who owes money to whom? Who has power here?). Ethnography is the process of learning all of those things through relatively long term participant observation or learning by being and doing in some local setting–and then writing it all down for analysis.

This is the first reading of the semester so there is not a lot to compare and contrast it with, but I am left with some questions. For one thing, Geertz seems to imply that the job of the ethnography is to “thickly” (i.e. with lots of detail and context) describe everything I witness during research. But is this even possible? Don’t I need some way to decide even before I get started what I will pay more or less attention to? If you think about thickly describing “everything” from even a 20 minute observation of your home or classroom you will realize how difficult, even hopeless a task that could be. Geertz is a good writer, but he does not really tell us how he decided to describe what he described out of all the infinite possibilities of description he would have met in the field. He focused for example on sheep steeling, not on people’s sexual relations, the history of Moroccan Judaism and Islam or the environmental factors constraining life in the Atlas Mountains etc. etc. etc. Does he implicitly adopt the view of one group of his informants or does he manage to really position himself outside the fray as a truly objective observer?

This leads me to another  thorny problem. Geertz says that context is everything. But does this mean that nothing has any intrinsic meaning of its own, outside of context? Is everything reducible to culture? Given that we will speaking in this class about seemingly hard and objective matters like assisted reproductive technology and people’s physiological capacities and limitations, do we need another kind of analytic language that does not threaten to go all postmodern on us? Or is Geertz really less postmodern than he seems?

What does any of this have to do with bioethics or human reproduction?