In the last session of my tutorial questions arose on what Thick Description actually is, were it comes from, how it might be best defined, how Clifford Geertz used it and what to think of „one of the most widely used texts in introductory anthropology courses“ (Kerim, Savage Minds).
And as if the world wouldn’t be small enough, by coincidence there was Saturday’s entry Anthro Classics Online: Geertz’s Notes on the Balinese Cockfight in Savage Minds. Zephyrin picked up immediately remembering HyperGeertz, an All-Inclusive- Documentation compiled by Ingo Moerth and Gerhard Froehlich. Sensational! A comprehensive, contextual and referential bibliography and mediagraphy of all works and public statements by Clifford Geertz! (Available as much as recommandable there is HyperBourdieu and HyperElias.)
Running through the site some might also discover answers to another question that came up about Geertz’s reaction on his critics within the developing Writing-Culture-Debate and within the last years, e.g. Geertz, Clifford, 2005: Shifting Aims, Moving Targets: On The Anthropology Of Religion. In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11 No. 1., pp. 1-15.
„We are, most all of us now, not just anthropologists, folklorists, or connoisseurs of the odd and arcane, thus somewhat employed. The jumbling of the world’s catalogue is, by now, general to the point of near universality. (…), drawn with increasing force and inevitability into the whirl of the world’s variety. It is, of course, possible that all this here-we-are-and-there-we-are will in time sort itself out and large, neat, hermetic blocs of cultural commonality, what we used to imagine ‘nations’ to be, will either re-emerge or be created anew. But, so far as I can see, there is at the moment precious little sign of it. Jumble is with us late and soon.†(p.14)
