Talk:Thick description

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Sadly, this page says nothing at all about what thick description is. The argument about semantics needing context (repeated at indexicality, really) is nothing like specific enough. Certainly some historians find thick description a useful working concept, for other reasons.

Charles Matthews 10:38, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 8 January 2019 and 30 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Win2121. Peer reviewers: Eumenade, JamesZD online.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 11:17, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

An example?

I think the average reader would need to see an example to have some sort of an idea about what thick description is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.181.209.50 (talk) 09:00, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Peer review

From User:Carwil

There's a significant amount of added material here and the work of describing the work is partially accomplished. I have a number of recommendations for making this a good article, which include:

• The first paragraph of "The Geertz Article" section is difficult for a non-specialist to understand. I suggest finding a non-anthropologist to read it (without getting to ask you questions), and working to improve it on that basis.
• Please tell us more about what ethnographies typically were pre-Geertz. Expand upon: "These ideas were incompatible with textbook definitions of ethnography of the times that described ethnography as systematic observations."
• I'm not sure this is contributing anything where it is: "In Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture Geertz address culture and concludes that men produce culture."
• "Natives" is a charged word, but one with a particular meaning within the discipline of anthropology. Explain that to readers when you first use it. (Possibly by connected "thick description" to Malinowski's "native point of view.")
• "Culture should be treated as symbolic.": Non-anthropologists might not know what this means.
• Avoid "current" when you mean "at the time Geertz was writing."
• The adoption section should explain how Geertz's approach was widely influential. It should connect him to the "interpretive turn in social sciences. See:
  • Discussion of the "interpretive turn" in Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2016-01-15). Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 978-3-11-040307-7.
  • Gellner's chapter in Hodder, Ian; Shanks, Michael (1997). Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-15744-5.
• This is a non-sequitur: "Because of its versatile nature, various disciplines popularized thick description."
• Sentences that obviously represent someone's opinion—"is credited with resuscitating field research from an endeavor of ongoing objectification"; "enlisted as a working antidote to overly technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding." Tell the reader in whose opinion this is so. See WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV

• No biographical material like this belongs in articles on concepts: "He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton."

Good luck!--Carwil (talk) 18:48, 15 April 2019 (UTC)