1.1 Culture and ‘thick description’

According to Geertz, an interpretive theory of culture entails a methodological commitment to providing a ‘thick description’³, a term introduced by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle⁴. An intellectual undertaking of this kind represents ‘an elaborate venture’⁵, which obliges us to draw a distinction between two principal types of description: on the one hand, ‘thin description’, which is founded on surface-level observations of human behaviour; on the other hand, ‘thick description’, which contextualizes human behaviour and, thus, endeavours to comprehend it by taking into consideration the environment in which it takes place.

Ethnographic work, understood in the classical sense, involves a series of noteworthy activities—such as establishing a rapport between researcher(s) and participant(s), selecting a pool of informants, transcribing texts, developing genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so forth. Ultimately, these methodological tools are employed with the purpose of studying and comprehending a group of actors in their social setting, permitting the ethnographic researcher to produce a (theoretically informed and empirically based) narrative account of cultural practices, structures, and arrangements.

Geertz’s reflections on the differences between a twitch and a wink is a case in point⁶. Through the lens of a ‘thin description’, the act of contracting one’s eyelids may be perceived in merely physiological terms and, hence, as a twitch. Through the lens of a ‘thick description’, the same phenomenon may be interpreted as a (psychologically motivated, historically situated, socially contingent, and culturally codified) process whereby a person seeks to communicate something to someone else through a wink. If the latter, rather than the former, is the case, then the act of contracting one’s eyelids can be regarded as an act of winking, in the sense that something is being communicated (a) intentionally, (b) to another actor or group of actors, (c) with the goal of conveying a message in a secretive manner, and (d) to accomplish this without cognizance of the rest of the company.

Far from aiming to lay bare what anyone actually intends or means, however, Geertz is interested in explicating the larger system of meanings—that is, the semiotic system—through which people can participate in communicative processes (including winking). In other words, his primary concern is not to establish whether, in a given context, actors are trying to convey something in an enigmatic manner, to reveal what their fundamental motives are, and/or to enlighten us about what they are hoping to accomplish by performing a concealed or encrypted communicative act (such as winking). Rather, he is interested in contextualizing and understanding the semiotic code within and through which a culturally competent person can engage in communicative acts.

When attempting to provide a ‘thick description’, one is immersed in the realm of ethnography: its object of study is ‘a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures’⁷, practices, and arrangements. This symbolically mediated pecking order sets the parameters for the production, perception, appreciation, and interpretation of actions, or sets of actions, implying that, in principle, anything can be interpreted ‘as a cultural category’⁸.

Ethnographic descriptions are ‘extraordinarily thick’⁹ in that data are never simply ‘data’. Rather, they are the researcher’s ‘own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’¹⁰. Just as ordinary actors navigate their everyday lives by virtue of numerous material and symbolic constructions, so do those who seek to study and to comprehend them. Constructions of other people’s constructions are both constructive and reconstructive. They are constructive insofar as researchers have to mobilize their cognitive resources, projecting their own (perspective-, meaning-, and value-laden) concepts and beliefs upon those whose lives they scrutinize. At the same time, they are reconstructive insofar as they are supposed to capture their object of inquiry as accurately as possible, situating it in the contexts in which it is embedded and, by implication, in the relationally constituted spaces it inhabits.

To do justice to the complexity of this task, however, it is essential that the ethnographer recognize the challenges arising from identifying the factors that lurk in the background and, therefore, escape our common-sense grasp of the world: ‘most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined’¹¹. To put it bluntly, ethnographic research is as much about observing what seems obvious to the observer as about uncovering what can be found beneath the surface. To be sure, this twofold objective is not predicated on the assumption that crucial information is deliberately or unwittingly hidden by the research participants. Rather, it is based on the insight that, due to its multidimensional constitution and multifactorial determinacy, every social situation is far more complex than it appears to be at first glance.

1.2 Culture and ethnography

According to Geertz, it is erroneous to endorse ‘a view of anthropological research as rather more of an observational and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is’¹². Granted, every social science—including anthropology—has a ‘factual base’¹³, which constitutes ‘the hard rock, insofar as there is any, of the whole enterprise’¹⁴. This solid ground, however, is the empirical foundation of symbolically mediated and culturally codified practices, structures, and arrangements.

To accept that ‘ethnography is thick description’¹⁵ requires recognizing that ‘[d]oing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript-foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries’¹⁶. Reading—understood in these terms—is not only a technical matter of decoding, deciphering, or decrypting but also an interpretive exercise in looking at the world from the perspective shared and co-constructed by ordinary actors. This co-agential outlook manifests itself in different ways: collective representations, collective consciousness¹⁷, and collective imagination (at the ideological level); practices, habits, and conventions (at the behavioural level); social structures, arrangements, and organizations (at the institutional level).

Doing ethnography requires the ability to ‘construct a reading of’¹⁸ texts written not in ‘conventionalized graphs of sound’¹⁹ but, rather, in ‘transient examples of shaped behaviour’²⁰—and, by extension, of varying degrees of social institutionalization. Given their interest in and engagement with the (often messy and constantly evolving) constitution of social life, ethnographers cannot rely on standardized, routinized, and automatized forms of data collection. Committed to the participatory study of behavioural, ideological, and institutional modes of sociality, which are ‘superimposed upon or knotted into one another’²¹, ethnographers are confronted with several interrelated challenges: (a) the methodological challenge of examining, (b) the theoretical challenge of explaining, (c) the terminological challenge of offering a vocabulary for, (d) the epistemological challenge of identifying different types of knowledge emerging within, and (e) the empirical challenge of absorbing the presence of individual and collective forces, which—as structural and agential variables that are ‘at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit’²²—govern everyday life.

Caught between the scientific tasks of objectification, observation, and explanation, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic tasks of immersion, interpretation, and understanding, on the other, ethnographic descriptions—in the Geertzian sense—contain four characteristics: (a) they are interpretive, (b) they are interpretive of the flow of social discourse, (c) their processes of interpretation are aimed at rescuing ‘the “said” of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms’²³, and (d) they are microscopic.

This is not to suggest that ‘there are no large-scale anthropological interpretations of whole societies, civilizations, world events, and so on’²⁴. Indeed, ethnographic descriptions would be shortsighted if they failed to consider the macro-historical settings in which micro-historical events are situated and the macro-sociological factors by which micro-sociological dynamics are shaped. Moreover, there is an array of anthropological constants, which—owing to their ineluctable presence in forms of life—ethnographic descriptions cannot ignore. The tension between cross-cultural universals and cross-cultural variations is as central to anthropology as to any other social-scientific discipline concerned with the constitutive features by which humanity is either united or divided. The question is not whether any ‘all-too-human constancies’²⁵ exist. Rather, the question is whether these are outweighed by all-too-human differences.

Doing ethnography does not mean that those involved in the research should aim ‘either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them’²⁶. On the contrary, it is imperative that ethnographers be capable of maintaining a healthy scientific distance from their object(s) of study. Insofar as they succeed in doing so, they can combine the third-person perspective of the observer(s) with the first-person perspective of the participant(s), instead of claiming that one is epistemically superior to the other.

As Geertz—drawing on Stanley Cavell²⁷—points out, if ‘speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process’²⁸, the main reason for this is that ‘speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough’²⁹. Both in everyday life and in everyday research, the third-person perspectives of observers and the first-person perspectives of participants are deeply intertwined:

• As lifeworld-inhabitants, we are both participants (contributing to the material and symbolic construction of reality) and observers (grappling with and making judgements about the constitution of reality).

• As critical analysts, we are both participants (contributing to the production, reception, and circulation of both scientific and non-scientific reflections) and observers (mobilizing terminological, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and empirical tools for the study of reality).

By comprehending the nature and purpose of ethnography, as well as the orientations and practices of ethnographers, we can grasp ‘what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge’³⁰. In short, doing ethnography reveals a great deal about the project of interpretive anthropology.

1.3 Culture and anthropology

The concept of culture lies at the core of anthropology’s disciplinary identity. It is not self-evident, however, how the concept should be defined from an anthropological perspective. Warning his readers of an inflationary use of anthropology’s most central concept, Geertz makes a case for a clearly defined understanding of culture. On this account, a narrow and specialized conception of culture is both theoretically and empirically more insightful than a broad and elastic one, which is epitomized in E.B. Tylor’s well-known ‘most complex whole’ formulation³¹. It is not uncommon for such forms of ‘cultural holism’—according to which everything is cultural, just as culture is everything—to be implicitly or explicitly invoked in general introductions to anthropology.

A good example of this trend is Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man³², in which—as pointed out by Geertz—the concept of culture is defined in a dozen ways³³: (a) civilizational³⁴; (b) sociological³⁵; (c) mental, emotional, and ideological³⁶; (d) symbolic³⁷; (e) behavioural³⁸; (f) educational and transgenerational³⁹; (g) habitual and consequential⁴⁰; (h) educational and behavioural⁴¹; (i) normative and regulative⁴²; (j) technical, instrumental, and social⁴³; (k) historical and motivational⁴⁴; (l) orientational, representational, and environmental⁴⁵.

While expressing a degree of sympathy with Kluckhohn’s attempt at developing a differentiated account of culture, Geertz warns that an overly eclectic, if not catch-all, approach runs the risk of failing to recognize that ‘it is necessary to choose’⁴⁶ and, thus, to provide a workable definition of this central concept. The concept of culture endorsed by Geertz, then, is ‘essentially a semiotic one’⁴⁷. Similar to Max Weber’s Verstehende Soziologie, Geertz’s interpretive anthropology is predicated on the assumption that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’⁴⁸. Culture can be regarded as the totality of those webs, which are not only socially constructed but also symbolically mediated by, and materially embedded in, local and global networks of human actions and interactions. On this view, anthropology is ‘not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’⁴⁹. In brief, interpretive anthropology is a form of cultural analysis, rather than a type of experimental science, let alone scientism.

While advocating an interpretive conception of anthropology, Geertz rejects mentalist, idealist, and occultist approaches to culture—that is, explanatory frameworks that tend to reduce culture to a merely cognitive, conceptual, and/or hidden affair. In a more general sense, he is wary of the dichotomous thinking by which much of anthropology has been marked ever since it came into existence. This mode of reasoning is illustrated in counterproductive divisions, such as subjectivism vs. objectivism, idealism vs. materialism, mentalism vs. behaviourism, impressionism vs. positivism—to mention only a few. These (and other) paradigmatic dualisms manifest themselves in varying degrees of academic tribalism and increasingly polarized ways of defining and defending discipline-specific (particularly terminological, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and empirical) tools. Ultimately, this trend results in the proliferation of fruitless intellectual divisions, preventing social scientists from combining insights gained from competing traditions of thought.

Different social-scientific approaches offer different perspectives on the ‘ontological status’⁵⁰ of culture (and, by extension, on the terminological, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and empirical tools by which it should be studied). Irrespective of one’s interpretation, it would be erroneous to present culture as ‘a self-contained “superorganic” reality with forces and purposes of its own’⁵¹, since such a totalizing move would oblige us ‘to reify it’⁵². To put it bluntly, a culturalist conception of the social is no less reductive than its economistic counterpart. And yet, the idea that culture is located ‘in the minds and hearts of men’⁵³—which is central to cognitivist and mentalist approaches to forms of life—is equally problematic. In fact, this notion is common among proponents of ethnoscience, componential analysis, and—crucially—cognitive anthropology⁵⁴. For Geertz, this cognitivist fallacy indicates that ‘extreme subjectivism is married to extreme formalism’⁵⁵.

Whether we are dealing with the cognitivist reduction of culture to a merely mental or psychological affair, the subjectivist reduction of culture to a phenomenon located in and defined by individuals, the formalist reduction of culture to an object of study graspable only by mathematics and logic, the behaviourist reduction of culture to a sequence of actions and interactions determined by environmental conditioning, or the idealist reduction of culture to spatiotemporally contingent sets of concepts and representations—none of these outlooks can do justice to the complexity of culture, notably in terms of its constitution, functioning, and development (both within and across different contexts).

1.4 Culture and meaning

Far from being reducible to ‘the conceptual manipulation of discovered facts, a logical reconstruction of a mere reality’⁵⁶, whose inner workings are determined by ‘autogenous principles of order’⁵⁷, anthropological inquiry is a mode of cultural analysis⁵⁸ that involves ‘guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses’⁵⁹. It could not be further removed from the transcendental belief in the possibility of ‘discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape’⁶⁰, as if cultural analysis were motivated by the enlightening mission of seeking to uncover the underlying mechanisms that govern the material and symbolic construction of reality.

In the spirit of the later Wittgenstein, Geertz insists that ‘[c]ulture is public because meaning is’⁶¹. Just as, according to the later Wittgenstein, ‘[t]he meaning of a word is its use in the language’⁶², the value of a culture is its use in a particular context. There is no such thing as an entirely private language and no such thing as an entirely private culture. Language and culture are products of the symbolically mediated and materially anchored actions and interactions taking place between human subjects.

Since the earlier Husserl⁶³ and the later Wittgenstein⁶⁴, the widespread rejection of ‘privacy theories of meaning’⁶⁵ has been an integral part of the humanities and social sciences—from philosophy and linguistics to sociology and anthropology. As a general trend, it reflects the widely shared conviction that ‘culture consists of socially established structures of meaning’⁶⁶, mobilized by human actors navigating the objective, normative, and subjective realms of their existence. Culture has a strong cognitive dimension, in that it permeates a person’s dispositional apparatus of perception, appreciation, and interpretation. At the same time, culture has a pronounced relational dimension, in that it shapes a person’s way of encountering, engaging with, and working upon the world. Culture is a manifestation, vehicle, and engine of intersubjectivity.

1.5 Culture and (un)familiarity

One of the most striking features of cultural (including inter- and cross-cultural) dynamics is the relationship between familiarity and unfamiliarity—or, to be precise, between degrees of familiarity and degrees of unfamiliarity⁶⁷. As pointed out by the later Wittgenstein⁶⁸, given the (in many cases, profound) differences between forms of life, a person from one culture may perceive a person from another culture as ‘a complete enigma’⁶⁹ (and vice versa). When we fail to understand each other due to cultural differences, ‘[w]e cannot find our feet with them’⁷⁰. When this happens, we experience the full force of cultural (and often linguistic) incommensurability, which makes us realize the tangible consequences of interpretive inaccessibility. Put in Kantian terms, such an experience makes the foreign or unfamiliar culture appear like a noumenal realm (that is, ‘culture in itself’), to which we do not have access and whose constitution is only inferable through our superficial decoding of a phenomenal realm (that is, ‘culture as it appears to us’)⁷¹.

Geertz draws attention to a curious paradox: on the one hand, we are confronted with ‘[t]he great natural variation of cultural forms’⁷² across the world, indicating the high degree of contingency permeating the spatiotemporally conditions that undergird the existence of humanity; on the other hand, we are faced with ‘the biological unity of the human species’⁷³, which transcends socially constructed boundaries and provides us with a sense of universality, based on a set of anthropological constants, which distinguish us from other sentient beings, irrespective of their role in the construction of reality.

As members of a species whose members are divided by several sociological variables, one of which is culture, most—if not all—of us are familiar not only with the feeling of familiarity but also with the feeling of unfamiliarity: we may be in sync with a cultural environment, especially when we experience it as broadly aligned with our personal identity; we may be out of sync with a cultural environment, especially when we experience it as largely misaligned with our personal identity. Human life is a constant back-and-forth between experiences of familiarity and experiences of unfamiliarity.

1.6 Culture and science

The quest for evidence-based and logically defensible truth claims is central to modernity’s attempt to make the world more and more controllable⁷⁴ by virtue of a ‘new positive science’⁷⁵. Narrowly defined versions of this project, however, tend to result in dogmatically pursued variants of scientism, which ignore, or deny, the extent to which human reality is socially constructed⁷⁶—including the extent to which its constitution, functioning, and development⁷⁷ are contingent upon symbolically mediated actions and interactions performed by meaning-seeking beings.

In anthropological terms, symbolism is the ‘new key’ to understanding how the human mind has transformed the primal need to express oneself⁷⁸. Understanding the nature of understanding—and, on a metatheoretical level, understanding the understanding of the nature of understanding—can be regarded as a major challenge for the humanities and social sciences, from hermeneutics and phenomenology to social psychology, micro-sociology, interpretive sociology, and interpretive anthropology. These interpretive—if not, interpretivist—endeavours emphasize not only the perspective-, meaning-, and value-laden constitution of social reality but also the degree to which monolithic and monoparadigmatic approaches fail to account for the multilayered composition of the objective, normative, and subjective realms that humans inhabit.

And yet, even if reductive frameworks (whether these be cognitivist, subjectivist, formalist, behaviourist, idealist, or otherwise) do ‘not explain everything, not even everything human’⁷⁹, they still explain something, albeit in a highly limited and questionable fashion. Two key questions that arise in this context are (a) how to distinguish between non-reductive and reductive approaches and (b) how to distinguish between scientific and non-scientific (including pseudo-scientific) approaches. The ‘demarcation problem’⁸⁰, therefore, poses numerous challenges, notably in relation to (a) the question of where to draw the line between defensible and indefensible explanatory reductions and (b) the question of where to draw the line between what counts as science and what does not count as science.

Albert Einstein’s famous dictum that ‘[e]verything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler’⁸¹, captures the complexity of this task. Non-reductive and scientific endeavours should make everything (including extremely complicated issues) as simple as possible. Their reductive and non-scientific (comprising pseudo-scientific) counterparts, however, make them simpler than they actually are.

It is no accident that, with the exception of Skinnerian versions of behaviourism and intelligence testing, operationalism ‘as a methodological dogma’⁸² has become increasingly marginalized in the contemporary social sciences. For all its limitations and shortcomings, including its tendency to reduce potentially complex social phenomena to mere ‘operations’⁸³, these approaches have one advantage: they oblige us to acknowledge that, in order ‘to understand what a science is’⁸⁴ and, by implication, how it really functions, one needs to ‘look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it’⁸⁵. Rather, one ‘should look at what the practitioners of it do’⁸⁶. In other words, a powerful advantage of operationalist approaches is that—owing to their pragmatist spirit—they require us to challenge and to go beyond what scientists preach. To this end, it is essential to examine what they do when pursuing research, including the strategies they employ when positioning themselves in relation to their collaborators and competitors as well as, more generally, in relation to other actors in their respective fields.

1.7 Culture and semiotics

The principal aim of anthropology may be defined as ‘the enlargement of the universe of human discourse’⁸⁷. While this is not anthropology’s sole objective (and while, in one form or another, it is pursued by various other disciplines), it provides a strong justification for ‘a semiotic concept of culture’⁸⁸—that is, for an approach committed to the study of signs and symbols and of their meaning and use. From a semiotic point of view, culture is not reducible to an anonymous power or force, working—paradoxically, both ‘through our bodies’ and ‘behind our backs’—in a causalist fashion and determining every inch of our being. It is not the case that culture is so omnipresent and omnipotent that it is capable of hijacking the physical, social, and personal dimensions of our existence, in such a way that these are not only permeated but also determined by its normative codes and modes of functioning. While human actions and interactions are unavoidably power-laden, they are not always power-driven⁸⁹. While human actions and interactions are unavoidably culture-laden, they are not always culture-driven. Put differently, all social practices are power- and culture-permeated, but not all of them are power- and culture-motivated.

Rather than ascribing causal power to culture, an interpretive anthropology conceives of it in semiotic—and, by implication, contextual—terms. On this account, culture is a context within which social phenomena (whether these belong to the micro-, meso-, or macro-spheres of human existence) can ‘be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described’⁹⁰. Obviously, the question of whether such a (cultural) context is familiar or unfamiliar to those experiencing and/or studying it is crucial. The old cliché that anthropology is all about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar persists to this day. This laudable mission, however, is transferable to other academic disciplines. Scientific endeavours that succeed in shedding light on the underlying forces that escape our common-sense perception of reality make the unfamiliar familiar. Scientific endeavours that succeed in challenging and breaking free from everyday preconceptions of reality make the familiar unfamiliar. Both missions—that is, both one’s familiarization with the unfamiliar and one’s defamiliarization of the familiar—are essential to the pursuit of a critical social science.

Addressing this task, interpretive anthropology advocates an action-oriented approach, commonly associated with a strong emphasis on the paradigm of Verstehen⁹¹. The interpretive approach proposed by Geertz, however, differs from classical Verstehen-focused methods (à la Dilthey and Weber)⁹² in that it is concerned with understanding semiotic codes, rather than with performing an empathetic interpretation of people’s largely unconscious assumptions, intentions, and motives⁹³.

In anthropology (as in any other social science), it is important to draw a distinction between one’s object of study and one’s mode of study. The former is ontological in the sense that it refers to a type of being situated in the world. The latter is methodological in the sense that it refers to the means by which a particular component of the world is examined. Whether they do so as insiders or outsiders, ethnographers seek to gain an understanding of social realms by immersing themselves in them. Their ‘anthropological writings are themselves interpretations’⁹⁴ of their object(s) of inquiry. To be clear, ordinary actors (or ‘natives’) are as interpretive as academic researchers. Yet, whereas the former rely largely on first-order interpretations, the latter generate second-order (or even third-order) interpretations. First-order interpretations permit natives to inhabit ‘their’ culture through the taken-for-granted assumptions of their worldview. Second-order (or even third-order) interpretations, by contrast, enable researchers to convert other cultures into objects of scientific investigation.

For Geertz, the sociological differences between ‘natives’ and ‘researchers’ manifest themselves not only in the epistemological differences between ‘first-order interpretations’ and ‘second-order/third-order interpretations’, the methodological differences between ‘insider involvement’ and ‘outsider observation’, and the ontological differences between ‘cultural being’ and ‘cultural analysis’ but also in the functional differences between ‘substance’ and ‘representation’. Culture is ubiquitous. It exists everywhere, in the sense that it permeates every aspect (including seemingly non-cultural aspects) of human life. By contrast, ‘anthropology exists in the book, the article, the lecture, the museum display, or, sometimes nowadays, the film’⁹⁵. It is present in particular meta-cultural realms—that is, in realms whose main function consists in reflecting upon culture as both a vehicle of human co-existence and a vehicle of a symbolically mediated transcendence of material immanence.

To become aware of culture—as both a problematizable object of study and a constitutive part of human existence—is ‘to realize that the line between mode of representation and substantive content is as undrawable in cultural analysis as it is in painting’⁹⁶. If anything, the line between its mode of representation and its substantive content is blurred and constantly being renegotiated, not least because the latter is part of the former, just as the former is part of the latter. Put differently, there are no cultural depictions without cultural existence, just as there is no cultural existence without cultural depictions.

The blurring of the line between mode of representation and substantive content ‘seems to threaten the objective status of anthropological knowledge by suggesting that its source is not social reality but scholarly artifice’⁹⁷. At the same time, it seems to undermine the ontological status of anthropological existence by promoting the inflationary notion that culture is everywhere and nowhere. If ‘ethnography is thick description and ethnographers [are] those who are doing the describing’⁹⁸, then the key question that arises is whether—in Geertz’s phraseology—‘it sorts winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones’⁹⁹ and, thus, whether it succeeds in distinguishing between (merely) physiological and (essentially) motivational acts.

1.8 Culture and coherence

The relationship between culture and coherence is far from straightforward. On the one hand, ‘coherence cannot be the major test of validity for a cultural description’¹⁰⁰, since social life is fragile, messy, and unpredictable. On the other hand, ‘[c]ultural systems must have a minimal degree of coherence’¹⁰¹, since social life is not viable unless it is relatively stable, organized, and predictable. Cultural systems, however, would implode without the modes of behaviour by which they are produced, reproduced, and potentially transformed. Indeed, the concept of behaviour needs to be taken seriously by anthropologists, ‘because it is through the flow of behaviour—or, more precisely, social action—that cultural forms find articulation’¹⁰². All symbolically mediated actions and interactions—embedded in language, consciousness, culture, artefacts, and so forth—‘draw their meaning from the role they play (Wittgenstein would say their “use”) in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships they bear to one another’¹⁰³. Words derive their meanings from the way they are used¹⁰⁴. Language games obtain their existential significance from the fact that they are—at once—manifestations, vehicles, and engines of forms of life.

Viewed in this (socio-holistic) light, a ‘hermetic’ or ‘isolationist’ conception of culture is untenable. If culture is regarded ‘as a symbolic system (the catch phrase is, “in its own terms”), by isolating its elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements, and then characterizing the whole system in some general way’¹⁰⁵, the extent to which it permeates all aspects of social life, while itself being permeated by them, is overlooked. Such a narrow approach runs the risk of ‘locking cultural analysis away from its proper object, the informal logic of actual life’¹⁰⁶, which is irreducible to the self-referential logic of reductive frameworks. Whether these be defended as versions of cognitivism, subjectivism, formalism, behaviourism, or idealism (or, in discipline-parasitic terms, as psychologism, sociologism, or anthropologism), they fall into the trap of schematicism¹⁰⁷.

For Geertz, there is no doubt that ‘[n]othing has done more […] to discredit cultural analysis than the construction of impeccable depictions of formal order in whose actual existence nobody can quite believe’¹⁰⁸. When formal orders take precedence over substantive orders, the former end up being increasingly dissociated from the latter. What may make sense on paper may not make sense in real life (and vice versa). More importantly, what may make no sense on paper may make a lot of sense in real life (and vice versa). This insight places an enormous burden on the process (and purpose) of anthropological interpretation: ‘A good interpretation of anything […] takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation.’¹⁰⁹

Just as all cultures exist on a spectrum between coherence and incoherence, so do the interpretations by which they are sustained (‘from within’) and/or studied (‘from without’).

1.9 Culture and context

For Geertz, all interpretations (and misinterpretations) need to be put in context. They are, by definition, perspectival and ‘inherently inconclusive’¹¹⁰. Given the tentative nature of all interpretations, ‘[e]thnographic findings are not privileged, just particular’¹¹¹. Their epistemic value, in other words, needs to be relativized (without therefore subscribing to relativism¹¹²): spatiotemporal contingency pervades the social world—including all interpretations generated, negotiated, and evaluated within it. Contingency permeates not only all ontologies of the social world but also the first- and second-order epistemologies that arise within it. The notion that ethnographic findings can rise above the contingency of the historical settings in which they emerge amounts to a transcendental illusion.

One of the most striking features of ‘the anthropologist’s findings is their complex specificness, their circumstantiality’¹¹³. There is no anthropology without a critical awareness of the situatedness at the core of all forms of sociality. Far from being reducible to an abstract principle of anthropological research, however, the methodological commitment to drawing on ‘material produced by long-term, mainly (though not exclusively) qualitative, highly participative, and almost obsessively fine-comb field study in confined contexts’¹¹⁴ is vital to the ethnographic enterprise. In fact, it is a precondition for developing and substantiating ‘the mega-concepts with which contemporary social science is afflicted’¹¹⁵ and which tend to be associated with macro-theoretical approaches—such as functionalism, systems theory, and complexity theory.

One of the many lessons that such a microscopic¹¹⁶ grassroots approach teaches us is that, unless social-scientific ‘mega-concepts’¹¹⁷ and grand theories are rooted in a fine-grained understanding of cultural dynamics and constellations as they emerge in everyday life, there is no chance of acquiring ‘the sort of sensible actuality that makes it possible to think not only realistically and concretely about them, but, what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with them’¹¹⁸. The methodological challenges raised by the microscopic analysis of ethnography are ‘both real and critical’¹¹⁹.

The point, however, is not to focus on micro-sociological settings with the aim of treating each of them as a mini-universe, reducible to a ‘world in a teacup’¹²⁰ or ‘cloud chamber’¹²¹, let alone an autopoietic system. Rather, the point is to acknowledge that ‘social actions are comments on more than themselves’¹²², in the sense that they convey potentially significant meanings about both the microcosms (such as social fields, lifeworlds, and communities) and the macrocosms (such as social institutions, systems, and societies) in which they are spatiotemporally situated. ‘Small facts speak to large issues, winks to epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they are made to.’¹²³ It is not simply that small is beautiful but, rather, that small is relevant. Put differently, small is actually big because it is a foundational part of the bigger picture.

1.10 Culture and interpretation

A major limitation of interpretive approaches to different aspects of social life ‘is that they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to escape systematic modes of assessment’¹²⁴. This is not the case because—unlike explanation [Erklären]—interpretation or understanding [Verstehen] may be misconceived as an atheoretical, or even anti-theoretical, endeavour. Rather, this is the case because ‘[y]ou either grasp an interpretation or you do not, see the point of it or you do not, accept it or you do not’¹²⁵. Interpretation is not merely a cognitive mechanism (subject to the laws of logic, validity, or rationality) but also an experiential and existential journey (contingent on different degrees of recognition, relevance, and resonance).

If an interpretation, however, is ‘[i]mprisoned in the immediacy of its own detail, it is presented as self-validating, or, worse, as validated by the supposedly developed sensitivities of the person who presents it’¹²⁶. If, by contrast, it is open to being challenged by other interpretations and, hence, by access to details from outside its epistemic and/or experiential comfort zone, it stands a chance of being revised (and, ultimately, strengthened) by exposing its own limitations and incorporating insights from alternative perspectives. If anthropology—or any adjacent field of inquiry for that matter—claims to be a science, it should be able to demonstrate that ‘the conceptual structure of a cultural interpretation’¹²⁷ is as solid, formulable, and ‘susceptible to explicit canons of appraisal’¹²⁸ as the procedural norms and principles underlying experimental and observational methods in the natural sciences. And yet, the theoretical development of cultural interpretations is difficult for at least two reasons:

2.1 Between interpretation and explanation

In any ethnography, gathering background information¹⁸⁰ is important for contextualizing one’s object of study. The challenge, however, consists in demonstrating the extent to which an interactional background—which comprises a combination of social, cultural, historical, and other dimensions—can be both interpreted in hermeneutic-phenomenological terms (in accordance with the paradigm of Verstehen) and explained in functionalist terms (in accordance with the paradigm of Erklären). Just as facts can be explained and meanings can be interpreted, meanings can be explained and facts can be interpreted. Both explanatory interpretations and interpretive explanations are integral parts of social science. Perhaps, the marriage of hermeneutics and functionalism is not so unhappy after all¹⁸¹.

2.2 Between the micro and the macro

Ethnographers face up to the challenge of absorbing the presence of individual and collective forces, which—as structural and agential variables that are ‘at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit’¹⁸²—govern everyday life. A key question arising from this issue, however, is why some societies appear to be better (or worse) than others at reaching an equilibrium between their relatively stable, organized, and predictable dimensions, on the one hand, and their fragile, messy, and unpredictable dimensions, on the other. To account for the multi-level complexity of these dynamics, it is vital to combine micro-sociological (including ethnographic, hermeneutic, and phenomenological) with macro-sociological (including functionalist, systems-theoretic, and structuralist) perspectives.

2.3 Between the particular and the universal

It is one thing to draw attention to the tension between the particular and the universal in terms of the relationship between ‘[t]he great natural variation of cultural forms’¹⁸³ and ‘the biological unity of the human species’¹⁸⁴. It is quite another to resolve this tension—or at least to illustrate how the former can be squared with the latter. Paradoxically, particularity and universality represent two co-constitutive elements of the human condition. To be clear, universals may manifest themselves in particular ways, just as particulars may amount to expressions of universal features. Culture is both ‘a particular universal’ and ‘a universal particular’: insofar as it is present in all forms of life, culture constitutes ‘a particular universal’ of human existence; insofar as different forms of life generate different modes of being, culture constitutes ‘a universal particular’ separating human collectives—in terms of their values, habits, conventions, traditions, and codes of conduct—from one another.

2.4 Between reality and representation

‘The ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse’¹⁸⁵ and, hence, ‘writes it down’¹⁸⁶. Thus, the ethnographic engagement with reality is discursive in a twofold manner: it reconstructs the discursive constitution of social life (object of study), and it accomplishes this in a discursive fashion (method of study). Faced with this task, the ethnographer must avoid confusing the reality of representation with the representation of reality¹⁸⁷. If reality is reduced to its textual, discursive, subjective, normative, psychological, and/or ideological construction, then we run the risk of falling into the traps of textualism, discursivism, subjectivism, normativism, psychologism, and/or ideologism. While there is more to the construction of human reality than its material, physical, and empirical dimensions, there is more to it than its nonmaterial, nonphysical, and nonempirical counterparts.

2.5 Between nature and culture

In anthropology, the concept of culture is of paramount importance. Given the pivotal role it plays in the construction of both human and nonhuman realities, it occupies a central place not only in the humanities and social sciences but also in the natural sciences. It is no accident, therefore, that the empirical and conceptual boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are increasingly blurred. If we accept that human (and some nonhuman) actors exist on a continuum between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, we need to ask to what extent this distinction still holds true, on both empirical and conceptual grounds.

2.6 Between interpretations of culture and cultures of interpretation

It is, of course, prudent to reject reductive conceptions of culture (whether these be cognitivist, subjectivist, formalist, behaviourist, idealist, or otherwise). A first step towards overcoming their respective shortcomings is to provide a high-resolution approach capable of differentiating discipline-specific perspectives on culture:

• In anthropology, the concept of culture commonly refers to a set of symbolically mediated behaviours and ideas acquired by human beings as members of forms of life¹⁸⁸.

• In philosophy, the concept of culture is crucial on at least three levels: (a) ontologically, as an existential source of species-constitutive transcendence; (b) epistemologically, as a vehicle allowing for symbolic meditation and interpretation; (c) ethically, as a locus of normative regulation¹⁸⁹.

• In sociology, the concept of culture has acquired, and been studied in terms of, several meanings: (a) in cultural sociology, as the performative nucleus of social constructions; (b) in economic sociology, as a commodity; (c) in digital sociology, as a hyperreality; (d) in critical sociology, as an interest- and power-laden field of competition and struggle; (e) in political sociology, as an arena of ideas, beliefs, norms, and values¹⁹⁰.

• In the arts, the concept of culture describes a source of aesthetic experience¹⁹¹.

• In politics, the concept of culture has, especially in recent decades, acquired the meaning of a relationally constructed and power-laden sphere, which has the characteristics of a social battlefield¹⁹².

Granted, this is by no means an exhaustive overview of seminal interpretations of culture¹⁹³. It illustrates, however, that a nuanced understanding of culture is needed, if one aims to grasp the principal functions it plays in the construction of reality, including its constitutive (notably social, linguistic, political, ideological, religious, economic, demographic, and other) dimensions¹⁹⁴.

2.7 Between cognitive orders and normative orders

The cognitivist or mentalist notion that culture is located ‘in the minds and hearts of men’¹⁹⁵ is one-sided and flawed in that it fails to account for the multiple factors at play in the construction of codified behaviour, which is indispensable to the emergence of more or less viable and solidified forms of social interaction. Granted, cognitivist and mentalist conceptions of culture have received considerable attention in the contemporary social sciences—including in anthropology¹⁹⁶ and sociology¹⁹⁷. One of the main challenges in this respect concerns the question of the extent to which neuroscientific approaches can be combined with their social-scientific counterparts, especially with regard to explanatory models on culturally variable patterns of socialization¹⁹⁸.

Ultimately, however, every ‘cultural order’ is a ‘normative order’¹⁹⁹—that is, an order within which behaviour is (implicitly or explicitly) codified, in accordance with (implicit or explicit) conventions, standards, values, assumptions, and principles. To be empirically relevant, these need to be imprinted in our bodies in general and our brains in particular. There are no culturally defined modes of being without internalized schemes of perception, interpretation, appreciation, and action (and vice versa). In brief, there are no ‘normative orders’ without ‘cognitive orders’, just as there are no ‘cognitive orders’ without ‘normative orders’.

2.8 Between the public and the private

While it is true that ‘[c]ulture is public because meaning is’²⁰⁰ (and the same applies to language²⁰¹), it is also true that every culture comprises private dimensions (just as every language does), expressed in private meanings. To be sure, the Wittgensteinian critique of ‘the private language argument’²⁰² may be as persuasive as the Adornian thesis of ‘the preponderance of the object’²⁰³.

A key question is why—to a greater or lesser degree—the tension between ‘public’ and ‘private’ (and, by implication, between ‘public interests’ and ‘private interests’)²⁰⁴ pervades all forms of life: ‘individualist’ or ‘collectivist’, ‘complex’ or ‘simple’, ‘loose’ or ‘tight’, ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal’, ‘freedom-based’ or ‘control-based’, ‘person-centred’ or ‘community-centred’, ‘relatively heterogeneous’ or ‘relatively homogeneous’, ‘technologically advanced’ or ‘technologically backward’, ‘large-scale’ or ‘small-scale’²⁰⁵.

Another crucial question is where to draw the line between ‘public’ and ‘private’, both analytically (in anthropological and sociological terms) and normatively (in moral and political terms). Different analytical frameworks (from hermeneutics and phenomenology to functionalism and systems theory) and different normative frameworks (from virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and utilitarian ethics to moral sentimentalism and the ethics of care—from anarchism, communism, and socialism to liberalism, conservatism, and fascism—from feminism to environmentalism) will provide different answers to this question. Both theoretically and practically, the public/private dichotomy means different things to different people (from different cultural backgrounds and with different worldviews).

2.9 Between common humanity and cultural diversity

One need not be a professional anthropologist to comprehend that a person from one culture may perceive a person from another culture as ‘a complete enigma’²⁰⁶ (and vice versa). When this happens, they experience the full force of cultural (and often linguistic) incommensurability and face the consequences of interpretive inaccessibility. Casting doubt on the received wisdom of some scholars (notably those pursuing postmodern and/or poststructuralist agendas), it is important to recognize that, even in cases of seemingly insurmountable degrees of cultural incommensurability and/or interpretive inaccessibility, there are cross- and transcultural channels of communication between actors, permitting them to engage with, to relate to, and to make sense of each other²⁰⁷. Their common humanity transcends all (real or imagined) obstacles created by cultural (including linguistic) diversity.

2.10 Between ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge

There would be no point in pursuing social science (including interpretive anthropology) if, as researchers, we did not aspire to go beyond the epistemic realm of everyday preconceptions. In order to undertake this ‘epistemo­logical break’²⁰⁸, we need to draw a distinction between ordinary knowledge (generated and used by laypersons) and scientific knowledge (produced and employed by researchers and experts). Considering the distinction between ‘ordinary knowledge’ and ‘scientific knowledge’, we are confronted with three main options²⁰⁹:

• Option 1: The former is superior to the latter, because it is based on the ‘genuine’ (individual and/or collective) experiences of human actors in ‘real life’. On this view, the former provides a degree of per­spectival authenticity that the latter, due to its socially detached constitution, fails to embrace, let alone to convey.

• Option 2: The latter is superior to the former, because it is—at once—empirically substantiated, meth­odologically rigorous, epistemologically reflexive, terminologically precise, and theoretically informed. On this view, the latter guarantees a degree of epistemic certainty that the former, owing to its inevitable reliance on everyday preconceptions, fails to strive for, let alone to achieve.

• Option 3: Little is to be gained from constructing a rigid epistemic hierarchy between the former and the latter. Although ‘ordinary knowledge’ and ‘scientific knowledge’ are qualitatively different, they reflect equally legitimate types of epistemic engagement with the world. Rather than opposing ‘ordinary’ and ‘scientific’ ways of attributing meaning to and acting upon reality, we should seek to cross-fertilize these—arguably complementary—modes of relating to the world. As laypersons, we can navigate our everyday lives and—whether we do so consciously or unconsciously—draw on scientif­ically established insights. As experts, we can study objective, normative, and/or subjective aspects of the world and take ordinary people—including their conceptions, as well as their misconceptions, of reality—seriously.

Based on a sound understanding of the relationship between ‘ordinary knowledge’ and ‘scientific knowledge’, interpretive anthropology should commit to the third option. Whether we focus on the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of everyday life, the sociology of morality, the sociology of science and technology, or any other relevant area of sociological inquiry, Geertz’s interpretive anthropology serves as a source of critical insight for each of them: in all realms of life—whether these be represented in, shaped by, and/or constructed through ordinary or scientific discourses—humans are caught in webs of significance, which they produce, reproduce, and potentially transform through their actions and interactions as well as their classifications and interpretations.

2.11 Between correlation and causation

From a semiotic perspective, culture is not reducible to an anonymous power or force, capable of colonizing both the material and the symbolic dimensions of our existence in a causalist fashion. Given its emphasis on the multi-level and multi-agential constitution of social reality, interpretive anthropology rejects both causalist and determinist explanatory frameworks. In accordance with this view, we must avoid lapsing into the correlation–causation fallacy—that is, we cannot deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two (or more) developments from an observed correlation between them. The dictum ‘correlation does not imply causation’, although it has almost become a truism in the social sciences, needs to be defended to prevent us from being seduced by simplistic explanations of multilayered, multifaceted, and multifactorial states of affairs and events. Interpretive anthropology should admit, however, that it is not always clear where to draw the line between causation and correlation—not least because, in some cases, our culture may cause us to behave and/or to think in a particular way (and not in another).

2.12 Between familiarity and strangeness

The old cliché that anthropology is all about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar persists to this day. Arguably, this laudable mission is transferable to other academic disciplines. Scientific endeavours that succeed in shedding light on the underlying forces that escape our common-sense perception of reality make the unfamiliar familiar. Scientific endeavours that succeed in challenging and breaking free from everyday preconceptions of reality make the familiar unfamiliar. Even if we recognize, however, that both tasks are essential to the pursuit of a critical social science, we need to concede that, in many cases, the distinction between ‘the familiar’ and ‘the unfamiliar’ is not as straightforward as it may appear at first glance. Social life comprises grey areas, which both ordinary actors and researchers may experience and conceptualize as ‘semi-familiar’ (or ‘semi-unfamiliar’, depending on one’s angle). Arguably, both those immersed in everyday life and those studying everyday life can learn a great deal from these grey areas, not least because they illustrate that interpretive processes—both for ‘insiders’ and for ‘outsiders’—can be marked by high degrees of elasticity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

2.13 Between ontology and epistemology

In any scientific investigation, it makes sense to draw a distinction between ontology and methodology, implying that ‘the object of study is one thing and the study of it another’²¹⁰. This insight, however, requires a further consideration, which concerns the realm of epistemology, including its role in anthropology: the normativity of the perspective sets the parameters for the descriptibility of the object²¹¹. Ethnographers, even when making a conscious and sustained effort to minimize their implicit biases, carry their preconceptions into their fieldwork. The most reflexive anthropologists cannot remove the projective power of perspective-, meaning-, and value-laden assumptions from their interpretations²¹².

2.14 Between functionalism and interpretivism

It would be naïve to deny that ‘[c]ultural systems must have a minimal degree of coherence’²¹³, since social life is not viable unless it is relatively stable, organized, and predictable. To the extent that interpretive anthropology acknowledges the fact that society is unthinkable without its reliance on cultural systems, it is predicated on a functionalist understanding of the structural preconditions for the emergence and sustainability of forms of life. Rather than stressing only its ethnographic orientation, however, interpretive anthropology should be upfront about its subjacent functionalist presuppositions. It is no accident that, in the secondary literature, there has been a growing interest in studying the links between functionalist and interpretive approaches. More specifically, there have been promising attempts at examining the theoretical and methodological implications of Geertz’s exposure to, engagement with, and training in functionalist modes of analysis for his interpretive approach²¹⁴.

2.15 Between Feldanschauung and Weltanschauung

Language games obtain their existential significance from the fact that they are—at once—manifestations, vehicles, and engines of forms of life. Interpretive anthropology would benefit from combining this Wittgensteinian insight into the relationship between ‘forms of life’ and ‘language games’ with Bourdieusian inquiries into the relationship between ‘social fields’ and ‘illusio’. Each social microcosm generates a field-specific view of the world [Feldanschauung]²¹⁵. The problematic irony of illusio consists in its power to convert the subject’s Feldanschauung into its Weltanschauung.

Be it in the economic field (‘business is business’), the artistic field (‘art for the sake of art’), the judicial field (‘justice for the sake of justice’), or the scientific field (‘truth for the sake of truth’)²¹⁶—every social field generates its own set of competing discourses, mobilized by its participants not only to pursue their strategies and interests but also, in a more fundamental sense, to attach meaning to the world. Their encounter with the world [Weltbegegnung] strives for an interpretation of the world [Weltdeutung]. How they interpret the world is substantially conditioned by the positions they occupy, and the dispositions they acquire, in the world as social actors: their Weltanschauung is necessarily a form of Feldanschauung²¹⁷. That they interpret the world is due to their place in the world as human beings: their Weltinterpretation²¹⁸ stems from their Bedeutungsbedürfnis²¹⁹. Interpretive anthropology can shed light on both the species-constitutive and the species-divisive functions of interpretation. Whereas the former are field-transcendent, the latter are field-contingent.

In short, valuable lessons can be learnt from cross-fertilizing Geertz’s interpretive anthropology (notably in relation to the meaning-generating functions provided by culturally codified webs of significance) with Habermas’s critical theory (notably in relation to the species-constitutive potential inherent in communicative action) and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology (notably in relation to the species-divisive power of competing and asymmetrically structured fields)²²⁰.