Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

STEREOTYPES

one cannot despise these phrases laid like Roman roads across the tumult of our lives, since they compel us to walk in step like civilized people…though one may be humming any nonsense under one’s breath at the same time….

In short, far from the pervasiveness of stereotypes necessarily involving a retreat from subtle individual usage, experience and significance, the very opposite can be the case. Partaking in a stereotypical discourse can represent a way for the individual to secure a personal preserve: a mapping of the world, a context for action and a journeying within it which are particular to him alone. It might even be argued that the more stereotypically a milieu is imaged, the more dynamic and diverse the cognitive play which individual users may be making of it, stereotyping and personalizing being two sides of the same cognitive coin (cf. Rapport 1995).

The modernity of stereotypes

Stereotypes have been described as affording a discursive and conceptual bulwark against the randomness and complexity of the world. These static, limited, inert idioms provide beacons of constancy and recognition through which familiar cognitive order can hope to be replicated and stable collective rhythms maintained (Sherif 1967:157–60). Indeed, as social life sees an increase in scale and pace through such ‘massifying’ processes as globalization, mass communication, transnationalism and travel, so the attractiveness of stereotypes might be expected also to increase. A world in movement eventuates in a heightened emphasis on the stereotyped—on the clichéd and proverbial and sloganish—in discursive and conceptual usage. One comes to be at home in stereotypical interactions as routine as one’s experience is fluxional, as straitened as ones itinerary is wide (cf. Rapport 1994c).

In Zijderveld’s phrasing, the contemporary world represents a ‘clichégenic’ condition (1979:4–5). Cliché predominates in individual speech, thought, emotion, volition and action, and it is with the stereotypical that modern ‘massificated man’ feels most at home (Riesman 1958:376–7; also cf. Drazdauskierie 1981). Social interaction becomes predominated by the verbal ‘pre-fab’: ‘[A]n enormously large part of natural language is formulaic, automatic and rehearsed, rather than propositional, creative or freely generated’ (Fillmore 1976:9). Notwithstanding, the prevalence of such stereotypic imagery may be seen as less obscurantist, less outrageous or threatening of communication and civility, when stereotypes are seen not primarily as instruments prejudicially to predominate or pre-empt others, and not as evidence of

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merely thinking in stale, collective terms, but rather as means for individuals rapidly to project and establish a secure personal belonging in a shifting, complicating world. Here is a cognitive resort (used in concert with possibly many other types of cognitive construction, affording very different types of environmental mapping) whose fixity and reductiveness may be a means simultaneously of conceptualizing great flux and multiplicity. Individual cognition runs to stereotypes because here is a shorthand way to order, and at the same time to juggle with, a vast array of diverse, possibly incompatible data, people, objects and events.

See also: Classification, Cognition, Home and Homelessness,

Movement

THICK DESCRIPTION

Thick description is a concept introduced into anthropology by Clifford Geertz. It is theorized in his 1973 essay, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, and perhaps best exemplified in his 1972 essay, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ (both appearing in The Interpretation of Cultures 1973).The essays remain two of the central texts of what became known as ‘interpretive anthropology’, and figure as part of a widespread (if controversial) refocusing of anthropological interest, since the 1970s, from social structure to meaning.

The interpretation of meaning

Geertz’s starting-point is Max Weber’s: human beings live suspended in webs of significance which they themselves have spun and continue to spin; above all, human beings make sense, attribute meanings, of and for themselves. It is these webs of significance which are known, collectively, in anthropology, as ‘culture’, and whose sense is a matter of symbolism. Anthropology is, inter alia, the comparative study of culture, the analysis of the traffic in symbols.

But then ‘culture’ is the province of other academic disciplines besides: sociology, folklore, literary criticism. What distinguishes anthropological study, for Geertz, is the way that it is operationalized; what anthropologists do, first and foremost, is ethnography. And ethnography can be understood as a particular way of ‘inscribing’ culture, as a special kind of ‘thick’ writing.What anthropological analysis amounts to, in a word, is a venture in thick description.

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The term, ‘thick description’, Geertz borrows from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, and Ryle’s disquisition on appreciating the difference between twitching and winking. In terms of overt and observable behaviours, phenomenalistic observation and superficial (‘thin’) description, there is no difference between a twitch and a wink; both involve contraction of the eyelid of one eye. And yet one is an involuntary movement and the other (possibly) a symbol of conspiracy to an ally; in terms of their social significance, the difference between them is vast. Nor does the matter rest there, because further complications (and significances) arise in the differences between a wink, a twitch, and the mimicking of a twitch, the parodying of a wink, the rehearsing of the parodying of a wink, the mimicking of the rehearsing of…, and so on. To describe this stratification of layers of significance is to describe increasingly ‘thickly’. And this, Geertz advises, is the main objective of ethnography: to get beneath the surface of behaviour to the piled-up levels of inference and implication, the hierarchy of structures of meaning, in terms of which twitches, winks, burlesques and imitations are produced, perceived and interpreted.

To make out winks from twitches, furthermore, to disinter intelligible frameworks of symbolic signification, calls for a particular kind of focus: one that is microscopic and particular.Thick description is characterized by a complex specificity and a circumstantiality; and this, in turn, must originate in largely qualitative research which is participatory and longterm, and carried out in small-scale, even confined, contexts.This is not to say that anthropological study does not extend to large-scale canvases—whole villages or cities, whole societies or civilizations—but that large conclusions are characteristically drawn from small, densely textured facts, and broad abstractions grounded in narrow particulars. And as study builds on study, so anthropological analysis delves more and more deeply and finely into the underlying conceptual structures which give meaning to the symbolic usage within a socio-cultural milieu.

In explicating thick description, then, Geertz places particular and special emphasis on the notions, ‘culture’ and ‘symbol’. Culture is to be understood as an accumulated totality of symbol-systems (religion, ideology, common sense, economics, sport, etc.) in terms of which people make sense of themselves and their world, and represent themselves to themselves and to others. Members of a culture use its symbols (winks, crucifixes, footballs, cats, collars, foods, photographs, words) as a language through which to read and interpret, to express and share meaning. And since the imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence, this reading of culture (and traffic in significant symbols) is constant.

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The traffic in symbols is public, but it is not thereby transparent. For symbols are inherently ambiguous, and the meanings they carry must always be interpreted before they can be read off. These readings, moreover, are not necessarily fixed or made explicit. The task of the anthropologist in inscribing a culture, therefore, is to interpret the interpretations of that culture which, at a particular moment, its members are making. It is rather like deciphering an ancient ensemble of texts at the same time as it is being read and interpreted by its current owners. An ensemble, moreover, which is often in a foreign language, incomplete in any single manifestation, scribbled over with contradictory commentaries, and written in transient behaviours, not words. Hence, Geertz’s pithy conclusion: the anthropological analysis of culture is not ‘an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (1973:5).

Interpretation as science and fiction

Writing thick description, interpreting cultural meaning as symbolized by members’ behaviour, is a complex process; nevertheless, it remains a ‘scientific’ one, embodying objectivity and capable of being refuted. It is complex, we have seen, because the structures of meaning underlying any one social situation are multiple, partial and tangled together. Moreover, it is not only the anthropologist who is engaged in their interpretation but the members of a culture themselves; the anthropologist’s inscriptions are interpretations of interpretations: constructions of members’ constructions of what they and their fellowmembers are engaged in doing.

Notwithstanding, the enterprise is a scientific one and suited to theoretic generalization (relating to previous cases and studies), Geertz avers (drawing on the later work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), because meaning is inherently something public.The symbolic logic in use may be foreign to the anthropologist, and the conceptual structuring inexplicit, but these are socially established, sustained and legitimized. Moreover, they are publicly enacted; they are tied to concrete social events and occasions, and expressive of a common social world. In short, giving meaning to behaviour is not something which happens in private, in insular individual heads, but rather something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose natural habitat is public spaces. Entering these, the anthropologist can hope to share in the symbolic traffic and so gain access to cultural meaning.

And yet, as the thick description of culture entails interpreting the momentary interpretations of systems of symbols made by a culture’s

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members, this inscribing by the anthropologist remains an imaginative act and a fiction: something made out (even if not made up) through the inscribing process: something he or she fashions into words and fixes on the page from the flow of talk and transient behaviours. And this means that it remains incomplete and contestable. It can be refuted by events, past and future. It can always be superseded by interpretations more deeply grounded, more complexly conceptualized.

The most commonly cited exemplification of thick description remains Geertz’s ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’. Much of Balinese culture ‘surfaces’ in a cock ring, Geertz contends, and cockfighting, a popular (if sometimes illegal) obsession, can be read as providing significant insights into what being a Balinese is really about. First, Geertz explicates how Balinese fighting cocks are locally viewed as symbolizing the ambulant genitals of their male owners. Then, he goes on to show how the ramifications of this symbolic usage touch further and further features of Balinese life; so that cocks and cockfights come to be symbolically informed by a multiplicity of Balinese structures of signification. Precisely, here is the narcissistic male ego concretized and magnified; also, a momentary letting loose of archetypal animality; also, an oblatory blood sacrifice to cannibalistic demons and threatening powers of darkness; also, a representation of the social matrix and tensions constituting village and locale (kingroups, irrigation societies, temple congregations and castes); also, a celebration of status rivalry, of gaining and losing esteem, honour, dignity and respect; also, an expression of leadership and loyalty; also, an opportunity to partake of the pleasures of gambling; also an art-form which renders ordinary everyday experience comprehensible, imaginable and meaningful to its own protagonists: an encompassing and displaying of the cultural themes of masculinity, pride, death, loss, rage, beneficence and chance. Here, in short, is an inscription, a fiction, a model, a metaphor, a meta-social commentary, which the Balinese construct about themselves. Spelled out publicly in a collective text, in a vocabulary of sentiment, Geertz would have read in the Balinese cockfight one expression at least of how that society is built and its individual members put together. And since to express publicly is also to realize culturally, here is Balinese temper and individual temperament being constituted and reconstituted with each performance.

For Geertz, the double task of an interpretive anthropology is to uncover the conceptual structures which inform people’s acts and also to demonstrate the role that these structures play in determining human behaviour. In this venture, thick description is the sine qua non.

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