In class, I expressed that this is the first anthropology course I’ve taken and that I’m interpreting a lot of the things I’m learning by putting it in context alongside my own discipline in English. This was a particularly interesting exercise when thinking about Geertz’s essay and our discussion around it. Geertz talks about how anthropological writings are fictions in the sense that they are “something made”. He goes on to claim that the important difference between representing events that have happened vs. representing events that have not happened doesn’t lie in that fact that one story is noted and the other created but rather in “the condition of their creation, and the point of it” (16). Verification is called into question–and whether there are correct and incorrect interpretive accounts. 

It might be superfluous, but I want to expand a bit about the differences I see between Geertz’s descriptions of the fictive interpretive anthropology and my own understanding of fictional stories in order to examine the differences between “the condition of their creation”, which I interpreted as how a thing is made. In class, we discussed the thick description of the twitch-wink distinction in Geertz’s essay. Lauren brought up the suggestion that a good anthropological account relies on the anthropologist’s due diligence in providing their thought process for reaching a particular interpretation or conclusion. 

In a work of fiction, an author is most likely not providing this reasoning process for their characters’ actions. This might seem obvious, but there is no written description of the data point “contraction of the eyelids” that the reader must interpret; there is only “his eye twitched involuntarily”, “he winked”, and “he winked mockingly”. This difference in how a work of fiction is made is also indicative of Geertz’s note on the second difference between anthropological accounts and fiction: “the point of it”. The author who pens such a line skips communicating an observation and instead directly communicates its meaning, an interpretation that the reader must assume is accurate because the author wrote it. (A reader will not question the veracity of “his eye twitched involuntarily” unless it appears that they are supposed to do so.) But part of the reader’s suspension of disbelief relies on the notion that the author is not acting as an interpreter-figure, but rather that a created character is–the narrator of the text. And although this fictional figure acts as the first fictional interpreter, there is another external interpreter that exists–the reader of the text. And although it’s unlikely for the narrator’s interpretation of “his eye twitched involuntarily” to be incorrect, it is very possible for the reader’s interpretation of the circumstances around “his eye twitched involuntarily” to be incorrect, including the why, how, or what it means. In his essay, Geertz draws parallels between interpretive anthropology and fiction by proposing that the relationship that anthropologists and authors share is an equivalent role. I think his comparison would be more accurate by drawing parallels between anthropologists who interpret real accounts and the literary analysts who interpret fictional accounts, both of whom must engage with unique data and information and draw conclusions based on evidence in order to provide more accurate and thus more valuable interpretations, even if they might not be exactly “correct”.