I wanted to take a chance to reflect on our in-class discussion of layers of meaning and thick description, which I found extremely applicable in the context of my senior thesis research/project. Things are starting to click together in my head so I think that this exercise of having to write it out will prove beneficial to me but also show how my understanding of these concepts have grown in the past few months. 

I found myself this summer having an existential crisis, trying to figure out what anthropology and ethnographic research looked like in a pandemic; at times I was googling “what is anthropology” because I felt that I had lost grasp with the meaning of the discipline. I even enrolled in ANT201 this semester as a senior in the department to try to reignite a conversation between myself and my thesis of what exactly culture is and what anthropology seeks to discover. At times, I was even questioning if my topic of interest was even “anthropological” or “ethnographic” because I am not currently in the COVID19 pandemic able to be in my field site, which was supposed to be urban Philadelphia neighborhoods (specifically those in the Riverwards and affected by the opioid epidemic). 

So in a sense, “thick description” in my proposed project would be exposing the connections, in the form of data visualizations and mapping, of how urban Philadelphia residents connect their constructions; a “mind map” in a sense. Building on this, my “data” in referring to Geertz’s statement would be producing counter visualizations from data generated from residents’ constructions of their environment (where, geographic wise, they perceive that toxicity/danger/harmfulness/unhealthy structures are present). This would be juxtaposed with visualizations and constructions generated by the Philadelphia government (for example, the Heart of Kensington Collective Impact Report or just visualizations that can be generated with data that the government collects based on their own categories and values) to see where there are overlaps or discrepancies. This is where I would be understanding and applying the idea of how I view “layers of meaning;” Geertz cites that, “What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (9). 

But the layers of meaning continue here, as Geertz argued, because the “ethnographer is in fact faced with…a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another” (10). Many of these problems that my visualizations are contesting did not originate from the constructions of current residents, but are rooted in issues of structural violence that have been present in Philadelphia since its creation in the form of health, economic, gender, and racial disparities. Turtles upon turtles.
So I’m at the point where I try to lay out the map of connections of these layers, which would start at an (infinity)-(structural violence)-(resident’s constructions)-(how resident’s constructions might be ignored in data visualization)-(me guessing to viewing my data/vizs as constructions of residents’ constructions)-(me reassessing these guesses)-(me “drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses” (20))-(infinity).

I’m hoping that as the semester progresses in this class that I can come back and reassess these “first draft thoughts” like we are going to do with the culture/media/data mapping. I now see that you can add media to these posts so be on the lookout for my visual renditions of the above map^ later on.