First of all, this (Thick Descriptions) was my first time reading anything anthropological\/any writings on anthropology, so I found it a little difficult to understand at first without a having a previous foundation or background. However, the in-class discussion and especially the illustrative example through Trump\/Kyle Rittenhouse really made some concepts clearer for me, especially the notion of layered meanings and contexts, and the difference between thin and thick descriptions.<\/p>\n
The Trump\/Kyle Rittenhouse example also brought up a question regarding the way Gertz distinguishes between thin and thick description: can you really ever have a truly thin description? Gertz\u2019s simplest example of the difference is the physical description (an eyelid contraction, which is thin) and the context (a wink, which is thick(er)). What\u2019s interesting to me is that, in the case of the Rittenhouse video, even seemingly \u2018thin\u2019 descriptions can be \u2018thick\u2019 and that it seems difficult (to me) to produce a physical description of events without attributing at least an additional layer of meaning. For example, Trump describes the events by saying \u201cI guess it looks like he fell, and then they very violently attacked him\u201d. His use of the word violent adds a layer of meaning to the events. Trump surely has his own motivations for describing the video as a \u2018violent attack\u2019 on Rittenhouse, but even other attempts to describe what happened are informed by the wider context (the cultural layers) brought by the viewers. Do the other people in the video approach Rittenhouse? Attack him? Attempt to disarm? Surround? Threaten? Every one of these words has a different connotation and meaning associated with them; no matter which are used in an attempt to describe the physical actions (in an attempt to provide a thin description), the describer adds a layer of thickness and meaning. I think that in the in case of events such as this one that are more complex than singular physical movements (ex: an eyelid contraction), it would be quite challenging and maybe impossible to obtain an objective and \u2018thin\u2019 description of events for the ethnographer to analyze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First of all, this (Thick Descriptions) was my first time reading anything anthropological\/any writings on anthropology, so I found it a little difficult to understand at first without a having a previous foundation or background. However, the in-class discussion and especially the illustrative example through Trump\/Kyle Rittenhouse really made some concepts clearer for me, especially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4198,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions\/4198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}