When we maintain that an anthropologist offers ‘thick descriptions’ of the life of people, do we mean that it is in any way descriptive? Or, instead, that it is purely interpretative, like the creative reading of a text by a literary critic? According to Gilbert Ryle, who invented the term, a ‘thick description’ is just a ‘thin description’ made complex by the addition of adverbial information. According to Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist has no access to ‘thin descriptions’, he deals with conflicting views and interpretations given by the participants of ‘social discourses’ and has to address a permanent ‘confusion of tongues’. Contemporary use of this term appears to rest upon a hidden conflict between two philosophies of anthropology.
