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The purpose of symbolic and interpretive anthropology can be described through a term used often by Geertz that originated from Gilbert Ryle, "Thick Description."By this what is conveyed, is that since culture and behavior can only be studied as a unit, studying culture and its smaller sections of the structure, thick description is what details the interpretation of those belonging to a ...
The book is a foundational text in cultural anthropology and represents Geertz’s vision of how culture should be studied and understood. The essays collectively argue for a new approach to anthropology , one that emphasizes the interpretive analysis of culture, which Geertz describes as “webs of significance” spun by humans themselves.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant.
The interpretive turn in the social sciences had strong foundations in the methodology of cultural anthropology. A shift occurred from using structural approaches (as an interpretive lens) towards meaning. With the interpretive turn, contextual and textual information took the lead in understanding reality, language, and culture.
An 'etic' account is a description of a behavior or belief by a social analyst or scientific observer (a student or scholar of anthropology or sociology, for example), in terms that can be applied across cultures; that is, an etic account attempts to be 'culturally neutral', limiting any ethnocentric, political or cultural bias or alienation by ...
The Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a prolific ethnographer in antiquity. The term ethnography is from Greek (ἔθνος éthnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω gráphō "I write") and encompasses the ways in which ancient authors described and analyzed foreign cultures.
Influenced by Hermeneutic tradition, Clifford Geertz developed an interpretive anthropology of understanding the meaning of the society. The hermeneutic approach allows Geertz to close the distance between an ethnographer and a given culture similar to reader and text relationship.
The Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing is awarded annually by The Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA). Eligible works are "published books in various genres including ethnographic monographs, narratives, essays, biographies, memoirs, poetry, and drama."