Of "Thick Descriptions" and more

Arjun Appadurai looks at two distinct but related topics, 'culture' and 'social interaction'. In common, everyday usage, we assume 'social interaction' to be nothing more than the daily actions and experiences that we come across everyday. Similarly, the term 'culture' is often perceived as an extension of the 'society' and hence of 'social interaction'.

Noted American anthropologist Clifford Geertz differentiates between the two, saying “Culture is an ordered system of meanings and symbols in terms of which social interaction takes place”. In other words, Culture is akin to a large, social construct, not unlike a web(picturing a enormous spider web with multiple spiders may help here) where each strand has a distinct meaning on its own, and interacts with its connecting strands to form a more complex meaning. It is a “fabric of meaning” through which human actions and experiences can be interpretted. Social Interaction is then nothing but the form that human actions/experiences take(in the web visualisations, these are the movements and interactions of the spiders with each other and with the strands of the web itself).

Furthur, Geertz goes on to talk about how these two concepts are integrated by themselves. He says that Culture has 'logico-meaningful integration', that is, each aspect of the cultural fabric has a meaning that is logical in its source and value, even when isolated. Similarly, Social Interaction has 'causal functional integration', that is all the components of Social Interaction(human actions/experiences) have a manner of causality to them. They are the means to an end.(The components are likened to cells of the same tissue, whic unite to form functional organs which in turn form an organ system and form the living organism as the end).

The works of British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner were in the field of symbolic and interpretive anthropology. He said that the disruption of the 'normal pattern' of existence(in this case, our ordinary daily lives) brings certain fundamental aspects of social interaction and culture that are normally overlooked or hidden, into prominence. It is in this aspect that Appadurai studies the region of South India, with special emphasis on worship and conflict, and on caste related social interaction. He studies in particular, the Sri Partasarati Svami Temple in Mylapore, Chennai. He explores the “disharmonic fit” between Culture and Social Interaction.

One other term brought into prominence by Geertz and Turner is “thick description”. With regard to Social Interactions, a 'thick description' of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider. It is the specific, circumstantial and dense description generated in the narrow spatial confines of social interaction. The chief difference between Ethnography and Ethnohistory is that the latter contains 'thick descriptions' from one or multiple historical viewpoints.

On Ethnohistory

On Ethnohistory
The hasty generalisation that all history is non-hypothetical, particularistic, ideographic, and didactic and that all anthropology is academic, oversimplifying, nomothetic, and value free is no longer acceptable. Disciplinary boundaries are blurred to make more sense of social and cultural realities, hence we have newer and newer disciplines coming up and Ethnohistory is a prominent one. What makes an ethnohistorian different is the fact that he assimilates cautious accuracy from history and imaginative theorization from anthropology. Ethnohistory is a multidimensional concept which lacks a universal definition. Anthropologists and archaeologists engaged in the study of native history and culture benefit substantially from the broad comparative perspectives of their disciplines, as well as from findings.Ethnohistoric research could significantly enlarge the data base and provide greater time depth in tracing a particular sequence of culture change. For Clark Wissler, who coined the term, spoke of enthohistory in 1909 as reconstructing prehistoric culture by combining available ethno historical and archaeological data. According to Schieffelin&Gewertz the traditional view of many historians and anthropologists that Ethnohistory meant the reconstruction of the history of people who previously had not history is insufficient;Ethnohistory should fundamentally take into account the people's own sense of how events are constituted, and their ways of culturally constructing the past.

Ethnohistory has wider political implications in the modern Eurocentric world. The most contested definition of Ethnohistory was given by W. C. Sturtevant who defined ethnohistory as "(the study of) the history of the peoples normally studied by anthropologists." For Sturtevant conventional anthropology focused on mysterious people and presumed that explanation required theory, typology, and generality; conventional history on the other hand dealt primarily with non-exotic Western people and with exclusive or specificevents and preferred description over explicit generalization. It is noteworthy that ethnohistory operates as a specific scholarly activity in North America, Australia, and the Pacific region, but not in Europe.Anthropology was developed as the study of change among native peoples, as opposed to history, which supposedly studies the activities of Europeans both before and after they settled elsewhere throughout the world.The contrast between history and anthropology thus became a distinction between a discipline that sought to record the development and vigor of peoples and cultures that were of European origin and another that sought to study the so called stationary and inferior cultures of native peoples elsewhere. Ideally ethnohistory should provide a natural get-together arena for historians and anthropologists. But the fact is that this intellectual community has been dominated by anthropologists from the first which ensured the alignment of this disciplines to non-European societies.

Ignoring the above mentioned political dialectics the combination of anthropology and history is branded very successful. Comprehensive study of all the available ethnohistoric materials relatingto a particular culture or people can often produce remarkably detailed and coherent results, filling in hitherto unknown historical facts, and illuminating various aspects of cultural process.Linguistic analysis, culture change, demography, ecological studies, structural institutional analysis, symbolic analysis and the study of ideology are the integral parts of ethnohistoric analysis. One of the leading scholars of this discipline is Charles Gibson (1952, 1964). In his research on the Mexican Indians under colonial rule he examinedhuge masses of documents and manuscripts in a variety of archives, as well as reviewing all relevant published sources. While this kind of undertaking may literally demand years of scholarly effort, the quality of the results is vastly superior.

Most of the early general discussions of ethnohistory were concerned with defining its general goals and methodology and the extent of its subject matter. The journal Ethnohistory, founded in 1954, has published more articles as an indication of the special problems that were involved in defining a convincing role for ethnohistory within the social sciences. Now, many anthropologist historians prefer to do away with the term "ethnohistory" altogether and call the permutations of anthropological and historical method and theory something else: "anthrohistory" or simply anthropological history or historical anthropology. Which discipline is nominal and which dependent may be a matter of taste of the researcher. Because the concepts of ethnos, ethnicity, and ethnic are so foggy intellectually, it is not advisable to continue to use "ethno-history" as used in the past. Both anthropological history and historical anthropology substitute well for ethnohistory without stigma or illogic, and one's training in anthropology should not prevent one from writing an anthropological history, just as training in history should not preclude production of a historical anthropology.

Appadurai uses Ethnohistory in the wisdom of a self-conscious study of change over a long period of time. Quoting him, “What makes it ethnohistory is its link to the present, to the cognitive and structural ways in which these traces (structural or cultural) have become compacted in the meaning systems of actors in the present.”

Chandni Chandran
HS09H014