Blackwell Reference Online

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Since at least the nineteenth century, culture has been one of the most difficult, richly connotative concepts to define. While it is widely accepted that its roots are to be found in the Latin verb colere , among whose associated meanings is “to cultivate,” this has been all but forgotten in ordinary language. Being a web of meaning in which social life is suspended, culture most commonly goes unnoticed, and requires detailed inquiry, or what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (borrowing from the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle) called “thick description.” Geertz used Ryle's example of two boys in a room, rapidly contracting their right eyelids: is this a wink, a twitch, a deliberate message, to someone in particular, coded, without cognizance of the rest of the company? These and other preparatory questions have to be addressed before any analysis can reach an understanding of the “piled-up structures of inferences and implications” ( Geertz 1993 , 7) that characterize communications in any culture. Culture, thus, can be said to consist of all the structures and processes of →  meaning in which communication takes place. In the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, anthropology, relying on ethnography as its “method” or approach, came to interpret the communications of diverse peoples in order to reach an approximation of their culture. Ethnography, further, provided ... log in or subscribe to read full text