Geertz: Thick Description (9)

Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys (...) a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort--how extraordinarily "thick" it is. In finished anthropological writings, including those collected here, this fact--that what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to--is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined. (...) There is nothing particularly wrong with this, and it is in any case inevitable. (...) Right down at the factual base, the hard rock, insofar as there is any, of the whole enterprise, we are already explicating: and worse, explicating explications. Winks upon winks upon winks.