Glimpses of the websites run by the Contrade di Siena: Thin description and phenomenological traditions (original) (raw)

2023, XXXIII Congresso Geografico Italiano: Geografie in Movimento

In 2013 John L. Jackson published Thin Description, a book in which he shakes up the principles of creating ethnographies that have been practised in empirical cultural studies since the 1970s. Jackson attacks what Geertz (1973) called «thick description» – a method of extensive data collection and of presenting that data by providing an interpretative deep and rather coherent ethnography – as inappropriate both for capturing most contemporary social-cultural phenomena and for making self-reflexive scientific analysis after the reflexive turn in cultural anthropology. The latter trend entered the ethnographic mainstream through the anthology Writing Culture, first published in 1986 and edited by Clifford and Marcus. In what he calls «thin description» Jackson, indeed, provides a meticulous and illuminating description of the lifeworld and network-like organisation of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (AHIJ), a digitally active transnational religious community whose most prominent members emigrated from Chicago, USA, to Dimona, Israel, in the 1960s. His descriptions are episodic, yet have profound theoretical underpinnings and are based on several years of field research. Jackson sees contradictory narratives as a constitutive part of the described community. Because of the network-like and fragmented modality of description, Jackson sees episodic thin description as particularly suited to analysing communities in today’s digital age. At the same time he warns against falling prey to the hubris of proclaiming definitive structures of meaning that would be unconscious to the people under research (Jackson, 2013, pp. 13-14), such that he believes thick description would suggest. He describes thick description as a futile pursuit for coherence and wholeness that, at least in today’s digitally-networked communities, does not exist. Jackson rightly points out that social and cultural scientists can only provide glimpses or slices of the phenomena they study, as these are constantly changing due to their inherent historicity. Thus, we may ask: can Jackson’s proposal of thin descriptions enrich cultural-geographical analyses of places and the communities associated with them? Or even replace the thick description method?