Tips for Writing Thick Descriptions for Ethnographies and.
Category: Descriptive Essay Examples. See our collection of descriptive essay examples. These example essays are to help you understanding how to write this type of papers. More than many other types of essays, descriptive essays strive to create a deeply involved and vivid experience for the reader.
To get you started, here are 40 topic suggestions for a descriptive paragraph, essay, or speech. These suggestions should help you discover a subject that especially interests you. If you don't start out with a topic that you're willing to spend some time with, your writing will show your lack of enthusiasm.
In the social science fields of anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, human-centered design and organizational development, a thick description results from a scientific observation of any particular human behavior that describes not just the behavior, but its context as well, so that the behavior can be better understood by an outsider.
Thick description, or the sorting through of “webs of significance that man himself has spun”, is an ethnographic reporting technique defined by Clifford Geertz in his seminal book The Interpretation of Cultures. This form of reportage may be applied to many stages of design research and types of insight.
Appealing-to-the-Senses Description: Let the reader see, smell, hear, taste, and feel what you write in your essay. The thick, burnt scent of roasted coffee tickled the tip of my nose just seconds before the old, faithful alarm blared a distorted top-forty through its tiny top speaker.
The term thick descriptions was first used by Ryle (1949) and later by Geertz (1973) who applied it in ethnography. Thick descripton refers to the detailed account of field experiences in which the researcher makes explicit the patterns of cultural and social relationships and puts them in context (Holloway, 1997). This can be contrasted with thin description, which is a superficial account.
The essay by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, which first appeared in his best-known book The Interpretation of Cultures, has been published in Russian as a separate work in Garage and Ad Marginem Press’s Minima series. Deep Play is a study of the Balinese tradition of cockfighting, based on a year of anthropological research conducted by Geertz at the end of the 1950s, when he and his wife.