Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, 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. (Clifford Geertz)

Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, 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.

Clifford Geertz

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background bottle call custom datum description elemental event fact fair idea information need note particular passage raw ritual sense similar sort thick thing whatever

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