) is doing (“rapidly contracting his right eyelids”) and the “thick description“ of what he is doing (“practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion”) lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much non-winks as winks are non-twitches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids. The point is that between what Ryle calls the “thin description” of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher. Here, too, a socially established code exists.
Only this boy is neither winking nor twitching, he is parodying someone else’s, as he takes it, laughable, attempt at winking. He, of course, does this in the same way the second boy winked and the first twitched: by contracting his right eyelids. Suppose, he continues, there is a third boy, who, “to give malicious amusement to his cronies”, parodies the first boy’s wink, as amateurish, clumsy, obvious, and so on. That’s all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and-voila!-a gesture. Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The two movements are, as movements, identical from an l-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. In one, this is an involuntary twitch in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes.
To make better sense of what thick description entails, Geertz explained it with a simple example:Ĭonsider.
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