CLIFFORD GEERTZ

1. CLIFFORD GEERTZ • Cultural anthropologist from Princeton • Studied various peoples of rural Indonesia • Especially those who lived on Java • Developed “thick description” to study them

2. THICK DESCRIPTION • Purpose was to find out the innermost fears, hopes, beliefs, goals, values, and so forth of the shy and secretive Javanese people • By observing and analyzing their rituals and forms of entertainment • Most famous example was his observation and analysis of Javanese cock fights • Allowed him to make generalizations regarding the role and nature of status in Javanese society, the social importance of money, kin, and friendship alliances, the concept of male honor, and the self-image of the Javanese make • He “unraveled layers of meaning” from a seemingly trivial event and uncovered some of the most fundamental, thought unspoken, characteristics of Javanese society

3. ROBERT DARNTON • From Princeton • Applied Geertz’s techniques to descriptions of the activities of ordinary people by literate observers • Used “thick description” to unravel hidden meanings from 18th century peasant fairy tales, from a description of a procession through Montpellier in the 1740s, from fan letters written to Rousseau, and from a description of the ritual torture and murder of cats by two printing apprentices in 18th century Paris

4. STRENGTHS • Darnton treats descriptions of popular behavior as artifacts of the past • What he calls “windows” into the often bizarre and incomprehensible mental world of ordinary people who are no longer around to tell us about themselves • Uses them to investigate the values, fears, dreams, and aspirations of these people • Aspects of their lives that would otherwise be closed to us because there is no written evidence • Methods of cultural anthropology have allowed social historians to exploit sources that otherwise could not be exploited and to extract important information from them

5. PROBLEMS • Social historians cannot personally observe the phenomena they analyze • Must rely on descriptions written by people who were often not direct participants • People who were often hostile to the event they described and whose motives for providing the description are therefore suspect • Difficult to prevent historian’s own biases and prejudices from influencing the way he or she “unravels” the event • Methods of cultural anthropology allow social historians to uncover valuable aspects of the past of ordinary people but these methods are very subjective and therefore the results should not be accepted without a great deal of scrutiny and questioning

6. MICROHISTORY • Similar to cultural anthropology in that its main emphasis is finding and explaining true meaning in what appears to be trivial gestures, symbols, rituals, and so forth • But it dramatically reduces the scale of historical observation to a “microscopic” level • Instead of studying an entire tribe of people, it Intensively studies one person from a tribe, or maybe one family

7. CARLO GINZBURG • The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller • About Domenico Scandella (Menocchio) from Friulli (northern Italy) • Reconstructed his personal belief system from Inquisition records • Did not generalize from this about belief systems of ordinary people • Simply interested in the beliefs of this single individual, nothing more

8. THE POINT OF MICROHISTORY • Microhistory is the conscious rejection of the development of broad explanations for past events • Treats episodes from the past as self-contained phenomena which may or may not have any relationship with the beliefs, attitudes, and mentalities of the rest of society at the time

9. THEORY • Assumes the past is too complex to be explained through broad generalizations • The past is the product of a nearly infinite array of variables interacting with each other in a nearly infinite variety of ways • It is impossible and inaccurate to squeeze all of these variables and interactions into a single explanatory generalization • To do so robs the past of its complexity and the people of the past of their individuality • Microhistorians try to convey the complexity of the past to their readers by examining little things and little people as intensively as possible