Reference:
Review Excerpts 'The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays
below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing,
with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and
the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in search of meaning' (5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis |
concept |
culture |
meaning |
science |
semiotic |
significance |
'In understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what
doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what
anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it
must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of
view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport,
selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping
fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques
and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is
the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a
notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description"' (5-6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis |
description |
form |
knowledge |
notion |
understanding |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 9:19:17
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