successful explanations are so frequently taken. Whenever such a concept is taken for reality,the result is reification, which makes self-monitoring of these explanatory activities all themore pertinent, so that their basically heuristic character will never be eclipsed. Such anawareness is bound to qualify the methodological guidelines of anthropological research asfictions by nature. Geertz fully acknowledges this when he assesses his own methodologicalframework called "thick description":
In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot.(By definition, only a "native" makes first order ones: it's
his
culture.) They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in thesense that they are "something made," "something fashioned"—the original meaning of
fictiō
—not that theyare false, unfactual, or merely "as if" thought experiments. To construct actor-oriented descriptions of theinvolvements of a Berber chieftain, a Jewish merchant, and a French soldier with one another in 1912Morocco is clearly an imaginative act, not all that different from constructing similar descriptions of, say, theinvolvements with one another of a provincial French doctor, his silly, adulterous wife, and her feckless loverin nineteenth century France. In the latter case, the actors are represented as not having existed and theevents as not having happened, while in the former they are represented as actual, or as having been so.This is a difference of no mean importance; indeed, precisely the one Madame Bovary has difficulty grasping.But the importance does not lie in the fact that her story was created while Cohen's was only noted. Theconditions of their creation, and the point of it (to say nothing of the manner and quality) differ. But the oneis as much a
fictiō
—"a making"—as the other.
Fictions, it seems, allow us to map out an actor-oriented scenario which holds true forboth the network of thick description and literature; such scenarios are enactments designedfor finding things out. Fictions, however, are not independent of those things that have to befound out, and this fact is somewhat obscured when the difference between explanatoryfictions and literary fictions is ignored. The constellation between a Berber chieftain, a Jewishmerchant, and a French soldier refers to an actual occurrence, whereas the one in Flaubert'snovel has no such reference. Obviously, the fiction is put to different uses in the two cases,and that changes the very function the fiction is meant to perform.Thick description starts out from reading signs emitted by the chieftain, the merchant,and the soldier in their social interaction, which Geertz uses in order to illustrate hisprocedure. Reading signs is a matter not so much of grasping what they represent as of spotlighting what they imply. There is always a gap between what is manifest and what isimplied in either saying or doing something. Thick description is, therefore, first and foremost,an―161―unfolding of the implications of the manifest, which thus becomes all the more richlyorchestrated.By revealing the observable manifestations, thick description establishes a semiotic webof interacting features, which we are given to read. Reading culture appears to be the onlyway of gaining access to it. There are no universals to be invoked, there are no frameworks tobe superimposed, and there are no constants of human nature to be appealed to if we want toexplain human behavior. Instead, culture arises out of human responses to a challengingenvironment; it is an assembly of "extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms,"
which are subject to change, otherwise humans would imprison themselves in the products of their reactions.When reading culture is of paramount concern (and this is the way thick descriptionrealizes itself), then scenarios of reading can only be basically fictional. These fictionalscenarios not only reflect the avoidance of thin description, which is a superimposition of concepts on what one is given to observe; they also facilitate a "treatise in cultural theory"
insofar as such a theory seeks to find out the implications of the human actions andinteractions that inform the "actor's act" from which—as the only given—inferences are to bedrawn. These fictional scenarios are, as Geertz maintains, made up; however, they are not"‘as if’ thought experiments," because the established semiotic web refers to an indisputablereality. In other words, the fictional construct of reading, though made up, has a specific use,which again confirms that a fiction is always defined by its use. How does this fictional readingof culture operate, bearing in mind that the very many "outside-the-skin control mechanisms"are the direct offshoot of human responses to entropy? If culture as an outgrowth of humanreactions is built into the void, the fictional scenario of reading such human achievement canonly proceed in terms of recursive looping. Human interaction with its environment realizesitself through a feedback system.This feedback system develops as an interchange between input and output, in thecourse of which a projection is corrected insofar as it has failed to square with what it hastargeted. Consequently, a dual correction occurs: the feedforward returns as an alteredfeedback loop, which in turn feeds into a revised input. Thus, recursive looping adjusts "future
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