#thick description

[victusinveritas]

Romance Is Like That by Liian Varus

[vamptoll]

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Please someone else who read a lot of Anthropology theory please join me in laughing about this article.

Highlights are "Just like Malinowski I longed for my own culture, But I refused to masturbate to 3D pornography to see what what would happen to my body by truly embracing Japan"

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14687941221096600

[screaming-skvll]

"Not quite my old Duke, but it'll do."

"Looks more like an Ill Will than a Duke."

"Does it? I could never quite tell the difference."

"Well, a Duke hit you like a punch from a haughty aristocrat, right in the head. Shakes you, definitely disorients a little. Ill Will, though—that one hit you deeper, like a knee to the kidneys from both sides at once that somehow left you feeling like you'd done something wrong."

"That's... those are very colorful descriptions of what it's like to get shot. I didn't know you had this poetic streak."

"Oh, it's not supposed to be poetry. I'm working on an exhaustive catalog of the sensations imparted by different hand cannons, and I'm trying to develop a descriptive language that communicates the visceral sense of each experience."

"I... see."

"So, what's this model like, if I may ask?"

"Well, it's a fast shooter, so it's not actually like the Duke at all... or like the Ill Will, from the, uh, sound of your description."

"Ah... Well then, would you say it hits more like a procession of large, angry hornets, or a shower of small meteoroids at terminal velocity?"

(Survivor's Epitaph w/ Maroon Moon)

[bee-flies]

History Words #3

Ratiocination

NOUN; the process of exact thinking; a reasoned train of thought

(Geertz, C.  (1973).  The Interpretation of Cultures.  New York: Basic Books.)

[umachkupiterinu]

Though an understandable reaction to early frustration and deprivation, envy constitutes a self-frustrating factor in the psyche, for the excessive craving for love that it entails neveranswers the chronic sense of inner scarcity and badness, but on the contrary, stimulates further frustration and pain. Frustration is a natural consequence of envy. In addition, over-desiring can lead to painful situations as portrayed by Quevedo in his dream of hell, when he tells us that when the envious arrive there and see the different souls subjected to the various tortures of the hell realms, they are frustrated and suffer by seeing that there is no place reserved for them.

https://www.personalitycafe.com/type-4-forum-individualist/148114-naranjos-character-neurosis-ennea-type-4-a.html

ENVY AND DEPRESSIVE MASOCHISTIC CHARACTER: ENNEA-TYPE IV 1. Core Theory, Nomenclature, and Place in the Enneagram The emotional state of env

[weirdmirrors]

Thick Description

Don't you sometimes marvel how patently poorly worded, although true, ideas get accepted and circulate in these unfortunate forms? The example is Geertz's "thick description." Thick? Description? Thick description? It's not even clear unless you read the source. Not to mention, not too mellisonant. Compare to Peter Elbow: "Facts are always dirty with some theory." (Writing Without Teachers, 1998, 117). Similar idea: the very naming of the thing is already an interpretation of it. "Dirty facts," does it not sound good? How could anthropology be seduced and charmed by such stylistic clumsiness, such monster as "thick description"? Now we have "thin description" to pair the thick; it does at least sound better, but it still has this monster of a thing for the source. My guess (or theory) is that no science in reality aspires to be clear. It wants to obfuscate itself to a degree that allows it to preserve the sense of itself as a possessor and a keeper of the arcane knowledge as opposed to the knowledge profane. Hence as if intentionally-awkward concepts that are needlessly obscure. Of course, we do not know for certain why and how some things get picked up and spread like fire while too many other, sometimes "better," things fall into oblivion. My guess is therefore as good as any other. I do not, naturally, equate "thick description" and "dirty facts." The first is a method of ethnographic writing, the second is merely a statement of the embeddedness of things in our perception. I am talking about what seems to me a poor word choice versus a precise word choice. But the more precise, elegant, or simple is not more effective, in this particular and many other cases. Poet Boris Pasternak called the method to which he arrived by the time that he perceived as late in life, "unheard-of simplicity." Есть в опыте больших поэтов  Черты естественности той,  Что невозможно, их изведав, Не кончить полной немотой. В родстве со всем, что есть, уверясь И знаясь с будущим в быту, Нельзя не впасть к концу, как в ересь, В неслыханную простоту. —Boris Pasternak

[protoslacker]

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 in Preface (PDF). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays

The Interpretation of Cultures

[shrinkrants]

Interview: Kim Stanley Robinson - Farsight

On climate change, politics, literature, the human/nature divide, and humanity's far off future.

When elaborated in detail, with thick texture and some lived imaginative time, a speculative fiction can bring to life in the mind one possibility or other, which can then be contemplated as a felt experience, and one’s present actions then adjusted accordingly, influenced by experiences that are fictional but nevertheless real.