Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory

In this paper I rehearse the thinking steps J. K Gibson-Graham developed in order to theorize diverse economies and reveal a landscape of economic difference. Reading with and against Clifford Geertz’s 1973 essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” I discuss how “thick description” of diverse economic practices can be combined with weak theory to produce a performative rethinking of economy centered on the well-being of people and the planet. I discuss the difficulties of resisting the influence of “strong theory”—that is, powerful discourses that organize events into understandable and seemingly predictable trajectories. I outline the diverse economy, a reframing that allows for a much wider range of social relations to be seen to bear on economic practices including, to name just some, trust, care, sharing, reciprocity, cooperation, coercion, bondage, thrift, guilt, love, equity, self-exploitation, solidarity, distributive justice, stewardship, spiritual connection, and environmental and social justice. In the complexly overdetermined field of a diverse economy, we are invited to trace multiple dynamics at play. It is in the apprehension of these diverse determinations that ethnographic thick description comes into its own and leads the way toward rethinking the economy. For ethnographers today, no task is more important than to make small facts speak to large concerns, to make the ethical acts ethnography describes into a performative ontology of economy and the threads of hope that emerge into stories of everyday revolution.