Writing Thin

Writing Thin Talia Dan-Cohen In 2006, John Friedman published an article spurred by his own frustration with the poststructuralist takeover of development studies in anthropology. That frustration is to a large extent encapsulated by a particular admonition: "[P]ost-structuralist anthropologists of development fall short;" writes Friedman, "their studies are ethnographically thin" (2006:209). Its target aside, the admonition is, I would venture, well-known to most anthropologists. In disciplinary speak, labeling something "ethnographically thin" is not usually a compliment. This paper is dedicated to questioning certain versions of this admonition and the attendant predilection for "thickness" in anthropology that turns "thin" into a distinctly self-evident slight. I query particular meanings anthropologists sometimes attribute to thickness, and highlight one approach that makes a case for writing thin. I do this by focusing on the piece from which Friedman explicitly drew the barb: Sherry Ortner's "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal" (1995), an article that is concerned with defining and making a case for thickness in anthropology, and that has been cited in invocations of the thick/thin distinction, Friedman's among them.1 As Ortner's paper simultaneously explains and illustrates, thickness is not synonymous with "thick description." Rather, Ortner argues, thickness is a constitutive element of an "ethnographic sensibility" that animates disparate kinds of work in anthropology. I highlight two features of Ortner's take on thickness that carry particular relevance for my argument here. First, I note that Ortner's text reifies thickness. Second, I show that it aestheticizes it. In the second half of the article, I examine contributions by an anthropologist who has made what I take to be a compelling case for sometimes cultivating a thin sensibility: Annelise Riles. Riles's writings are among [End Page 903] several more recent interventions that challenge anthropologists to examine the limits of thickness as a disciplinary trope and to pay more attention to what the use of "thin composition," in particular circumstances, might yield.2 Given that there are other such interventions, the reader may wonder why other paths into thick and thin were not chosen. I have paired Ortner and Riles for a reason. Riles's work directs our attention towards aesthetics and forms that are latent in ostensibly shared norms. Through my reading of Ortner's article, I show that thickness in part describes just such aesthetics and forms. That is, insofar as thickness is sometimes construed aesthetically, from certain angles, thickness can be apprehended as itself thin in Riles's sense. My point is not to disparage thickness by observing that it can be read thinly. Rather, my aim is to illustrate the analytic purchase of a thin sensibility for an understanding of anthropological knowledge practices. This article is a corollary to a larger project I have been pursuing for some time now and can be read in this vein: a study of the uses and meanings of "complexity" among different epistemic communities. In cultural anthropology, thickness is often situated—both in terms of semantic family resemblances but also in evaluative terms—on the side of such terms as "richness," "complexity," "texture," and "nuance," and in opposition to such terms as "thinness" and "simplicity," but also, as Ortner (1995) points out, "elegance" and "parsimony." If scholars have noted a bias towards valuing complexity across an array of fields (see for example Mol and Law 2002), thickness has special evaluative resonance for anthropologists (Jackson 2013, Marcus 1998).3 What interests me about this entire collection of normatively loaded terms is the way they can sometimes partially peel apart from the projects or theoretical paradigms that framed their virtues, yet continue to carry normative force and do disciplining work. Thickness After Geertz In the anthropological lexicon, thickness is most closely associated with "thick description," the central term for Geertzian interpretive anthropology. The term is so thoroughly seared into anthropological discourse that I shall only briefly discuss it here, and a little sheepishly at that. Geertz famously borrowed the term "thick description," as well as the familiar example through which its meaning is made manifest, from an essay by Gilbert Ryle, the mid-20th century ordinary language philosopher. [End Page 904] The example involves...