Public worlds, though they are unavoidable and often ensnare people, do not inevitably eclipse them or dictate the course of human affairs. People act within public worlds, but they also operate according to their own lights, sometimes transforming those worlds and even themselves. The phrase “personal worlds” is intended to suggest size, systematicity, variability, and complexity in lives and minds. Personal worlds are, in a manner of speaking, just as big as public worlds, and they are at least as complicated. Clearly, public worlds are incredibly varied, multi-leveled, and intricate, as anthropologists have amply demonstrated; but then, I will argue, so are the worlds of persons.
Here is another way to put it. Personal and public worlds are systems, but not closed systems. Key anthropological issues, above all those related to representation and meaning—matters closely associated with the concept of culture—demand attention to both systems, and to the interactions between them. They demand, in other words, inspection through a double lens, which in turn requires new forms of ethnographic description.
Descriptions, Thick and Thin
“Culture” can, of course, mean whatever an analyst wants it to mean. Anthropologists have used “culture” in myriad ways—Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) discovered 164 definitions in the literature, a half century ago!—but these formulations are mostly attempts to give a strict sense to a small number of loose notions. One such loose notion is “the degree to which people in a particular group experience things the same way.” This loose notion can be formally captured by defining culture as the distribution of personal cognition.14 The definition has the advantage of introducing flexibility, nuance, and precision into cultural analysis. A group does not, as in standard theory, have “a culture.” Rather, an analyst can identify many cultures (or cultural clumps) among its members; conversely, each person participates in many cultures. Those many cultures may or may not be aligned with subgroups defined on the basis of standard social coordinates such as class or gender, or any obvious social coordinates, for that matter. For example, “getting high” and “being born again” are both U.S. American cultural scripts; though many Americans have intimate knowledge of both, many others do not, and many are familiar with neither.
Moreover, a distributive definition draws attention to subjective disjunction—at least some meanings will be idiosyncratic, and all meanings, even apparently common ones, viewed at a sufficiently high resolution, will have singular personal dimensions and resonances. A subjectivity is always, ultimately, someone’s, a personalized network of meanings contingent on the unique learning accomplished during a unique life trajectory. In other words, one’s personal web of meaning is always, necessarily, custom-learned and custom-made, though it is learned in interaction and an analyst will see that some portions, at some levels of resolution, are shared with some others.
Culture thus defined dispels the Cultural Relativity Effect. The term becomes an analytic convenience, a shorthand for describing the scatter of ways of thinking and feeling among members of a group. It helps one understand why people act as they do and how interactions and inner worlds unfold. But meaning-making involves more than thinking and feeling. Public representations (the “symbols” of conventional interpretive approaches), which, I am suggesting, should not be treated as culture, impinge upon cognition. I have come to think of public representations as rough, ambiguous, widely circulated messages that evoke varying cognitive responses. Representations thus characterized meet cognitive processes at the interface between public and personal worlds.
To be sure, this formulation is a strategic objectification, a partial retreat in the direction of mindlike condensations. But it does not erase human minds from the picture. Consider, for example, an English lexical item such as “love.” The word is comprehensible to English speakers in a basic sense, as an emotion ideally associated with affiliation between spouses or sweethearts or parents and children; but a moment’s reflection should suffice to suggest that its connotations and feeling-tone are in many (and supremely important) respects highly personalized.
It is crucial to emphasize that public representations so conceived are typically thin rather than thick. Their thickening occurs in human subjectivities. Rather than a web or cage, public representations constitute a somewhat haphazard, flexible, open lattice, which people adapt in their own ways and upon which they build the most fantastic and elaborate personal forms. Of course, some people’s subjective creations may, and often do, overlap or correspond, owing to similarities in life trajectories and dispositions. But the theoretical artifice that thick meanings reside in the representations themselves strikes me as hazardous and misleading.
The celebrated literary turn in cultural analysis is thus a wrong turn.15 The problem with thick description and literary methods is that they provide unduly subtle and elaborate conjectures about meaning. They over-interpret. The practice is justified in literary criticism, where the object may be to produce a thought-provoking critique or an inventive original essay. But in ethnography thick description substitutes an analyst’s professional and highly specialized, often brilliant, techniques of meaning extraction for the varied, biographically situated meaning-making acts of members of a population. Literary readings are accounts not of subjectivities, but of virtual subjectivity—which is to say, no one’s subjectivity, aside perhaps from that of the interpreter in his or her intellectualizing mode.16 Clifford Geertz’s own work yields impressive descriptions of communicative behavior and insights into possible worlds of meaning. But a portrayal of the range of actual thick, personal subjectivities cannot be rendered through such literary techniques, which depend too much on a single analyst’s perspective and imagination. A more subtle and direct account requires empirical research methods such as person-centered ethnography, which seeks to explore the intricacies of personal worlds through specialized interviewing and observational practices.17 Such practices typically have a minor role in interpretive anthropology.
Person-centered ethnography, the topic of several of the following chapters, draws attention to the linkage between the circulation of public representations and diverse, textured human lives. This more inclusive problem of meaning-making has come to occupy a central place in my work. But finding appropriate analytical language has been difficult, and I have not been consistent in my use of terminology. With the benefit of hindsight, let me therefore set out some terms that should help the reader approach the essays, which were originally conceived at different moments. I find it useful to think about an arena of meaning having public and personal dimensions. The study of meaning calls for the characterization of both, as well as theory that can bridge them. Bridging theory spans public and personal worlds, requiring a double optic. And bridging theory, if it is to deal seriously with the spectacular variations and discontinuities in the world, must recognize that human beings make personalized meanings continually in the living of singular lives, and that they have a universal, and highly consequential, capacity for reflective consciousness.
I discuss these broad concepts—the arena of meaning, bridging theory, singular lives, and reflective consciousness—in greater detail in the following section. They do not comprise a strict formal scheme: in a theoretical program so expansive, there are inevitable loose ends and inconsistencies. It is best to think of the concepts as a beginner’s kit of rough mental tools—heuristics, postulates, and models—for grappling with the inclusive problem