Key concept: culture practice questions.

Geertz argued that an observer who records only that a boy's right eyelid contracted has produced a thin description of the event. A thick description of the same movement would additionally

• note the contraction in far greater detail and over a much longer stretch of recorded time
• establish by physiological measurement whether the eyelid moved further than in an ordinary blink
• set out the conventions that make the movement a signal and what it meant to those present
• compare the contraction with similar movements recorded by other ethnographers elsewhere

Answer: set out the conventions that make the movement a signal and what it meant to those present

Thickness is a matter of interpretive layers rather than of length or resolution, since the wink, the parody of a wink and the rehearsal of one are physically identical. Glossing thick description as 'more detailed notes' is the standard error.

In 'Writing Against Culture' (1991) Abu-Lughod urged anthropologists to write ethnographies of particular people rather than of cultures. Her principal objection to the culture concept was that it

• makes groups appear bounded and uniform, and hardens the difference between them
• cannot be translated into the languages of the communities that anthropologists write about
• was developed too recently to be applied to societies with long written historical records
• belongs properly to sociology, where it had already been defined more precisely than in anthropology

Answer: makes groups appear bounded and uniform, and hardens the difference between them

Her worry is that speaking of 'a culture' packages people as a type and makes the difference between us and them look like the fundamental fact; her remedy is ethnography of named individuals over time. She wrote against the noun, not against the study of meaning.

Bourdieu, drawing on fieldwork in Kabylia in Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s, used the term habitus for the dispositions through which people generate appropriate conduct without consulting stated rules. On his account a young man who knows how far to lower his eyes when greeting an elder

• is applying a rule that he could state accurately if the ethnographer asked him to
• has acquired through long participation a bodily sense of what the situation calls for
• is repeating a habit that carries no consequences for how those present judge him
• is calculating the social advantage to be had from the greeting in advance of each new encounter

Answer: has acquired through long participation a bodily sense of what the situation calls for

Habitus sits between rule-following and calculation: it is durable and learned, yet it improvises in situations no rule anticipated. Glossing it as 'habit' loses the point that it generates new conduct rather than repeating old conduct.

An account explains what members of a group do by referring to a single unchanging inner nature that all of them are said to share, so that variation within the group and its history drop out of the description. Anthropologists call this move

• cultural determinism, since conduct is being derived from the culture people were raised in
• cultural essentialism, since a fixed inner nature is being credited to every member
• cultural relativism, since the group is being described in terms of its own standards
• ethnocentrism, since the group is being judged by the standards of the observer

Answer: cultural essentialism, since a fixed inner nature is being credited to every member

The objection is not that groups have nothing in common but that a supposed inner nature is offered in place of an account of history, circumstance and disagreement. Cultural determinism is a different claim, that upbringing shapes conduct, and it neither requires the group to be uniform nor denies it a history; Abu-Lughod's 1991 argument for writing about particular people is the standard response to essentialism.

Benedict argued in 1934 that every culture selects a narrow arc from the great range of human possibilities and elaborates it into a consistent whole, so that a society can be characterised by a dominant configuration. The standard anthropological objection to writing of this kind is that

• it depends on comparison between societies, a method anthropologists have since abandoned altogether
• it smooths away internal disagreement and change, presenting as one pattern what people actually argue about
• it draws on fieldwork material, whereas configurations of that scale could only be established from historical documents
• it makes the selection from the arc of possibilities a matter of conscious collective decision by each society

Answer: it smooths away internal disagreement and change, presenting as one pattern what people actually argue about

The objection is over-integration: a portrait built to be coherent leaves no room for the dissenters, the contested cases and the historical shifts that any close fieldwork turns up. Comparison itself was not abandoned; what was abandoned was the assumption that each society yields one consistent pattern.

Between 1972 and 1975 Willis spent time with a group of working-class boys at a secondary school in the English Midlands who mocked academic effort, prized 'having a laugh' and looked forward to manual work. His account of what their counter-school culture accomplished is that

• it was imposed on the boys by teachers who had already decided what sort of work they were suited to
• it had no bearing on where they ended up, since examination results alone determined the jobs open to them, regardless of anything the boys themselves did
• it led the boys to choose, for reasons that made sense to them, the jobs their position had already marked out
• it shows that a shared way of life among young people can develop quite apart from the wider economy

Answer: it led the boys to choose, for reasons that made sense to them, the jobs their position had already marked out

The case is used for cultural production rather than passive transmission: the boys were not tricked, they saw through the promise that school work pays, and acted on that insight in a way that delivered them to the shop floor. Reproduction here runs through their own agency, which is what makes the study uncomfortable.