in the United States." Interpretive methodologies were needed to understand culture as a system of meaning. Because of this, Geertz's influence is connected with "a massive cultural shift" in the social sciences referred to as the interpretive turn. The interpretive turn in the social sciences had strong foundations in cultural anthropological methodology. In doing so, there was a shift from structural approaches as an interpretive lens, towards meaning. With the interpretive turn, contextual and textual information took the lead in understanding reality, language, and culture. This was all under the assumption that a better anthropology included understanding the particular behaviors of the communities being studied. Geertz's thick description approach, along with the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, has become increasingly recognized as a method of symbolic anthropology, enlisted as a working antidote to overly technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures, organizations, and historical settings. Influenced by Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Weber, Paul Ricoeur, and Alfred Schütz, the method of descriptive ethnography that came to be associated with Geertz is credited with resuscitating field research from an endeavor of ongoing objectification—the focus of research being "out there"—to a more immediate undertaking, where participant observation embeds the researcher in the enactment of the settings being reported. However, despite its dissemination among the disciplines, some theorists pushed back on thick description, skeptical about its ability to somehow interpret meaning by compiling large amounts of data. They also questioned how this data was supposed to provide the totality of a society naturally. See also Contextualism Cultural studies Indexicality Claude Lévi-Strauss Symbolic anthropology References Footnotes Bibliography Hammersley, M. (2008) 'On thick description: Interpreting Clifford Geertz', in Questioning Qualitative Inquiry: Critical Essays, London, Sage. Munson, Henry. 1986. "Geertz on Religion: The Theory and the Practice". Religion 16: 19-32. Robinson, Paul. 1983. "From Suttee to Baseball to Cockfighting". The New York Times September 25, 1983. External links Robinson, Paul Ryle, Gilbert. What is le Penseur doing? — lecture by Ryle (1971), and later published in his collected papers. Philosophy of social science Anthropology