 The term was introduced by the 20th-century philosopher Gilbert Ryle, but the predominant sense in which it is used today was developed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his book "The Interpretation of Cultures" (1973) to characterise his own method of doing ethnography..Since then, the term and the methodology it represents has gained widespread currency, not just in the social sciences but also, for example, in the type of literary criticism known as New Historicism.Thick description was first introduced by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949 in "The Thinking of Thoughts