Thick description and the everyday. Xxxxxx (1973) stresses the problematic nature of thick description for the ethnographer. He believes that it presents the ethnographer with a complex set of problems when trying to faithfully represent a cultural formation as he states: What the ethnographer is in fact faced with […] is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them are superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he [sic.] [the ethnographer] must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render (Xxxxxx, 1973, p. 10). Xxxxxx also highlights the intricacies associated with constructing a reading of what happens in a particular cultural context. As many of the cultural practices both inside and outside Hoshūkō are dependent upon Japanese language proficiency it is impossible to neatly divide language and cultural practices into two separable entities. Geertz highlights that what people say is equally important as what people do when he says: If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens—from what, in this time or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole vast business of the world—is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant (Geertz, 1973, p. 18). In addition, Geertz (1973, p. 16) believes that in the ‘thick description’: Behaviour must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behaviour —or more, precisely, social action—that cultural forms find articulation. They find it as well, of course, in various sorts of artifacts [sic.] […] but these draw their meaning from the role they play […] in an ongoing pattern of life […] (Geertz, 1973, p. 16). Language, cultural and bodily practices formed part of this behaviour both inside and outside Hoshūkō (see chapters 5, 6 and 7). In this thesis it was the hidden significance underpinning the artefacts and practices which I was painstakingly trying to tease out to provide the reader with a finely tuned analysis of how Japanese ethnicities of an official kind pervade the everyday lives of the A-Js. Although I have deliberately chosen to offer a thick description to give a feel of how the Anglo- Japanese formation is partly constituted by its participation with certain renderings of Japaneseness, I feel that the use of ‘thick description’ alone is not enough to represent the everyday in the lives of the A-Js. So I al...
