As an anthropologist, Geertz was not writing for historians, nor was he, from my notice, familiar with historiography. Thus, we need to look to the older anthropological theories to understand where he's coming from and why he's important.

In the mid 20th century, anthropology experienced its first true paradigms shifts. Sure, people had been writing about human societies for 100 years by then. But these were foundational scholars like Karl Marx or Emil Drukheim, whose work predated any divisions within the social sciences; physical "anthrolopogists" who only studied human morphology in vain attempts to delineate human races; and armchair "ethnographers" like Lewis Henry Morgan who were fascinated by indigenous American cultures and raced to preserve it (mostly ignoring, of course, the systems of oppression that threatened it). The modern field of socio-cultural anthropology had only emerged at the start of that century. Franz Boas started the first department in the US in 1903; it wasn't until after 1937 that A.R. Radcliffe-Brown started the anthropology department at Oxford. Long term, in depth fieldwork as the primary method of the anthropologists only comes about in the 1920s, with significant publications from Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and others. A primary consequence of this was that the field was very small, and those involved were heavily influenced by single individuals. As famous as Boas is for basically starting American anthropology, his students (Mead, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, etc.) can also be said to have started their own schools of thought.

By the late '50s there's finally enough anthropologists around that people start to A) branch into different schools within anthropology and B) revisit the founding concepts of the field. One of those concepts was the idea of "culture." Up to that point, most anthropologists could be considered Functionalists: cultural practices exist to serve certain functions within a culture. People need to eat, they need to resolve conflicts, and they need to raise children; what we call "culture" is generally just means to those ends. At the same time, people knew culture was more than that- but what was it? Where is culture "located:" in the mind, in the social world, somewhere in between? How can we study it, since it's lot more than the behaviors that we can observe?

Some folks- the ethnoscientists- found value in identifying what they called the "domains" of a culture. By "domains," they meant the categories with which a people viewed and understood their world: how are colors, animals, plants, foods, and geography classified? Similarly, cognitive anthropologists were interested in the psychological aspects of culture. Claude Levi-Strauss took this even further with his field of Structuralism; Levi-Strauss argued that human behaviors across cultures revealed underlying patterns/structures of human thought.

Some went the opposite direction and revived Marxist, evolutionary, and other materialist perspectives from the 19th-century. These scholars saw culture as a byproduct, a consequence of basic needs. They focused on economies, subsistence strategies, and the development of sociopolitical complexity. The traditionally "cultural" things that anthropologists studied- ritual, dance, religion, dress- were often ignored or considered inconsequential. The real story of these people was underneath that, in their material lives.

Others were influenced by linguistics and saw culture as a network of signs and meanings shared by a community. Whereas structuralists also used a linguistic analogy, they did so to emphasize the underlying rules (i.e. "grammar") of a cultural systems. These Symbolic Anthropologists- Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz- instead found culture something to be "read." Cultural behaviors were representative, they had deeper meanings, meanings that were sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken and secret, and sometimes tacitly acknowledged. It was the anthropologists job to, as Iggers says, "decipher these experiences indirectly though symbolic and ritualistic acts."

The fundamental tool of the Symbolic Anthropologist, per Geertz, is Thick Description. "Thick" refers to the depth of the ethnographic narrative; it must analyze behaviors at multiple levels. Geertz gives the example of a wink in the introduction to The Interpretation of Cultures. A wink is a tremendously simple action, one that may even be done unconsciously. When it's directed at someone, what does it mean? Perhaps it's a simple wink of acknowledgement, an "I see what you did there." Perhaps it's a flirty wink at a girl at the bar. Perhaps it's an ironically flirty wink. Perhaps it's ironically flirty but still used to flirt. Perhaps it's in reference to some piece of popular culture. The action is bound up in a "web of significance." The recipient (presumably) understands what is meant. But can the anthropologist? To do so they must understand the interlinked system of meanings, aka "culture." Thick Description is explaining behaviors within multiple layers of cultural meaning.

This meant that Geertz and similar authors spent more time talking about culture in its own terms than did other anthropologists at the time. Cultures weren't byproducts of material behaviors or psychological natures, but things inherently complex enough to study independently. As Iggers notes, this appealed to contemporary social historians, though they didn't do much with it. His critiques of Geertz ("the thick description they call for does not give us access to an individual but only to the culture in which he or she is bound up") closely resembles those made by later anthropologists. Geertz' most famous essay, Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, is archetype of Tick Description; not only is it a vivid account of a distinctive tradition, but it is also an interpretation of what the event means for people. It's a display of class, an arbitrer of personal conflicts, a contest of manliness (the obvious "cock" puns are plentiful). Yet through it all, it's hard to apply to any specific historical moment. Geertz speaks only of "the Balinese" as a collective; the bound system of meaning that he thickly describes seems only to exist in his writings. Because thick description is so concerned with culture and culture alone, it has limited applications in historical, specific writing.