Abstract
Abstract This article aims to complicate the opposition between “thick description” and “thin” thought experiments by constructing a thought experiment of its own. It compares the use of examples—thick and thin—in the work of Malinowski and Wittgenstein, who came to extremely similar conclusions about the importance of context to meaning, the former around a decade before the latter. By imagining the—by no means implausible—possibility that Wittgenstein read Malinowski, the article asks how it might change anthropological views about thickness and thinness if it turned out that one of the major philosophical sources of our disciplinary preference for “thick description” as a generalized prescription for ethnography took some inspiration for such ideas from Malinowksi's more modest and restricted empiricism.
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