Thick Description (answer)
Dave Fiore answers yesterday’s question:
anyway, on “thick description”–yeah, I was just following Geertz on that one…but I think it fits with what Thomas seemed to be trying to do with the culture of the American homefront (through the lens of the superhero, of course) in All-Star Squadron… I haven’t read much anthropology, but it just seems to me that Geertz’s “inductive” approach to culture makes some sense, and certainly resonates with my approach to lit crit–i.e. you can’t ever say what a symbol (whether it’s a rite or an act of narration) “means”, all you can do is hunt up as many of them as possible and throw in pile… The shape of the pile then becomes an acceptable substitute for “the answer”… Thomas went scavenging through the Golden Age with a will, and, along the way, he filled 66 issues with barely three months worth of “(ret)continuity” which scrutinized a liberal-democracy mobilizing for (near)”total war”, without bothering so much about the war itself, or who “the enemy” actually was (and without covering everything, either! By definition, there’s always something left out by this method, which is only unique in its explicit acknowledgement of this fact!)
The missing piece to my understanding is - more All-Star Squadron than just childhood’s #35. But I think I have a fingerhold on the term now, if not an actual grip.