WORK OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ IN HISTORY   pt2       2000w

‘Although a synchronic description or analysis is often glossed over as a ‘snapshot' that ‘freezes time or as a ‘slice' of time, that is not quite right. Such a description is, rather, one in which time is suspended or abolished analytically so that things that actually occur in the flow of time are treated as part of a uniform moment or epoch in which they simply coexist... To put it otherwise, in synchronic description acts of cultural signification, rather than being treated as a temporal sequence of statement and counterstatement or as linked by causal chains of antecedent and consequence, are seen as components of a mutually defined and mutually sustaining universe of... unchanging meaning.'

The use of synchronic analysis on what Geertz called ‘cultural systems' presented cultural historians with the ability to explore the past with a new analytical model. Robert Darnton, in his book ‘The Great Cat Massacre' uses such analyses to explore episodes from eighteenth century France, especially in his essays ‘Peasants Tell tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose' (an analysis of the cultural significance to French, German and Italian fairy tales) and ‘Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint Severin' (in which he explores the cultural context of the massacre of cats in Paris by printing apprentices during the late 1730s).

The use of thick description allows historians to suspend time rather than be carried along with historical narrative, and in the process analyse the transformations of the past with greater accuracy and depth. Geertz's ideas of thick description have allowed historians like David Sabean to explore witchcraft in seventeenth century Germany.

Despite criticisms by anthropologists of the diachronic approach taken by historians in the past, many historians are still attached to the ideas of history in transformation. Many American ‘new social historians and those within the French ‘Annales' school try to define themselves against historical narrative and by those ‘attempting to manage - or side-step - conceptual problems by writing historical accounts' , such as Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, as seen in his book ‘A History of the Jewish people'.

William H. Sewell Jr has best conveyed this view: