Fuera de contexto: la hermenéutica Geertziana en historia cultural y arqueología

this paper deals with the conceptual loans going from history and historiography to the interpretive anthropology, from the latter to cultural history, and from anthropological hermeneutics and cultural history to post-processual, radical, contextual or interpretive archaeology. the ideas specifically examined are the "thick description" and "culture-as-text" metaphors as they are applied to written materials which are already text in one case, and to artifacts or material remains whose relationship with the actual culture and meaning is not known or may be hardly knowable at all. my point is that in most of the cases, transferring practices from one discipline to another at a discursive, rhetorical level generates methodological problems wich are not as much circumstantial as they are systematic.