Kenneth Burke writes:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (The Philosophy of Literary Form, 110-111)

See the video of this passage with the seemingly affluent characters and all-white cast, implying that it might take more than good rhetorical chops to win a seat at the main table.

From Sara Ahmed:

The experience of this process offers us the opportunity to “thicken” our description of institutions. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle suggests that “thicker descriptions” require more than describing an action; it would locate an individual action in terms of its wider meaning or accomplishment. He suggests that a thin description of what a person is doing (such as doodling) requires thickening “before it amounts to an account of what the person is trying to accomplish.” (Ryle 1971: 498)

The idea that the path to an understanding might not follow the orderly categories of some expert’s discipline, but rather a patient method of observation and annotation leading to something that might be as much an account as it is an analysis. A story told by someone who didn’t rush to commence the tale, but who held back, observing and reflecting.

I’d better look up some other discussions of the term, at least in the field of anthropology. Remember, too, that a half century ago an interesting anthropologist had to cast her research as a novel because the field didn’t have room in its analytical categories for accounts based on something like thick description. So she published Return to Laughter under a pseudonym.

Mies van der Rohe: “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”