not emphasized by Geertz: the temple anniversary festival. Bakker
describes that the problem is not just restricted to the “Deep Play” essay.
Geertz’s other work is often also not based primarily on ethnographic thick
description. It concerns historical and sociological generalizations. Bakker
concludes that the notion of “thick description” needs to be seen in a
broader, comparative historical sociological context. This involves an inter-
pretive research paradigm that Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, dis-
tanced himself from, including symbolic interactionism and Weberian
verstehende Soziologie.
The next two papers, of this volume are related to the theme “conflict
and cooperation.” In “Obesity as Disease and Deviance: Risk and Morality
in early 21st Century” Pieterman discusses different and conflicting per-
spectives on obesity. His paper fits the social problem approach of, for
instance, Howard Becker and Joel Best where we look at how social pro-
blems are defined and by whom. In this paper Pieterman describes the
social construction of obesity as an epidemic, where experts claim that a
continuously increasing proportion of the western population is becoming
overweight and that this trend is spreading across the globe. Pieterman also
highlights the counterclaims, such as that in western countries obesity no
longer increases and that only extreme obesity increases the risk of dying
young. Pieterman states that the claims which are made by expert have
implications for how obese persons are labeled. Pieterman categorizes two
types of claims. One states that people become overweight because their
intake of calories exceeds their expenditure. This claim tends to foster the
medicalizing of fatness which contributes to blaming overweight people for
their own condition. In the second claim it is proposed that modern socie-
ties are obesogenic, e.g. offering food in abundance while removing the
need for physical exertion. The second offers opportunities for disciplining
the food industry. Pieterman concludes that medicalizing fatness results in
labeling obesity as (the result of) deviant behavior, with the consequences
of stigmatization and discrimination.
In the last paper of the Rotterdam Conference in this volume we leave
the more general western context in which Pieterman discussed obesity and
zoom in on the specific Dutch situation in relation to cannabis. In “Moral
Entrepreneurship Revisited: Police Officers Monitoring Cannabis Retailers
in Rotterdam, the Netherlands” I describe how police officers give meaning
to their relations with owners and personnel of coffee shops. In this paper
I relate my finding to Becker’s Outsiders and especially his concept of the
moral entrepreneur (1963). In this paper, which is based on interviews,
Volume Editor’s Introduction xv