ABSTRACT
In this chapter I report on an approach to the study of communication, and on the work of an interconnected group of scholars within the discipline of communication that is actively using and improving this approach in multiple contexts, languages, cultures, and arenas of practice. The approach is grounded in a simple but profound and consequential learning that, over the years, the participants in this group have achieved through their disciplined and systematic studies. That learning is that wherever and whenever there is communication, there are traces of culture laced through it. The learning began as a working assumption, adopted several decades ago (Philipsen, 1989a). Now it stands as a rich and robust finding demonstrated across the work of this group, in the past and in multiple ongoing projects. Our enterprise has been principally an academic and theoretic one. But we have also learned that these traces of culture, and the understandings we produce of them, are an important force in the lives of individuals and communities.
