“What We Need is Communication”: “Communication” as a Cultural Category in Some American Speech

THE materials which provided both the stimulus and the data for this study suggest that in some American speech about interpersonal life, “communication” carries localized and highly poignant meanings. The pervasiveness of “communication” in such speech, but more importantly the systematicity of its occurrence, its “compelling facticity,” ¹ and the moral freight it carries for its users, make it an important term in an American symbolic universe and vocabulary of motives. This study is an ethnographic exploration of that term and of the discursive field in which it finds a place.