ABSTRACT
Like the Teamsterville research, the research on “communication” as a cultural category in some American speech was originally part of a plan to discover and comparatively analyze two culturally distinctive communicative codes. With regard to the “American” code, early influences were Schneider (1965) and Hsu (1963), two ethnographers who provided a way to think about American life as deeply cultured. The first concrete expression of this plan is found in Philipsen (1976), a paper heavily indebted to Bernstein (1964), in which I articulated several dimensions of contrast between Teamsterville and “Sunnyville,” a designation for middle-class, college-educated Americans in southern California, whose communicative practices Mary Jo Rudd and I had studied through ethnographic fieldwork there. These practices were cast at the level of behavioral tendencies, beliefs, values, and indigenous speech situations. It was not until reading Varenne (1977) that the full implication of a cultural approach to American communication, such as Katriel and I took in the paper, became evident. Varenne, applying the ethnographic approaches of Geertz (1973) and Schneider (1976), showed a way to treat American culture as a system of symbols and meanings rather than as only a set of institutions and practices. Our research built on this foundation by treating “communication” as a cultural category.
