ABSTRACT
IN her essay, Kristine Fitch proposes to address a series of issues that characterize the relations among culture, ideology, and speech communi- ties that are often absent in interpersonal communication research. Her concerns point to broader ideological and epistemological issues that chal- lenge the traditional generalizing frameworks that organize empirical re- search in the social sciences. Recent debates in a number of disciplines have questioned the legitimacy of totalizing narratives and “neutral” theories that warrant scientific investigations into various arenas of social life. “The authority of ‘grand theory,’ ” observes George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986), “seems suspended for the moment in favor of a close consideration of such issues as contextuality [and] the meaning of social life to those who enact it” (p. 8).
