ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the relationship between the historical tradition, the emergence of cultural anthropology and its input to the ethnography of communication. Culture, in a manner consistent with the approach of cultural anthropology, is dealt with as that which conditions values and reason. Thus the communities in question are treated as residual categories somehow outside of the rational, normative consensus of normal society. The plurality of human society is a theme which emerges constantly in the work on the ethnography of communication. One of the functions of the persistent reference would seem to be to emphasise that values, world view, vary by culture, and thereby to underline the importance of culture. Culture is the independent variable which accounts for variation in the nature of communicative competence. Culture becomes synonymous with meaning associated with social practice and social experience – socialisation. Furthermore: The systems of culture are patterns of symbols, and language is only one of the symbolic systems in this network.
