Abstract
Interpretation refers to the way in which people make sense of their lives and the events, actors, processes, and texts that they encounter. This sense making is contextually resourced and often context dependent. Interpretation is taken to encompass any or all of understanding, comprehension, perception or simply grasping in order to make sense of something. In what follows, the interconnected concepts of interpretation and reception are examined through the lens of “reception studies” in communication and cultural studies, which contextualize the active role of readers and viewers within the wider circuit of culture This approach conceives of the production and reproduction of meaning at the levels of the macro (political economic), meso (groups, communities), and micro (everyday lifeworld) as part of a dynamic and mutually reinforcing cycle, in contrast with the linearity of the sender-message-receiver model more commonly adopted in audience research. The concept of interpretation lies at the heart of a range of different disciplines. It draws particularly on philosophy and later the literary humanities, in which scholars have theorized the nature and role of people’s understandings in everyday life, as well as the interpretation of literary texts. Interpretation has found a place in history, theology, anthropology, sociology, art, and linguistics, among other fields. It has even occupied the interests of cognitive researchers, who have often been criticized for reducing the question of interpretation to purely individual differences. The pursuit of interpretation as an empirical project within media and communication studies began in the face of the problematic aspects of interpretation being ignored in the heyday of propositions about either powerful texts or powerful media effects. While uses and gratifications research was initially seen as a counter to effects research, this counter in turn was criticized for a host of reasons, not least among which was its individualistic approach to audience motivation and the neglect of audiences’ interpretative task of engaging with texts (rather than, more simply, responding to stimuli). An impetus came from cultural studies, especially from feminist traditions and ethnographic methods through the 1980s and 1990s, in which interpretative work was contextualized within relations of structure and power. But the empirical effort was strongly sociological and socio-psychological (initially—later it was also influenced by anthropological approaches) and required the development of new methods of investigation within the private lifeworld of the audience.