Sense-making artifacts on the margins of cultural spaces

Graffiti are universal communicative artifacts. For example, epigraphologists used the graffiti found on the walls of the city of Pompeii, which was destroyed by a volcano in A.D. 79, to accurately reconstruct many cultural features of the people who inhabited the city (D'Avino, 1964; Lindsay, 1960; Tanzers, 1939; Varone, 1991). No doubt, most peoples and cultures throughout the world anonymously write, draw, and paint on walls and other surfaces. These acts are inherently social. As Bruner and Kelso (1980) astutely observe, "although [often] written in the privacy of a toilet stall, the writing of graffiti is an essentially social act.... To write graffiti is to communicate; one never finds graffiti where they cannot be seen by others" (p. 241). Yet graffiti remain relatively absent in communication inquiry and ethnographic research (for exceptions see Conquergood, 1994; Rodriguez and Clair, 1999; Scheibel, 1994). Communication scholars and ethnographers seem to still assume that graffiti have no communicative value. It is supposedly the doing of deviant and delinquent minds (Abel and Buckley, 1977; Dundes, 1966; Gaylin and Jennings, 1996; Klein, 1974; Opler, 1974).