In recent years, the attention of semiotics has strongly shifted from a textual focus to an interrogation of social, cultural, and ethnographic phenomena: rituals, collective behaviors, urban dynamics, politics, memory, and lifestyles. This shift has led to a rethinking of semiotic traditions and its analytic tools, with a specific design to create a strong dialogue with other social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and visual studies. In order to clarify what characterizes this recent cultural approach in semiotics, Anna Maria Lorusso reevaluates the work of some of the most important thinkers in this field: from semioticians such as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Yuri Lotman, to anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss and Geertz, and historians such as Michel Foucault. Lorusso details how the social sense and social communication can function together to analyze how culture works in the contemporary era.