Interpretive communities are a theoretical concept stemming from reader-response criticism and publicized by Stanley Fish although it was in use in other fields and may be found as early as 1964 in the "Historical News and Notices" of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly (p. 98) and also, and again before Fish's usage, in Richard Crouter's 1974 "H. Reinhold Neibuhr and Stoicism" in The Journal of Religious Ethics.
In a 2016 article, anthropologist Shirley J. Fiske argues for the existence of interpretive communities regarding climate change.
These interpretive communities are shaped by various factors, including political affiliations, regional identities, and cultural perspectives.
Through ethnographic research on farmers in Dorchester County, Maryland, Fiske determined two different cultural models regarding climate change which can be viewed as interpretive communities.
In this model, farmers interpreted the changes they observed, such as rising tides and summer droughts, as part of the patterns and cycles of nature.