How do humans accomplish actions in social interaction? What enables us to understand each other and to coordinate our activities? How should communication processes that underlie our everyday conduct be studied? This volume explores these fundamental questions in a collection of studies that investigate embodied interaction across a variety of contexts, languages, speakers, and academic disciplines. While diverse, the contributions to this volume present a coherent perspective on the study of human interaction as an embodied (or multimodal) activity system. Taken together, they convincingly demonstrate that no one semiotic resource—be it language, gestures, or material objects—should be examined in isolation since “the simultaneous use of diverse semiotic resources is pervasive in the organization of endogenous human action” (4). This volume can be appreciated, on the one hand, as a collection of original findings about a range of interactional phenomena with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on interactants' nonvocal conduct, and, on the other hand, as an illustration of—and an argument for—a naturalistic, video-based, micro-analytic approach to the study of human interaction.
In the introduction (Ch. 1), Jürgen Streeck, Charles Goodwin, & Curtis LeBaron explicate this integrated approach to the organization of action and social interaction adopted by the contributors to the volume and trace its intellectual history. They also provide very useful summaries of the chapters and explain how they fit together. The remaining twenty chapters of the volume are organized in three parts.
The papers in Part 1, “Founding capacities,” explore some basic linguistic, material, and embodied resources that enable humans to communicate. In Ch. 2, Edwin Hutchins & Saeko Nomura use cognitive ethnography to examine how multimodal utterances—that is, those that include both speech and gesture—are produced collaboratively by two or more interlocutors. The authors show how gesture, talk, and written documents are used in the production of multimodal actions in interaction between a pilot trainer and trainees in preparation for a flight simulation exercise. Gene H. Lerner, Don H. Zimmerman, & Mardi Kidwell (Ch. 3) analyze interactions involving very young preverbal children in a daycare center, focusing on how children bid to participate in a food distribution activity. They demonstrate that the sequential organization of this routine activity “furnishes a locally constituted formal scaffolding” for children's interventions (56). In Ch. 4, N. J. Enfield outlines a theoretical argument for a conceptualization of interaction that emphasizes the role of the “interpreter” (recipient) of actions over their producer and the importance of multimodal “move” as a basic analytic unit.
Ch. 5, by Streeck, examines the use of material objects. By analyzing segments from an interaction between two German businessmen, Streeck demonstrates how ordinary material objects become “situated symbols,” subsequently used as resources for accomplishing actions, and how artifacts created in the course of an interaction (e.g. inscriptions) are later deployed for interactional tasks. In Ch. 6, Eve Tulbert & Marjorie Goodwin use video ethnography to study how parents get children to brush their teeth. The authors compare the organization of this activity across several families and describe embodied resources parents use in directing their children's attention and actions.
Hiromi Aoki (Ch. 7) investigates head nods in Japanese conversation. Focusing on several sequential contexts, Aoki demonstrates that speakers deploy head nods to prompt a responsive action from the recipient and to strengthen sequential implicativeness of a particular response. In Ch. 8, Shimako Iwasaki explores the distinct nature of turn-taking organization in Japanese conversation, focusing on how single turn-constructional units are produced in collaboration with recipients. She shows that speakers manipulate embodied production of the turn-in-progress to prompt recipients to display their stance towards what is being said.
The second part of the book, “Transformational ecologies,” brings together chapters that examine interactions with speakers whose communicative competencies are not fully developed (preverbal children and second language learners) and speakers with communicative impairments (blindness, deafness, and aphasia). Ch. 9, by Siri Mehus, investigates how, in a daycare setting, caregivers control the behavior of preverbal children. Mehus focuses on the practice of “anticipatory contextualization” that consists in caregivers altering the context of a child's action so as to change its significance, indirectly guiding the child towards desired behavior. In Ch. 10, Marianne Gullberg investigates embodied communicative strategies (such as gestures and facial expressions) second-language learners use for dealing with difficulties in lexicon, grammar, and interaction and argues that, in the long term, the use of these compensatory strategies may interfere with second-language learning. Ray Wilkinson, Steven Bloch, & Michael Clark (Ch. 11) examine how people with communication disorders (specifically, dysarthria and aphasia) use writing and figure spelling and voice output communication aid (VOCA) devices. The authors discuss affordances and problems in using these resources for everyday interaction.
Ch. 12, by Sharon Avital & Streeck, is the first micro-analytic study of interactions involving blind children. How do participants establish and maintain focused interaction in the absence of visual input? The chapter describes various vocal and tactile resources, including “audible gestures” (deliberate acoustic signals) and sensory resources referred to as “peripersonal perception.” In Ch. 13, Charles Goodwin focuses on an interaction involving an aphasic man with a very limited productive vocabulary. Goodwin demonstrates that human action is multimodal—“constructed through the systematic use of public signs in diverse media … that mutually elaborate each other” (182), cooperative in that each subsequent action builds on prior context, and distributed across participants and turns. In Ch. 14, Elizabeth Keating & Chiho Sunakawa look at new forms of embodied action that emerge from interaction between real and virtual spaces. They examine two settings: multiplayer online computer game during a “LAN party” and computer-mediated interactions between deaf signers using the American Sign Language.
The papers in Part 3, “Professional communities,” examine how interaction is shaped by—and shapes—the organizational setting in which it occurs. Lorenza Mondada (Ch. 15) investigates interaction during a surgical procedure, focusing on how a head surgeon designs his actions for both a co-present surgical assistant and for a remote audience of novices being instructed on how to conduct the procedure. The chapter examines the precise coordination of actions within this multi-activity. In Ch. 16, Alan Zemel, Timothy Koschmann, & LeBaron also analyze instructional communication during a surgical procedure, focusing on how an attending surgeon pursues responses to instructional questions from a medical resident. Following an inadequate response, the attending deploys a variety of increasingly explicit embodied resources in order to guide the resident to a correct answer.
Ch. 17, by Keith M. Murphy, examines interaction in an architectural firm. The focus is on embedded skits—short, future-oriented story-like vignettes. These skits animate future uses of the building being designed and are used by architects in discussions of possible design problems. In Ch. 18, Julien C. Mirivel investigates how, during an initial consultation, plastic surgeons convince new patients to undergo plastic surgery. Surgeons use kinetic, tactile, and gestural evidence to substantiate their judgments about the patient's body, confirming its flaws and presenting plastic surgery as the logical next step to correct the flaws. Ch. 19, by Scott Phillabaum, examines instructional interactions between experienced and novice photographers. The analysis focuses on how novices are informally taught the use of different professional tools (contact prints, negatives, and the viewing board) so that they can learn to “see” photographs in professionally significant ways.
In Ch. 20, Christian Heath & Paul Luff explore bodily conduct involved in accomplishing a highly specialized organizational activity: auctioning fine arts and antiques. The authors examine how the distribution of bidding opportunities among potential buyers is coordinated so that that the price of an auctioned item can be successfully and legitimately escalated. Ch. 21, by John B. Haviland, is dedicated to musical performances of three different types: string quartet, jazz combo, and ritual musical performances in a Mayan Indian community. Specifically, Haviland examines how musicians deal with coordination problems (starting, stopping, and coordinating a performance) in the three musical traditions and the role of physical spaces in coordinating musicians' actions.
In general, the volume presents a coherent collection of state-of-the-art micro-analytic research on embodied interaction. As the above summaries suggest, each paper investigates video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in endogenous settings (except for Chs. 4 and 10). The collection is remarkable for the range of contexts and populations that are examined and for the diversity of disciplinary orientations brought to bear on the data. Aside from its empirical and theoretical contributions to research on embodied action in social interaction, the volume is valuable methodologically as an illustrative representation of ways in which video-recorded data can be studied and represented in print. The chapters contain detailed transcripts of both vocal and visible conduct, supplemented by high quality drawings, frame grabs, or photographs of participants, physical spaces, and artifacts. While few authors discuss the role of these representation practices in the analysis (but see Ch. 8), their variety and rhetorical deployment are, in themselves, instructional. (It is unfortunate, however, that no direct access to the recorded data is provided.) Overall, the book is highly recommended to all students and researchers interested in the organization of social interaction.
