This book richly demonstrates Lachixío sociality by giving us a window into how members of a small highland Zapotec community say and do things in everyday life. Sicoli's naturalistically grounded ‘multimodal ethnography’, based on a fifty-hour video corpus of ordinary social interactions, insightfully shows how interactants produce recognizable joint actions by not only using lexical and grammatical affordances of the Lachixío Zapotec language, but also mobilizing a variety of embodied and material resources.
The book brings together linguistic anthropology and interaction analysis by combining video documentation, participant observation, interviews, and ‘playback dialogues’ (a hybrid participatory methodology that involves use of the researcher's data for eliciting interpretation by members of the endogenous speech community). It demonstrates the strength of integrating a video-based multimodal approach into the ethnography of social encounters as they occur in actual situations of language use and practical action.
After an introductory chapter that situates the analysis against its theoretical background, chapter 2 places analytic focus on the action of offering by examining the socio-interactional work and moral-ritual dimensions involved in giving gifts, or offering food or drinks in both formal and everyday (household) settings.
Chapter 3 adds to a growing body of interactional research on recruitment sequences by providing a detailed investigation of various multimodally formatted recruitments and their interactional trajectories. The chapter thereby illuminates linguistic facets of Lachixío Zapotec grammar-in-interaction, while at the same time showing how interactants (re)constitute interpersonal relationships in situ and navigate family hierarchies and power structures when ‘getting others to do things’.
Grounded in foundational conversation analytic work, chapter 4 is concerned with the interactional organization of other-initiated repair sequences. Drawing on quantitative results, the chapter first discusses parallels with previous cross-cultural findings on repair organization and then goes on to exemplify a typology of different kinds of lexical, grammatical, and embodied resources that co-participants deploy for initiating repair. The chapter shows how intersubjectivity is emergently achieved in the moment-by-moment construction of social interaction.
Chapter 5 examines how Lachixío interactants deploy what are termed resonance-building practices in the sequential unfolding of interaction, such as when preceding utterances are reused with minimal lexico-syntactical changes. Such incrementally built, parallel structures are discussed as ‘resonating’ displays of affiliation and intersubjectivity as well as practices that are related to stance-taking and the marking of epistemic agentivity.
Chapter 6 turns to a focus on material culture in the praxis of daily Lachixío life. Video analysis of the fabrication of saddle straps or building of a coyote-proof turkey enclosure shows how interactants actually engage in practical collaborative work, thereby also shedding light on the dynamics of joint decision making and epistemic management. In investigating these interactional projects in multiactivity settings, the chapter highlights the interplay of verbal, embodied, and material resources within the multimodal framework.
The concluding chapter discusses relations between the notion of ‘multimodal assemblages’ and biosemiotics. Overall, and perhaps most importantly, Sicoli's holistic and participant-centered Zapotec ethnography not only provides important analytic and theoretical insights into the multimodal complexity of human sociality, but also constitutes a vital resource for language documentation and, hopefully, revitalization.
