Last update:
9 February 2010
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GesturecraftThe manu-facture of meaning
2009. xii, 235 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 2842 0 / EUR 90.00 / USD 135.00
e-Book
– Available from e-book platforms
The craft of gesture is part of the practical equipment with which we inhabit and understand the world together. Drawing on micro-ethnographic research in diverse interaction settings, this book explores the communicative ecologies in which hand-gestures appear: illuminating the world around us, depicting it, making sense of it, and symbolizing the interaction process itself. Gesture is analyzed as embodied communicative action grounded in the hands' practical and cognitive engagments with material worlds. The book responds to the quest for the role of the human body in cognition and interaction with an analytic perspective informed by phenomenology, conversation analysis, context analysis, praxeology, and cognitive science. Many of the cross-linguistic video-data of everyday interaction investigated in its chapters are available on-line.
Table of contents
“This is one of the most original and important books on gesture to appear in recent years. It offers a radically new analytic point of departure for thinking about gesture, one that moves away from a picture of gesture as the visual representation of internal mental life, to investigate the actions of skilled, cognitively rich bodies as they make sense out of the worlds they inhabit with others through practical work with their hands. The book includes a detailed investigation of the hand as a complex cognitive organ, one that finds its natural home in mundane work settings such as an auto repair shop, as well as a comparison of gestural practices in a variety of languages and cultures. It is essential reading for anyone interested how human action, communication and cognition emerge from embodied practice.”
Charles Goodwin , UCLA
Subject classification |
Communication Studies