15 - Environmentally Coupled Gestures

Summary

Much analysis of gesture draws an invisible boundary at the skin of the actor(s). Here actions are examined that cannot be understood without simultaneous orientation to 1) language, 2) deictic gestures, and 3) structure in the environment that is the target of the deictic (as well as the mutual orientation of the participants’ bodies that creates a shared focus of attention). What emerge are gestures built through the mutual elaboration of different materials in different media that have a symbiotic organization in which a whole that is greater than, and different from, any single part is created. The laminated organization of environmentally coupled gestures draws together within a single action both a category and the phenomena in the world that are to count as proper instances of the category. They are thus central to the co-operative construction of shared knowledge, professional vision, and apprenticeship investigated in other chapters. Simultaneously, they force us to expand our sense of what counts as gesture, and the analytic frameworks required to study it.

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