Enfield's The anatomy of meaning is a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion of composites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration—how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote a kind of cross-modal orderliness or the achievement of orderliness—perhaps through heuristics and inference-making? As I detail the book's engagement with this issue and compare it with others—especially recent discussions of “textuality” in linguistic anthropology and older structuralist approaches to behavioral events—I suggest that Enfield's notion is best viewed as a methodological operator. It is a notion that performs a kind of methodological displacement, pushing against an entrenched logocentrism while spurring us to view communicative events as multiplex, cross-modal assemblages. (Multi-modal, cross-modal, gesture, interaction, video, Lao)
