Spring 2021
March 24 Ignasi Clemente: Anthropology, Hunter College, CUNY
Another Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: Alan’s Use of Emblems and other Gestures to Create an Incipient Gestural Grammar
Inspired by Charles Goodwin’s (2004) illustration of the communicative competence and rich and fulfilling social life of a man with aphasia who can only speak three words, I analyze here the gestural virtuosity and dexterity of Alan, a young adult who has mostly lost the ability to speak because of a traumatic brain injury, but nonetheless manages to make jokes and to tease just about everybody that he interacts with. In particular, I continue my exploration of the “grammaticality” of Alan’s gestures, and focus on the order, number, and types of gestures that he combines as he create “gestured” actions (see below for an explanation of why I do not call them “signed” actions). If in my previous presentation I examined Alan’s combination of attention-grabbing gestures and emblems/quotable gestures, I examine here Alan’s combination of emblems, pointing gestures, and facial expressions to create an incipient gestural syntax to communicate complex messages such as “I want to walk with him and not with you” or “I am worried about my leg.” The larger theoretical question that I pursue is where Alan’s gestures fall within Kendon’s continua (McNeill, 2000). That is, whether the presence of multiple linguistic properties places Alan’s combination of gestures closer to sign languages (segmented, analytic, fully grammaticalized, and conventionalized) rather than as emblems (segmented, synthetic, partly conventionalized, and with some linguistic properties), or somewhere in between, as is the case of homesigns, the “natural” signs that deaf children produce on their own before they learn a sign language (Goldin-Meadow 2003). With rare exceptions, such as Brookes’ (2005) outstanding analysis of South African youth’s use of emblems, most research on emblems has relied on one-emblem-at-a-time elicitation and has not focused on the use of emblems in naturally occurring interactions. Thus, it is perhaps possible that gestural syntax/combination of emblems that express grammatical relations occurs much more often than previously thought, which could potentially lead to a reformulation of the linguistic properties of emblems.
March 31 Shannon Ward. Anthropology, University of British Columbia
Coordinating Multi-Party Play with Directives: Insights from Amdo, Tibet
This presentation examines video data from multi-party peer group play in a village in Amdo, Tibet. In this community, young children engage in free play in multi-aged peer groups, from the time they are mobile. Children tend to play with related peers, and move freely throughout their homes and the village. The peer group is often involved in several activities at once, and children coordinate competing play trajectories through directive sequences. Existing literature on the coordination of directives with embodied resources has focused extensively on touch, especially in caregivers’ directives to children (for example, Cekaite 2016; Goodwin & Cekaite 2018). In Amdo Tibetan play groups, in contrast, children tend to exert social control through a combination of gesture and movement, in addition to touch. This presentation considers how children link these diverse, embodied resources to establish play trajectories. It analyzes embodied directive sequences in light of the cultural significance of the village homeland as an anchor for belonging.
April 7, Adrienne Isaac: Linguistics, Georgetown: Environmentally-responsive interactional initiations by individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and their family member interlocutors
For this lab, I will workshop instances I am analyzing for my dissertation involving interactional initiations that are responsive to the sensory environment by individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and by their family members. I chose interactional initiations as my unit of analysis because one of the main symptoms of FTD – a young-onset neurodegenerative disease largely manifested through interpersonal behavior – is apathy; however, I found in the ethnographic videorecordings of meal-time interactions that I am analyzing that individuals with FTD are initiating conversations, and that these initiations are largely responsive to the immediate sensory environment. This led to the problematization of the temporal connection between talk and the sensory environment, as the initiations by the participants with FTD felt “sudden.” To more objectively describe what I was feeling, and to operationalize this “suddenness,” I compared and contrasted a corpus of instances initiated by the participants with FTD and their family member interlocutors, some of which we will analyze together. Such an analysis may also afford a better understanding of the non-normativity – normativity behavioral spectrum driving research in atypical interaction.
April 14 Cheryl Lee Anthropology, UCLA: “Guakamoore, guacamole”: Identity Claims, Authenticity, and Expertise in a Multilingual Classroom”
How do language identities emerge in classroom interactions? How is expertise negotiated and contested by multilingual students? By moving beyond theoretical paradigms of the “bilingual brain” and taking on an orientation of dynamic bilingualism, I turn to an ethnographic case study of one six-year-old Japanese Indian American student, Niko, from my field site, a trilingual full language immersion Montessori school located in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this data workshop, I present two events in which Niko’s linguistic expertise and authenticity in Spanish and Hindi respectively are challenged by peers through the lens of locally situated metalinguistic practice. I highlight the spontaneous peer interactional moments in which underlying monoglossic language ideologies of bilingualism are destabilized, offering emergent discursive spaces for heteroglossic linguistic practices and identity formations. An analysis of Niko’s embodied negotiations of expertise with her peers shows how young multilingual children take the discursive construction of their own linguistic identities into their own hands in ideologically supportive spaces.
April 21 Kreeta Niemi. Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Bee-Bot Robot as a Moral and Technological Artefact in Children’s Classroom Activities
In this data session, I will present video data from a first grade classroom in which seven- to eight-year-old pupils use Bee-Bot robots to learn mathematics and computational thinking. In the context of this activity, the participants are huddled on a big carpet in an embodied configuration that foreground haptic resources for action. The top of the Bee-Bot robot, which resembles a bee, features directional buttons for programming its motion on the carpet. The pupils program the bots in pairs, and the activity involves a playful competition against other pairs.
The concrete haptic materials enabled the children to learn abstract mathematical and programming concepts by using diverse semiotic resources (Goodwin 2000), including embodied actions such as handling the bots and observing their movement on the carpet. At the same time, the competitive setting fostered an affective atmosphere in which ownership of the bot and its own territory became salient features of the local moral order. The participants regulated turn-taking to handle the bot mostly by embodied means. They also created ‘territories’ (Goffman 1971) to the carpet and protected them from the intrusion of the other participants’ bots. In addition, the children were attentive to others’ bots, and used their teacher’s rules of the game as resources for competing (Goodwin 1998, 25), by accusing others of breaching the rules, and justifying rule breaches. The data are part of a larger postdoctoral project on how the designed environment influences learning activities.
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Micro-Studies of the public order. Harper and Row.
Goodwin, M. H. 1998. Games of Stance: Conflict and Footing in Hopscotch. In Kids’ Talk: Strategic Language Use in Later Childhood, Susan Hoyle and Carolyn Temple Adger, eds. Pp.23-46. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press.
April 28 Kristella Montiegl Sociology, UCLA: Hearing as an Interactional Accomplishment: Observations of DHH Children Developing Listening and Spoken-Language
This project is part of my dissertation research on the socialization and learning practices of deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children in an oral preschool classroom. In this setting, the primary objective is to develop children’s listening and spoken-language skills with the goal of transitioning into mainstream schooling. The total data collection consists of approximately 25 hours of audio-visual recordings in one oral classroom located in Southern California. For this project, I look at instances of adult-child interaction where a child’s hearing occasions a problem of intersubjectivity. What practices are involved in resolving this problem? What role does the child’s hearing assistive device play in this process? I will show how a DHH child’s auditory experience can become a joint activity, wherein the adult and child collaboratively achieve intersubjective understanding of what the child hears through various verbal and embodied resources.
May 5 Mick Smith: Culture and Society, Linkoping U., Sweden:
RE sequences and Multi-sensoriality in Anatomy Teaching
Building on previous work in manual skills training in crafts (Lindwall & Ekström, 2012), dentistry (Rystedt et al, 2013), and field geology (Goodwin & Smith, in press), the current study investigates the training of teaching assistants in the dissection of cadavers in a Swedish teaching hospital. Focusing on the preparation of cadavers, i.e., the extraction of relevant anatomical structures from surrounding viscera, we analyze the methods that participants use for highlighting the various tactilities of different anatomical structures in the dissection. As our analysis shows, cultivating tactile understanding of the cadaver, its anatomical structures, is crucial to training, as the differences between different structures, e.g., nerves, veins, tendons, muscle, fat, etc., are rarely as obvious as in anatomical drawings. The analytical questions pursued here include: Where does tactile experience become relevant in distinguishing various anatomical structures? What resources, embodied and otherwise, do participants use in publicly establishing that they indeed collaboratively recognize these tactile distinctions? As our analysis shows, effective instruction in this context utilizes a broader range of embodied and multimodal resources organized toward coordinating the learner’s attention toward not only seeing, but feeling relevant distinctions in anatomical structure.
May 12 Jan Hauck, British Academy Newton International Fellow Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics and Political Science; The Co-Operative Reproduction and Transformation of Culture in Aché Children’s Song”
This paper discusses creative, co-operative innovations on meaning and function of a song genre in Aché children’s peer groups. The Aché used to live as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the subtropical forests of what today is eastern Paraguay. Deforestation, disease, and persecutions forced them onto reservations in the 1960s and 70s where they now live in villages and subsist on small-scale agriculture and gardens. Sedentarization entailed many sociocultural transformations, including the abandoning of most rituals and verbal art. However, certain songs are still being performed by elders at public events showcasing Aché “culture.” Younger generations have ambivalent stances towards such practices. On the one hand, they are admired as indexes of a way of life mostly lost, yet increasingly important for a newly emerging ethnic consciousness. On the other hand, elders are also frequently ridiculed for their lack of knowledge in dealing with “modern” life, their ways of speaking often mocked, and their songs made fun of. In this paper, I analyze children’s non-serious performances of elders’ songs. These songs have become publicly available as a substrate upon which children innovate to construct an oppositional stance to their grandparents. However, in ongoing performance even in a mocking fashion, the structures, melodies, prosodies, voices, and content of these songs become available anew for further transformations, and can turn into a serious performance by children. I use such a case here to discuss the relevance of detailed analysis of co-operative action for anthropological discussions of cultural reproduction and transformation more generally.
May 19 Virginia Flood and Benedikt W. Harrer , Education, U of Buffalo:
Responding to STEM Students’ Gestured Candidate Responses in Whole-Class Discussions
In whole-class discussions, to answer teachers’ questions, students sometimes use representational gestures to provide unspoken, “off-the-record,” tentative responses. By attending to these “gestured candidate responses,” teachers can preview students’ potential contributions to the discussion and ratify or ignore the contribution. Students’ gestured candidate responses can be taken up by the teacher and shared with the class (whether publicly ratified or not). This study contributes to a better understanding of the nuanced roles gesture plays in STEM classroom discourse. Preliminary results will appear in Flood, V. J. & Harrer, B.W. (2021). Responding to STEM students’ gestured candidate responses. In E. de Vries, J. Ahn, & Y. Hod (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences – ICLS 2021. International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2021
May 26 No Lab
June 2 Farzad Amoozegar-Fassie, Music, UCLA: Being with the Dead
My presentation examines the Syrian refugee children’s narratives about the dead other that elicit “feelings of disorientation and discomfort that in turn become further prompts to rationalization along new pathways” (Doostdar 2018: 19-20). For the children death becomes an unresolved feeling, an “amalgam of curiosity and repulsion” (Saif 2020: 135) that invites questions and explanations. These “uncanny” experiences are not only of strangeness or alienation; more accurately, these sentiments become “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” (Royle 2003: 1). I build on the work of the anthropologist Alireza Doostdar’s use of ‘ajib va gharib (wondrous and strange) in an attempt to diverge from Western understandings, particularly Freud’s das Unheimliche (“the uncanny”) and der Todestrieb (“the death drive”). ‘Ajib va gharib can be explained as the “familiar-strange” experience rooted in the Islamic perception of death’s dual nature. The duality in death, according to Islamic writings, is rooted in pleasant feelings for the believer (the desire for the soul to reunite with Allāh) and haunting for the skeptic or the non-believer (Haj Manouchehri and Hirtenstein 2017). The dead, while no longer capable of morally significant actions, have awareness and knowledge far superior to the living (see al-Rāzī 1988: 36). In Islamic thought the soul relishes reunification with Allāh, but the intermediary space unhinges the heavenly understanding of the dead with the force of evil spirits.