Charles Goodwin

Seeing in Depth

On oceanographic research vessels, scientists from different disciplines must work together to obtain samples from the sea beneath their ship. Such juxtaposition of not just theory, but actual laboratory practice, creates unique possibilities for synergy, as members of one discipline make use of the tools of another. Using videotapes of technicians deploying a probe in the mouth of the Amazon, this paper investigates how multiple kinds of space - including the sea under the ship, graphic representations, the work space of the lab, and embodied participation frameworks for the organization of tool-mediated human interaction - are constituted through a range of temporally unfolding, work-relevant, situated practices. Particular attention is paid to how three parties work together to precisely position the probe at a spot where a geochemist wants to take samples. Because each actor uses alternative tools to organize his or her perception in ways appropriate to complementary tasks required for the successful accomplishment of the sampling run, each sees the place they are looking at together in a very different way.

Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities

The organization of embodied participation frameworks, stance and affect is investigated using as data a sequence in which a father is helping his daughter do homework. Through the way in which they position their bodies toward both each other and the homework sheet that is the focus of their work the two contest the interactive and cognitive organization of the activity they are pursuing together. The father insisted that their work be organized in a way that would allow him to demonstrate the practices required to solve her problems. However the daughter refused to rearrange her body to organize the participation framework that would make this possible, and demanded instead that Father tell her the answers. When the daughter consistently refused to cooperate Father eventually walked out, but returned later, and they constructed a very different affective and cognitive alignment. Such phenomena shed light on range of different kinds of epistemic, moral and affective stances that are central to both the organization of cognition and action, and to how participants constitute themselves as particular kinds of social and moral actors in the midst of the mundane activities that constitute daily family life.

Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word

In this paper gesture will be studied by analyzing in some detail its organization within a particular activity, searching for a word. Such an approach is quite different from others that often study such phenomena by isolating gesture from the local, interactive circumstances of its production (see, for example, Morris et al. 1979). However, by investigating gesture within particular events, it is possible to begin to study in some detail not only how participants find it to be meaningful, but also how they use that meaningfulness as a constitutive feature of the social organization of the activities they are engaged in. Data for this analysis consist of videotapes of conversations recorded in a range of natural settings (for a more complete description of these data see C. Goodwin [1981: 33-46]). We will begin by raising the issue of how participants find gesture to be a meaningful event. In the following, a speaker produces a small gesture, a wave of her hand, and immediately after this happens, the recipient nods toward her. Thus two parties are clearly working in concert; an action is performed by one and answered by another. However, how these participants interpret each others actions, and even what they are doing together, remains inaccessible unless the activity they are involved in, and the types of coparticipation that activity makes possible, are investigated in detail. Talk is transcribed using a simplified version of the Jefferson transcription system (Sacks et al. 1974: 731-733). Dashes within parentheses mark tenths of seconds with a silence; a full second is marked by a plus sign (Example I).

Gestures as a resource for the organization of mutual orientation

During face-to-face conversation participants are present to each other as living physical bodies in a particular situation. This has a number of consequences. First, with their bodies those present are able to provide and glean a great deal of nonvocal information about the substance of the talk in progress and the alignment of those present to it (see, for example, Goodwin 1980). However these same bodies have a range of needs and capacities — for example breathing, relieving itches, ingesting food, drinking, smoking, in short a wide variety of body cares — that fall outside the scope of the talk in progress. Thus, if participants are to use each others bodies as sources of information about their talk they are faced with the task of distinguishing relevant body behavior from that which is not. Indeed, as will be seen in more detail later in this paper, such classification is not simply a hidden cognitive process, but one that has visible consequences for the actions of the party doing that analysis. For example while talk-relevant behavior may be a focus for visual attention, body cares not related to the talk may call for systematic disattention. In short, while access to each others bodies provides a resource for the display of meaning, it also imposes constraints on behavior making use of that access. The effect is that the organization of a relevant and appropriate framework of mutual visual orientation becomes a practical problem for participants, a problem that they must work out together in the course of their interaction. The present paper will investigate some ways in which gesture might be used in this process. Data for this analysis consists of videotapes of actual conversations recorded in a range of natural settings. Before turning to empirical data it must be noted that the study of how gesture operates within conversation is beset with a number of methodological problems. Perhaps the most central is the fact that very often recipients to a gesture do not make a subsequent move to it that deals with the gesture as a distinct event in its own right. It is therefore difficult to establish what consequences the gesture has for the organization of

Forgetfulness as an Interactive Resource

Using as data videotapes of conversation in natural settings, this paper investigates (1) how displaying uncertainty is organized as interactive activity, (2) how this activity can be used to modify the participation framework of the moment, (3) the consequences this has for subsequent interaction and (4) how such events can invoke larger social identities in the midst of moment to moment interaction. Alternative syntactic and paralinguistic techniques for displaying uncertainty make relevant different types of responses from recipients. Such structure provides speakers with resources for shaping emerging interaction.

The blackness of black: Color categories as situated practice

In what remains one of the central accomplishments of cognitive anthropology, Berlin and Kay (1969) demonstrated that the diversity of human color systems was built on a universal infrastructure, with black and white being the most basic colors in all systems. The analytical focus of their work is a structural system divorced from the messy tasks of actually using color terms to make relevant distinctions within specific courses of action situated within the concrete settings that constitute the lifeworld of a particular society. By way of contrast, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues that it is precisely such endogenous activities that provide the necessary framework for the analysis of human language. Using as data videotape of chemists attempting to determine when to stop a reaction by deciding when the material they are working with is jet black, this chapter explores (1) the diverse practices they deploy to establish what can count as black; (2) how such a distinction is embedded within a local activity system lodged in turn within a relevant community of practice; and (3) the embodied apprenticeship required for new members to become competent in the use of such a category. For the chemists, jet black (e.g., the most prototypical example of black) is not a preformulated, context-free universal color category, but instead a problematic judgment to be artfully accomplished through the deployment of a collection of systematic work practices. This analysis contributes to the development of a practice-based theory of knowledge and action.

The Body in Action

This chapter will use videotapes of young archaeologists learning how to see and excavate the traces of an ancient village in the soil they are digging to explore some of the ways in which the human body is implicated in the structuring of human language, cognition and social organisation. Clearly the part played by the body in such processes can be analysed from a number of different perspectives. One can focus, for example, on how experiencing the world through a brain embedded in a body structures human cognition (Damasio, 1994; 1999). Such a perspective provides a counter to theories that treat cognition as the disembodied manipulation of symbolic structures, and places the body in the world at the centre of much contemporary thinking about the neural infrastructure of cognitive processes (Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998). Moreover, it sheds light on pervasive processes that shape how the symbols that human beings construct emerge from forms of experience that have a crucial embodied component (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). For example, the universal experience of bodies situated within a gravitational field leads in all languages and cultures to a range of metaphors that contrast high and low or up and down (for example the symbols used to describe social hierarchies).

Time in Action

One effect of the way in which human action is constituted and shaped within a rich multimodal ecology of sign systems is that participants orient to multiple orders of temporality simultaneously. Within talkininteraction, linguistic structure provides resources that can be used simultaneously to (1) structure time in the world being represented through talk and (2) provide hearers with resources for projecting future events in the current and future interactions. Such structure in the stream of speech is framed by the participants bodies. Through interactively organized gesture and posture, participants display crucial information about the temporal and sequential organization of their joint participation in the current interaction. This multiplicity of concurrently relevant embodied temporalities extends to the tools and documents used in a scientific work setting such as an archaeological excavation. To uncover a past world archaeologists use tools from a professional past (e.g., the coding sheet of a senior investigator, the history of research encapsulated in the Munsell color chart, etc.) to build a workrelevant future (the records that will form the basis for subsequent analysis). The data for the present analysis consist of videotapes of situated human interaction.

Multi-modality in girls' game disputes

This paper examines embodied procedures for producing disagreement turns in the midst of the children’s game of hopscotch. Turn shape, intonation, and body positioning are all critical to the construction of stance towards a player’s move in the game. In particular, in formulating a player’s move as ‘‘out’’ foul calls can state unambiguously, without doubt or delay that a violation has occurred. Turn initial tokens in disagreement turns include cries of ‘‘OUT!’’, negatives (‘‘No!’’), or response cries (nonlexicalized, discrete interjections such as ‘‘Ay!’’ or ‘‘Eh!’’). Players make use of pitch leaps, vowel lengthening, and dramatic contours (for example, LHL contours) to vocally highlight opposition in the turn preface. Whereas the normal pitch range of a speaker’s talk in ordinary conversation can be between 250 and 350 Hz, in opposition moves the pitch may be considerably higher, around 600 Hz. Affective stance is also displayed through gestures such as extended points towards the person who has committed the foul or the space where the foul occurred. Explanations or demonstrations (frequently embodied re-enactments of the player’s past move) constitute additional critical components of disagreement moves as they provide the grounds for the opposition. Disagreement moves and trajectories within children’s games provide demonstrations of the practices through which girls build and display themselves as agents in the constitution of their social order. Data for this study consists of videotaped interaction of working class fifth grade girls on the playground: second generation Mexican and Central Americans in Los Angeles, and African American Southern migrant children. Ethnic differences in the display

How Geoscientists Think and Learn

Decades ago, pioneering petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt pointed out that oil is first found in the human mind. His insight remains true today: Across geoscience specialties, the human mind is arguably the geoscientists most important tool. It is the mind that converts colors and textures of dirt, or blotches on a satellite image, or wiggles on a seismogram, into explanatory narratives about the formation and migration of oil, the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the opening and closing of oceans. Improved understanding of how humans think and learn about the Earth can help geoscientists and geoscience educators do their jobs better, and can highlight the strengths that geoscience expertise brings to interdisciplinary problem solving.