Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity

by Marjorie Goodwin, Asta Cekaite

Overview

Embodied Family Choreography documents the lived and embodied practices employed to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships in the family, examining forms of control, care, and creativity. Making use of the extensive video archives of family interaction in the US and Sweden, it presents the first investigation of how touch and interaction between bodies, in conjunction with talk, constitute a primary means of orchestrating activities through directives, thus creating rich relationships through supportive interchanges, and engaging in playful explorations of the world. Through close investigation of the sequential and simultaneous engagement of bodies interacting with other bodies, this book makes visible the important role touch plays in the context of contemporary Western middle class family life and is pioneering in its analysis of how the visual, aural, and haptic senses (usually analysed separately) mutually elaborate one another. As such, Embodied Family Choreography will appeal to scholars of child development, the sociology of the family and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367856595
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/17/2019
Series:	Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Distinguished Professor Emita of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. She is the author of He Said She Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children and The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion.

Asta Cekaite is Professor in Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden and co-editor of Children’s Peer Talk: Learning from each other. She is editor for Research on Children and Social Interaction.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Our Materials and Perspectives for the Study of Human Interaction 1. Capturing Family Interaction in Situ: Fieldwork and Theoretical Points of Departure 2. Frameworks for the Study of Human Interaction Part I: Control: Directive/Response Trajectories 3. Directive Response Sequences 4. Control Touch in Directives 5. Negotiation within Directive Trajectories 6. Metacommentary in Directive Sequences Part II: Care: Intimate Tactile Intercorporeality 7. Engagements of Care Entailing Touch 8. Constituting Relationships of Care Through Boundary Intertwinings 9. Alternative Trajectories and Attunements to Requests for a Hug 10. Intimacy in Good-Night Routines Part III: Mundane Creativity: Improvisation and Enskilment in Family Interaction 11. Improvisation and Verbal Play 12. Socializing Enskilment 13. Sibling Caretaking, Teaching, and Play 14. Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"More than a book, Embodied Family Choreography offers a multi-media, stop-motion view of how touch, gaze, and language entangle parents and children in comforting attunement and struggles for control. This landmark study brings theory to its knees, as it distills the experience of living, learning, and building intimacy with others." - Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UCLA, USA

"Embodied Family Choreography is an immensely dense web of vignettes of truly mundane family life: brushing teeth, saying good night, sheperding the children to their bedroom. Each scene is analyzed so as to brilliantly reveal the multiple ecological, socio-historical, relational, and semiotic practices and constraints shaping it, and the interactional ‘machinery’ by which patterns of close relationships and personalities are formed comes into clear relief. Rarely has family life been presented with so much vivid precision and depth of observation." - Jürgen Streeck, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

"Exploring the rich life of American and Swedish families, their routines and their creative improvisations, Marjorie Goodwin and Asta Cekaite offer a fascinating book that both revisits classical interactional topics - like directives in social interaction - and introduces innovative perspectives – especially regarding tactility and embodiment in everyday practices. That the multiple uses of touch are not only for care and intimacy, but for controlling and socializing bodies represents a strong originality of the book." - Lorenza Mondada, University of Basel, Switzerland

"In Embodied Family Choreography, Goodwin and Cekaite provide an in-depth view into everyday family life in the United States and Sweden. In doing so, they turn what they call "the mundane" into anything but, showing how the kinds of ordinary activities and practices that constitute "doing" being a family (like bedtime routines and managing homework) are densely packed opportunities for researchers to understand many of the core features of cultural experience that concern psychological anthropologists." - Sonya E. Pritzker, Ethos

"Marjorie H. (Candy) Goodwin and Asta Cekaite’s analysis of interactions between parents and children in daily life provides an excellent contribution that will extend the discussion [on multimodality and (inter)sensoriality in Conversation Analysis], and it does so from a more than cursory interdisciplinary perspective. […] [It] provides an outstanding possibility to see in detail how parent-child or sibling-sibling interactions take place, especially as embodied, haptic, spatially occurring routines that are calibrated in situ. It combines in one edition the two authors’ research into child rearing, and especially the role of intercorporeality (touches and hugs). The book is a goldmine of close to 200 exemplary analyses and a wealth of themes (with a thorough set of references to the literature) that pertain to family interactions." - Pirkko Raudaskoski, Journal of Pragmatics

From the Publisher