“Gesture and Embodiment: A Performance Ethnographic Perspective”
Christopher J. Koenig

Introduction

One of the essential qualities of gesture lies in its performability. Gesture is, in the first instance, a performative medium. That is, gesture achieves its primary effect through its embodied coordination in and through interaction. Past research on gesture has focused on its psychological (McNeill, 1992), linguistic and pragmatic (Kendon, 1995; Kendon, 1997; Streeck, 1994), and interactional (Goodwin, 1998; Goodwin, 2000; LeBaron & Streeck, 2000; Streeck & Kallmeyer, 2001; Streeck & Hartge, 1992) aspects; virtually no one, however, has examined gesture as performance. This paper outlines a performative approach for the analysis of gesture. Using Natural Performance as the primary theoretical and methodological focus, gesture is examined as a situated practice through which particular, subjective bodies experience gesture and the ways in which experience is tied to the context of everyday communication practices. As such Natural Performance is proposed as a productive means to expand gesture scholarship.

Natural Performance as Embodied Ethnography

Nathan Stucky first uses the term ‘Natural Performance’ in his article entitled “Toward and Aesthetics of Natural Performance” (Stucky, 1993). Natural Performance (hereafter: “NP”) is the name of a method of dramatic performance as well as an ethnomethodologically influenced theory of performance. NP concerns itself primarily with the “staging of naturally-occurring talk” (Stucky 169). In this sense it is an ethnographic representation of interaction. Drawing on the methods of Conversation Analysis (Hopper, Koch, & Mandelbaum, 1986; Stucky & Glenn, 1993), the research/performer carefully listens to and transcribes recorded naturally occurring conversational interaction or ‘first order events’. The researcher then identifies portions of interest from within these interactions to be played again and again while the researcher repeats, with as much detail as possible, along with the recordings. Recordings of first order interactional events are employed as templates for their subsequent performance. Eventually, the researcher moves away from using the recordings and attempts to perform them without the recording; in these later stages, the recording is used only to ‘check’ or verify the researcher’s performance. Finally, these bits of interaction that have been performed with and without use of the recordings are performed in front of an audience (Hopper, 1993). Similar to Conversation Analysis, NP employs audio and/or video recordings of naturally occurring conversational interaction as the raw materials from which to examine social organization; NP, however, employs the recorded materials in order to re-create interactional episodes as aesthetic and dramatic objects. As such, one aim of NP is to produce a staged performance, or ‘second order event’ (Stucky, 1993), that is both responsive to and reflective of original first order events.

NP provides a powerful basis for a performative approach to an embodied cognition (Thelen, 1995) and, subsequently, to scholarship about gesture. The purpose of performing first along with and later, without, the aid of the recordings is to help train the researcher/performer into paying special attention to those features of interaction that are reproducible in the performance. Transcripts, the recorded materials themselves, and other researcher/performers can all be used as ‘aids’ to learn and to imitate microethnographic details present in the recording. Features that are typically attended to include intonation, speech rate and rhythm, bodily orientation, and, of course, gesture. Once the researcher/performer has begun to master the various details of the interaction, her goal is not merely to re-produce the first order event but to create a re-performance of that event such that it can take on a new interactional life of its own. In re-performing something that has already been performed once, she highlights the relationship between original event and its subsequent re-performance. Through her body, she reflects the blurry boundary that exists between life and art.

With its roots in ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, NP’s approach to interaction recognizes that the ‘how’ of interaction cannot be meaningfully separated from the techniques through which interaction is conducted. NP conducts its scholarship through the bodies of its performers. Through the act of performing a first order event, the researcher/performer’s bodies ‘stand in’ for the participants engaged in first order interactional events (Denzin, 1997). While researchers/performers do not possess the same phenomenal experience as the participants engaged in the original interaction, through attending to and re-enacting various interactional details—in and out breaths, pitch, gestures—performers experience an embodied sense of the interaction. The how of first order embodiment is transformed into a re-performance, a ‘second lived’ technique of embodied experience (Mauss, 1950).

In this way NP places first and second order events within the same epistemic field as embodied, subjective experience. Furthermore, NP provides the means through which inquiry of interaction and gesture can be expanded through the technology of ‘embodied redoing’. It is here that the scholarly aspect of NP must be emphasized: however limited a second order performance may be vis-à-vis its first order recording, it represents an analysis of the previous event upon which that performance is based. NP produces an embodied analysis that, for a viewing audience, is in many ways similar to the analysis that participants engaged in the original event experience during and after their interaction.

Natural Performance as Gestural Performance

It was noted above that gesture is an embodied phenomenon; NP provides a range of techniques through which the courageous scholar can explore gesture in a variety of performative ways. As an ethnographic enterprise, NP permits the researcher/performer new insight into gesture as an embodied activity.

Engaging in NP as a research methodology the researcher becomes aware of those various embodied devices through which interaction is composed. With its emphasis on performance, it would seem natural that most emphasis would be on the end product of the research process. Simply engaging in NP’s research process with one’s self should not be underemphasized; selecting a portion of video to reproduce with one’s own voice and body has a sensitizing effect. What appears as ‘disorderly’ and ‘annoying’ in the details of the recordings, like in breaths and pauses, slowly transform into natural, more importantly, recognizable aspects of social life. Noticing is only the tip of the iceberg.

Researchers themselves typically begin to experience a keen awareness to their own bodies, voices, and interactional detail spontaneously after practicing NP for a short period of time. In re-performing someone else’s in breaths, researchers begin to notice their own; in practicing someone else’s gesture seen on video, the researcher herself becomes aware of her own as well as other’s in her life. As a research process NP can become the vehicle through which the researcher can expand her awareness of her own body as a vehicle for social experience. This experience, however, has analytic payoff. When one notices one’s own body in media res it becomes easier to understand how that experience is related with the particular technique/s through which that experience is articulated in a particular setting. The research experience, then, is made into an exercise in self-awareness and spontaneous reflection as the occasion arises. Incidentally, the researcher/performer is not the only one privy to these experiences: audiences are similarly sensitized to interactional phenomenon simply by watching and participating in performances.

Conclusion

NP cannot be the only means to conduct naturalistic research on gesture or any other aspect of interactional social organization. In contrast to virtually all other forms of research on gesture, NP systematically employs the researcher’s embodied experience with the research method in producing a piece of scholarship. As this brief article has demonstrated, NP provides many powerful techniques with which to theoretically and methodologically augment research on gesture.

Citations

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