Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning

Gesture Studies #2

by Jürgen Streeck

The craft of gesture is part of the practical equipment with which we inhabit and understand the world together. Drawing on micro-ethnographic research in diverse interaction settings, this book explores the communicative ecologies in which hand-gestures illuminating the world around us, depicting it, making sense of it, and symbolizing the interaction process itself. Gesture is analyzed as embodied communicative action grounded in the hands' practical and cognitive engagments with material worlds. The book responds to the quest for the role of the human body in cognition and interaction with an analytic perspective informed by phenomenology, conversation analysis, context analysis, praxeology, and cognitive science. Many of the cross-linguistic video-data of everyday interaction investigated in its chapters are available .

235 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Dr. Jürgen Streeck (1952) is German linguist (Dr. phil. FU Berlin 1981) has been one of the pioneers in the study of multi-modal (embodied) human interaction. Employing micro-ethnographic research methods, he has shown how speakers in face-to-face interaction coordinate eye-gaze with their hand gestures and speech; use material objects to symbolize their interactional process; and conduct meta-communication by self-touch and body postures. Jürgen’s co-edited books Embodied Interaction. Language and the Body in the Material World (Cambridge 2011, with C. Goodwin and C. LeBaron) and Intercorporeality. Emerging Socialities in Interaction (Oxford 2017, with C. Meyer and S. Jordan) have helped lay the foundations of the field. His book Gesturecraft – The Manu-facture of Meaning (Amsterdam 2009) is based on 20 years of video-based research on gestures of the hand, and in Self-Making Man. A Day of Action, Life, and Language (Cambridge 2017), Jürgen examines a plethora of moments of moving, standing, looking, gesturing, speaking, and managing during one workday of the owner of a local auto-repair shop. More recently, Jürgen has developed an interest in touch, one of the least studied and understood modalities of communication, and in interactions between humans and other animals.

Trained as a linguist, Jürgen has always maintained an interest in language diversity and evolution and the role of languages in social, cultural, and mental life. He has pursued this interest by following the development of hip hop and the playful and creative ways it makes music out of language.