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 other's 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 other's 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