Multi-Sensory Perception during Palpation in Japanese Midwifery Practice

This paper demonstrates ways in which vision is integrated with other modalities of perception in a manner relevant to a temporally unfolding activity. It will do so by analyzing a single episode extracted from an abdominal palpation conducted on a pregnant woman by a midwife in Japan. The episode forms a “natural experiment” through which one can demonstrate that the integrated visual and tactile perception of an object is organized differently according to the status of the ongoing activity in which it is embedded. Data are in Japanese with English translations

Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction

This article reflects on recent challenges emerging from the study of language and the body in social interaction. There is a general interest in language and the body across disciplines that has invited a reconceptualization of the broader issues relative to action, cognition, culture, knowledge, social relations and identities, spatiality and temporality. The study of social interaction focuses on how multimodal resources - including language and bodily movements - are holistically and situatedly used in building human action. This article discusses some consequences and challenges of putting the body at the center of attention: it repositions language as one among other modalities, and invites us to consider the involvement of entire bodies in social interaction, overcoming a logo-centric vision of communication, as well as a visuo-centric vision of embodiment. These issues are developed through a series of conversation analytic studies, firstly of classic topics in linguistics like deixis, then of more recent topics, such as mobility and sensoriality