AAA2014 panel on technologies for the study of embodied interaction

[Melanie McComsey]

Dear linguistic anthropologists,

I'm seeking a few more participants for a AAA2014 panel that I would like
to submit for Executive consideration on February 15. I realize this is
short notice, but anyone who is interested, please send me your title as
soon as possible (Friday evening at the latest), and just a brief, informal
description of how your paper will relate to the panel theme. A preliminary
abstract follows below, but is subject to evolution based on responses.

Best,

Melanie McComsey
mmccomsey at ucsd.edu

*Producing the perceptible: Technology and the objects of linguistic
anthropology*

This panel takes a methodological theme as its central organizing
principle with the goal of discovering new phenomena beyond the realm
usually considered “linguistic” but readily available to linguistic
anthropological inquiry. Bruno Latour, in his 1986 essay, “Visualization
and Cognition,” has argued that the possibility of scientific inquiry is
fundamentally based on the production of inscriptions—objects that are
mobile, immutable, and scalable. The availability of new types of
inscriptions, produced through innovative audio-visual methodologies, is
making possible the scrutiny of novel “phenomenal objects” (Goodwin 1994)
in linguistic anthropology. This revolution is epitomized by the papers
collected in Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron 2011, which synthesize a
perspective, brewing in disciplines like psychology, linguistics and
cognitive science for several decades, in which the minutiae of human
interaction that lurk below levels of awareness are shown to be central to
the social, cultural and cognitive processes long of interest to
anthropologists. The panel will engage the 2014 AAA theme of “Producing
Anthropology” by showing how methodological innovations directly affect
the types of objects available for anthropological analysis.