36.3751, Reviews: Language and Body in Place and Space: Kuniyoshi Kataoka (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3751. Mon Dec 08 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3751, Reviews: Language and Body in Place and Space: Kuniyoshi Kataoka (2025)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Helen Aristar-Dry <hdry at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 07-Dec-2025
From: Lorenzo Moretti [lorenzo.moretti at unive.it]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, General Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Kuniyoshi Kataoka (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2056

Title: Language and Body in Place and Space
Subtitle: Discourse of Japanese Rock Climbing
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
           http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/language-and-body-in-place-and-space-9781350319516/

Author(s): Kuniyoshi Kataoka

Reviewer: Lorenzo Moretti

SUMMARY
Kuniyoshi Kataoka's Language and Body in Place and Space: Discourse of
Japanese Rock Climbing was first published in 2023, and then released
in paperback in 2025. As the title indicates, the book addresses the
complex intertwining of language, physical practice, and spatial
orientation within the specialized community of Japanese rock
climbers. Its central purpose is to demonstrate that linguistic
expressions, especially those related to verticality and direction,
are dynamically co-constructed by the body and the immediate
environmental context. The methodology relies on original fieldwork
and linguistic ethnography conducted in Japan from the mid-1990s
through 2021, analyzing climbing interactions, collaborative
wayfinding, and community narratives.
The book consists of nine chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief overview
on the history of mountaineering and climbing, and explains how they
can be related to discourse studies. It highlights why studying
language use in and about climbing is important, and links this focus
to broader ideas and methods in sociolinguistics and linguistic
anthropology.
Chapter 2 offers a dense overview of the theoretical foundations and
methods of application for multimodal and multi-layered analysis of
language and the body, to be applied to the various analyses undergone
in the subsequent chapters. These major theories and concepts include
“inter-X” (interaction, intersubjectivity, and intercorporeality),
“spatial frames of reference”, “gesture and narration”, “poetics in/of
interaction”, and “place and chronotope” (p. 11). Each notion and
framework is then expanded and pursued further in the respective
chapters. The chapter emphasizes the contemporary significance of
these notions in discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology, and
explains that these approaches will be employed eclectically for a
multimodal analysis of language and body within various facets of rock
climbing discourse.
Chapter 3 begins the analysis by showing how climbing is actually
performed and highlights how the climbing system resembles certain
types of institutional discourse, where material conditions and
communication rules interact (p. 43). It focuses on the belayer’s role
and skills in climbing and belaying, and analyzes how belayers learn
to ‘catch’ a falling climber, demonstrating that their expertise
depends on making context-specific decisions to prevent accidents (p.
12).
Chapter 4 applies the concept of affordances, originally from
ecological psychology, to the data of climbing instruction. It assumes
that vertical space creates a unique environment for climbers, and
that the different holds on the wall act as affordances provided by
that environment (p. 61). The chapter argues that climbing is an
activity in which the actor’s perception, knowledge, and skills are
connected. This chapter does not deal strictly with language, but is
more concerned with bodily, cognitive, and perceptual aspects of
climbing, drawing from fields such as cognitive psychology,
phenomenology, and environmental psychology.
Chapter 5 provides an analysis of how technical instruction from
expert climbers to novice climbers is achieved verbally and
nonverbally. The focus is on the use of the vertical terms ue/shita
(“up/down”) in a first-aid training session, and on an expert
climber’s instructions to a newcomer on the correct use of climbing
protections, with a micro-multimodal analysis of the real-life use of
vertical expressions. Findings suggest that ‘gravity is the dominant
factor in defining the vertical axis, but the potential ease and
difficulty of staying in or moving out of the frame may vary across
languages’ (p. 102), with Japanese appearing to be somewhat more
ambiguous. This chapter has a greater focus on the linguistic aspects
of climbing interactions, with a discussion on the pragmatic use of
personal pronouns in climber-belayer’s interactions.
Chapter 6 examines the collaborative effort involved in identifying
the location of a fall accident, with an analysis of two sets of
multi-layered, micro/macro-levels interaction: discussions of a
climbing accident, and wayfinding activities as interactional text.
Here, spatial frames of reference, perspective-taking, physical
representations, and experiential statuses are shown to be intertwined
(p. 12). The chapter offers a dense theoretical background on
interaction, and argues that multimodal resources (such as the
interesting link between the use of language, gestures, and authority
on p. 131) are abundantly invested in the wayfinding activity, in
which a poetic configuration emerges through interactions.
Chapter 7 continues with the theme of poetics, and conducts an
ethnopoetic (p. 139) multimodal analysis (discourse analysis and
gesture analysis) of participants’ narratives of fall experiences. It
analyzes how the near-death narratives that feature critical and
long-distance falls are told through ethnopoetic structuring, and how
they rely on culturally preferred formations common in Japanese, such
as an odd-number structure at the verse and stanza levels of the
narrative (like oral patterns of threes and fives on p. 159,
reminiscent of traditional poetry).
Chapter 8, the final analysis-based chapter, examines how spontaneous
gossip in a casual setting between experienced climbers developed into
a debate about who was responsible for a suspected accident of a
fellow expert climber. The author traces the process that led to
blaming the deceased climber’s partner, who was accused of lacking
responsibility and possibly causing the fatal incident, together with
his current reprehensible behaviour. The chapter shows how gossip grew
into accusations through the use of metaphors and quotes, gradually
strengthened by a shared climbing ideology among “wholesome” climbers.
(p. 12). By analyzing the development of idle talk into blame and
slander, the author gives insights into the process of interactional
constructions of how and what climbers should be as responsible
members of society (p. 174). Arguably, this chapter has the greatest
focus on “language” in the book, while the previous ones are more
concerned with “body”, “place”, and “space”.
Finally, Chapter 9 summarises the major findings and insights of the
previous analytical chapters, and confirms the overall importance of
studying how language, space, and the body interact in the context of
rock climbing. The book concludes by arguing that activities like
climbing involve forms of interaction that are both taken for granted
and highly specific. The author’s main aim is to contribute to the
refinement of recent theories in discourse studies from an eclectic
perspective, drawing on analysis of a non-Western language, in this
case Japanese.
EVALUATION
Kataoka successfully achieves his goal of providing a rich,
theoretically informed linguistic ethnography of an extreme,
specialized physical practice. The monograph excels at demonstrating
that the seemingly simple use of language in high-stakes
environments—like an instruction to a climber or a retelling of a
near-fall—is actually a finely calibrated linguistic and embodied act
that is deeply contextualized. The book is an extremely valuable
contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to transcend
the traditional separation of mind, body, and culture, and it fits
squarely within contemporary work in linguistic anthropology, gesture
studies, and multimodal discourse analysis. The volume is highly
coherent, with each chapter building logically on the theoretical
foundation laid in Chapter 2, culminating in a powerful argument for
the necessity of an embodied, situated approach to language study.
A particular merit is the breadth of its theoretical approach, with
Chapter 2 providing a dense summary of previous frameworks from
different disciplines, including psychology and semiotics. The
integration of Japanese notions such as mi-wake and ba(sho) (pp.
19-20) with Western concepts like habitus (p. 33) and chronotopes (p.
39) enriches the analysis considerably. Furthermore, the suggestion on
the enregisterment (Agha 2007) of climbing as differently valorised
practices in Chapter 3 provides a useful model for future discourse
studies on multimodality. Chapter 5's micro-multimodal analysis is
particularly strong, showing how even the robust perception of
verticality may be overridden by contextual requirements through the
use of coordinate and topological spatial terms like ue/shita
("up/down"). Finally, in Chapter 8, the analysis of gossip as a means
of reinforcing alpine climbers’ ethics and the debate over
accountability are unique in their use of concepts like ethnopoetics
and chronotope to unpack how deeply personal experience and community
ethics are constructed and negotiated through linguistic form in the
Japanese context, also offering an interesting sociological take on
the community of practice.
However, the book’s interdisciplinary scope also presents its primary
shortcoming concerning audience and accessibility. The book is not
well-suited for beginners or students. Chapter 2, in particular,
requires that the reader is conversant with the literature on the
subject, and does not provide a great introduction to the field for
beginners. This problem is recurrent: the introduction to affordances
in Chapter 4 is also very technical, drawing on uses from cognitive
psychology, ecological psychology, and environmental psychology that
may not be familiar to all linguists and anthropologists. Due to the
wide scope of the book and the many themes and concepts discussed,
some are touched only briefly, and the discussion sometimes requires
prior knowledge of interdisciplinary literature, not merely
linguistics, discourse studies, and linguistic anthropology in
general, but also phenomenology, philosophy and psychology. The text
can sometimes seem to lose focus due to these many focal points across
chapters. A short but very dense literature review is present at the
start of each analysis, dealing with frameworks and theories that will
be used inside the chapter, but due to the interdisciplinarity of the
book, explanations and assumptions may not be easily understood by all
readers.
Accessibility is further hampered by the prose and subject matter. The
introduction to mountaineering in Chapter 1 is succinct, and may be
hard to follow for complete outsiders (like myself). Chapter 3, which
details the encounter between materiality and communicative protocols,
also uses very technical terms not easily understandable by those not
familiar with rock climbing techniques. Sometimes dialogue
transcriptions can also be hard to follow due to the repetition of
letters and numbers in speaker labels, such as in Chapter 6.
Finally, the book sometimes focuses more on perception and psychology
than strictly on language and anthropology, and the study is only
tangentially interested in Japanese. Probably also due to this,
Chapter 8, which is more focused on the “language” part than the
previous chapters, is arguably the easiest to follow for the average
reader, and the one with the most insights on the discursive
construction of ideologies in a community of practices, like the
subtitle of the monograph (“discourse of Japanese rock climbing”)
would suggest. This, however, does not diminish the book's value, but
rather frames it as a methodological model that opens up avenues for
cross-cultural replication: the core findings about the body,
interaction, and environment could be reproducible to other case
studies.
In sum, Language and Body in Place and Space is a methodologically
rigorous and original piece of scholarship. It is essential reading
for experienced scholars interested in the embodied nature of
linguistic practice and the boundaries of discourse studies, but its
theoretical depth and technical density make it a challenging read.
REFERENCES
Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University
Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Lorenzo Moretti is Adjunct Professor of Japanese at the University of
Bologna. His research interests include Japanese language and
linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and game
studies.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3751
----------------------------------------------------------