Gesturecraft

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 appear: 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 on-line.

John B. Haviland, UCSD Department of Anthropology, in Gesture Vol. 12:2 (2012):
Gesturecraft is a rich and thought-provoking book, always elegantly and eruditely written, whose main argument — that the body and especially the hands are central, shared parts in human technologies of knowledge; and that as a result of their semiotic virtues and visibility, they can become primary and, indeed, insistent visible articulators of that knowledge — I have found equally useful for understanding the role of the hands in wider human processes of utterance, and their special power in the realization of human communicative potential.