(Salle F106)

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  Koschmann, Timothy (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville)
  Goodwin, Chuck (UCLA, Los Angeles)
  LeBaron, Curt (Brigham Young University, Provo)
  Zemel, Alan (Drexel University, Philadelphia)
  Dunnington, Gary Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

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The Triangle of Doom : “geste dans le contexte”

We will examine in this presentation a specifi c gesture produced during the performance of a hernia surgery at a teaching hospital. Participants include two medical students, a resident, and an attending surgeon. The attending provided a commentary for the medical students as the surgery progressed and produced an instructive gesture in explaining the safe zone for installation of surgical staples. We will argue that, in addition to its associated talk, the gesture was made meaningful by particular aspects of the built environment (e.g., the scene portrayed on the endoscopic monitor), its superimposition on the surgeon’s own body, and by the unfolding activity within which the talk and gesture were embedded. Merleau-Ponty (1962) wrote that the gesture meaning “is intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture” (p. 216). We take this to be consistent with more recent proposals that argue that gesture meaning is “environmentally-coupled” (Goodwin, 2002) or “indexically-linked” (LeBaron & Streeck, 2000). In contrast to views of gesture as semantically-dependent on cooccurrent talk, we will argue that gestures function as meaningful and consequential action precisely in their reflexive relation to the context within which they are performed.