Touch in Social Interaction

Touch, Language, and Body

Asta Cekaite, Lorenza Mondada, Asta Cekaite, Lorenza Mondada

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138541931
• eBook ISBN: 9781000069587
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Rooted in multimodal conversation analysis and based on video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions, this book presents a novel analytical perspective for the study of touch. The authors focus on how different forms of touch are interactionally organized in everyday, institutional, and professional practices, showing how touch is multimodally achieved in social interaction, how it acquires its significance, how it is embedded in the current activity and in its social context, and how it is systematically intertwined with talk, facial expressions, and body posture.

Including work by a wide range of renowned researchers, this volume provides rich visual illustrations of situations featuring touch as a social and intersubjective practice. The studies make a compelling contribution to the field by clearly examining and demonstrating the social meaning of touch for the participants in social interaction in a broad range of contexts.

Presenting a new methodology for the study of touch, this is key reading for all researchers and scholars working in conversation analysis, multimodality, and related areas.

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Towards an interactional approach to touch in social encounters

Asta Cekaite and Lorenza Mondada

1. Introduction

This book is about touching as a situated practice. Rooted in multimodal conversation analysis and based on video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions, it contributes in a novel way to the growing interest in the study of touch and its relation to the body, socio-material activity contexts, language, and other communicative resources. Some of the basic points of departure for the present volume and approach are the assumption that social interaction lies at the heart of human sociality (Enfield and Levinson 2006). Participation in social encounters is inextricably related to the perception of the self in relation to others. This perception relies on talk, gaze, and other sensory resources within sociocultural corporeal fields of action (Goffman 1963; Simmel 1908/2009; C. Goodwin 2000). Among other embodied conducts, touch has a special importance, both as a communicative resource and a sensorial experience. Touch can be used to express affection, instruction, and enskillment or control and imposition. Letting another person touch you escalates the balance of intimacy. Among other senses, touch is a way to engage in the perception of the surrounding environment and its materiality. It is a fundamental dimension of both the way we interact with other humans and the way we access the material world.

This book takes a point of departure in the conceptualization of touch as a sociocultural phenomenon deeply rooted in social interaction, and its chapters engage in the detailed study of touching moments within situated activities and joint courses of action. Such touching moments are characterized by the intersubjective sharing of what it is to be touched or to touch each other, or, in the case of touching objects, what it is to apprehend material objects together with other social actors (by, for instance, collectively exploring their properties). The book offers empirical analyses of touching practices, video-recorded and occurring in different social contexts: families, schools, healthcare, shops, leisure and sport activities, and so on. It examines the social and communicative features of corporeal engagements, conceptualizing touch as an interactional phenomenon, and proposes a methodology for studying touch in a multimodal ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective.

The proposed interactional approach to touch in social interaction is inspired by social, interactional, and phenomenological perspectives conceptualizing human action as embodied and lived experience within the social and material world. This approach relies on recent scholarship emanating from a strong criticism of the dominance of language (i.e., the “linguistic turn” in social sciences). An “embodied” or “corporeal” turn, instead, strives to articulate a new vision of how language, body, cognition, and social life intersect (Clark 2008; Farnell 2012; Gallagher 2005; C. Goodwin 1981; C. Goodwin and Goodwin 2004; Gonzalez-Arnal et al. 2012; Meyer et al. 2017; Mondada 2014, 2016; Nevile 2015; Streeck et al. 2011; Varela et al. 1991). Paradoxically, this re-conceptualization of the human subject as embodied has so far neglected touch as a central aspect of human existence and experience. Such neglect reverberates with the long-standing Western philosophical and social science traditions that, since Aristotle’s On the Soul (350 B.C./2018), have treated touch as primal, basic, and therefore occupying the “lower” position in the hierarchy of the senses. Touch was considered to characterize animals and “inferior” social groups (such as children, females, and non-White people) (Classen 2012).

In contrast to this view of touch, the present book directs its attention to social situations where touching features as a naturally occurring part of social life; the collection of studies examines the social meaning of touch for the participants in social interaction. Embodiment as a characteristic human condition (in contrast to the mind-body great divide) is associated with phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeité (in English, “intercorporeality”) (1945/2012) as a primordial condition and engagement of sentient and sensible corporeal subjects, that is, the basic feature of human “being-in-the-world”. Such intertwining or “chiasm” (Merleau-Ponty 1964) can be realized through touch but is not limited to physical contact (since it also involves vision and other distant senses).

Intercorporeality, as argued by recent interactional conceptualizations (Meyer et al. 2017; Meyer and Wedelstaedt 2017), is not limited to the phenomenology of the individual’s experiential self but is experienced within shared social practices. Similarly, the present interactional approach to touch aligns with a micro-sociological view that human embodied conduct is anchored within the social situation and interaction order (Goffman 1983). Touch, as human action more generally, is not determined by any kind of mechanistic, biologically, or socioculturally preconditioned factors. Rather, by acting in socio-material spaces as embodied subjects, we orient to normative expectations and we both enact, reproduce, and transform the interaction order within which we experience and act in the world with others. Embodied conduct, including the use of touch, is not only normatively but also interactively ordered, interpreted, or “disciplined” (in Foucault’s words 1977). It is socially imposed and negotiated through various “techniques of the body”, that is, culturally and socially specific ways of arranging the body within specific activities (such as swimming, walking, or sleeping, which are shaped by training and education; Mauss [1935]). Its meaning is not only the result of disciplinary socialization but emerges within the moment-by-moment unfolding of movements and body orientations, within a sequential organization that includes turns-at-talk, embodied resources, and sensory practices, which are consequential for the intelligibility of actions, as well as the constitution of social roles, relations, and categories in everyday interactions.

The approach developed and proposed in this book contributes to the manifold and disciplinarily varied literature on touch by demonstrating how different forms of touch are interactionally organized in everyday private, institutional, and professional activities. While previous research on touch has considered in very different ways humans touching other humans and people touching material objects, this book brings these two aspects together, highlighting their intersubjective interactional social organization. The contributions in the present book develop a comprehensive analytical perspective on the use of touch as involving a multimodal sensorium, which is configured within embodied, linguistic-material, and social contexts of practices. This analytical perspective on touch is based on a methodology that is founded on video-recorded materials documenting touch conduct as it occurs in locally situated everyday private and institutionalized professional practices.

This introduction is structured as follows. We first present the state of the art in research on touch, from a broad range of perspectives and disciplines (Section 2). Next, we outline the current perspective – a multimodal interactional analytical approach – adopted to study touch in social encounters (Section 3). We describe the current interactional research and, building on this foundation, detail the characteristic analytical procedures and methodological considerations with regard to touch in social interaction. Finally, in Section 4, we present the specific chapters composing the book.

2. Background: state of the art

A recent growing interest in various facets of touch and touching characterizes studies that emanate from radically different research disciplines – such as psychology, neuroaffective sciences, history, anthropology, and other social sciences. Unsurprisingly, however, these different research perspectives rarely communicate with each other. Moreover, studies of interpersonal touch and studies of the haptic perception of things often rely on very different epistemological and disciplinary traditions, which are not easily combined. The following review aims to describe the main vantage points, foci, and findings of these different approaches to touch and to build a comprehensive ground and context for the current interactional perspective on touch in social interaction.

2.1. Touching objects

Despite some early acknowledgement of the importance of skin perception and touch (see Katz 1925), research on touch is only beginning to take shape. Touch is considered a fundamental way in which humans connect to the material environment. Various approaches, including psychology and cognitive and neuroaffective sciences, as well as philosophical approaches of perception, pursue a general interest in how humans access, perceive, and form a representation of the environment through tactile experiences. In this perspective, philosophical and cognitive studies have highlighted the interrelationships between touch and vision in the perception of the material world (Paterson 2007; Noë 2004). Neuroaffective sciences have identified which nerves (A-fibers) convey signals from skin mechanoceptors, allowing tactile discrimination (Linden 2015, 78). Philosophy, ever since the discussion of Molyneux’s question involving the major philosophers of the 17th century (Morgan 1977), has been interested in characterizing different ways of knowing objects’ features (such as shape or texture), based on different senses. By responding in opposed ways to the question of whether a blind person who suddenly regained their sight would recognize a sphere from a cube, philosophical controversies since the 17th century have paved the way for contemporary discussions in the cognitive sciences. While vision enables us to access global shapes, touch is considered more local; while vision embraces an object at one glance, touch explores it progressively. In this perspective, touch in particular involves an active and mobile (kinesthetic) exploration of the object (see Katz 1925 for an early contribution; see also Gibson 1962 for the notion of “active touch”). In turn, this has led to controversies and discussions about the definition of the sense of touch and its articulation and differentiation with the other senses.

2.2. Interpersonal touch

The importance of interpersonal human touch has been acknowledged for infant development and more generally for human well-being across the ages (Montagu 1971). It is an initial, basic, and important sense that binds infant and caregiver together (Bowlby 1969), contributes to enduring forms of intimacy, and regulates the recipient’s emotions (Wyschogrod 1981). Examining touch between caregivers and infants, numerous studies highlight that touch contact is vital to children’s social, cognitive, and physical development (Field 2014; M. J. Hertenstein et al. 2006) and that deprivation of touch can have serious consequences for well-being and development of sociality both for infants and later in life for adults. Moreover, touch is a sensorial practice that shapes social relations. For instance, observational studies argue that touch practices between persons in close, romantic relations or group companionship (e.g., sport or work teams) strengthens social bonds (Kraus et al. 2010), although it is also repulsive when touch is undesired and inappropriate. Furthermore, psychologists interested in the behavioral functions of touch focus on how interpersonal touch conduct “can serve as a potent mechanism of social influence” (M. Hertenstein and Weiss 2011, 329). Research from semi-experimental situations strongly argues that physical contact affects the tendency of people to comply with requests, and this works also when the persons touched during the social encounter did not recall the tactile contact (Gallace and Spence 2010). These findings present a puzzle concerning how touch can occur yet go unnoticed, suggesting that something more than physical contact is probably at play.

Touch is often examined as an individual experience, largely shaped by physiological and neuroaffective – as well as cultural – processes. For instance, Hertenstein (2002) argues that social touch and its discrete forms can be used to communicate emotions (in a culturally universal way) – and that this characteristic of interpersonal touch reaches far beyond infancy. Using recall-interviews, experiments, and direct observations, touch conduct has been coded and quantified, in order to differentiate various forms of touch, for example, showing solidarity, exerting power and dominance, or achieving compliance (Weiss and Niemann 2011, 246). Specific touch forms and functions were identified during experimentally set up situations, and a variety of touch positions and shapes were documented and described. For instance, strokes, rubbing, and hugs are characterized as concurrent with expression of prosocial emotions such as love, gratitude, and sympathy, and they co-occur with release of oxytocin, a.k.a. “the hormone of love”. Of course, there is a general understanding that touch is rarely used on its own (Mayo et al. 2018), but studies usually set out to identify discrete, single-mode, tactile behaviors and their functions. While the importance of multiple senses and embodied practices, social situations, and relational characteristics betwee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Towards an interactional approach to touch in social encounters
• 2 The interactive construction of a hug sequence
• 3 The tactility and visibility of kissing: intercorporeal configurations of kissing bodies in family photography sessions
• 4 Touch as embodied compassion in responses to pain and distress
• 5 Control touch in caregiver–child interaction: embodied organization in triadic mediation of peer conflict in Swedish and Japanese
• 6 When a dance hold becomes illegitimate
• 7 To touch and to be touched: the coordination of touching-whole-body-movements in Aikido practice
• 8 Touching and petting: exploring “haptic sociality” in interspecies interaction
• 9 Professional touch in speech and language therapy for the treatment of post-stroke aphasia
• 10 Guided touch: the sequential organization of feeling a fetus in Japanese midwifery practices
• 11 Passing touch: handing and handling tools and implements during surgical procedures
• 12 Calibrating professional perception through touch in geological fieldwork
• 13 Sensorial explorations of food: how professionals and amateurs touch cheese in gourmet shops
• 14 Ambivalences of touch: an epilogue
• Index