Embodied experience Gesture

The chapters that follow use this framework to examine how agencies attempt to reconcile diverse viewpoints to make sense of accidents (chapters 4 and 5) how embodied sensory experience is rendered invisible in writing (chapter 6) and how speakers gestures help them understand the temporal and spatial complexity of a hazardous environment (chapters 7 and 8). In chapter 9, I analyze 31 oral interviews with miners following the South-mountain disaster in Norton, Virginia (January, 1993), in order to show how embodied experience and gesture are documented in writing at one critical moment of transformation. 

To cite a mine for violations that precipitated the accident, investigators must fit miners experiences and observations into categories of risk defined by the Mine Act. They must create a coherent narrative that captures the complexity of events, decisions, and conditions prior to the accident. And they must transform miners embodied experiences of risk (underground and inside of the spaces they describe) into the language and viewpoint of engineers—above and outside of the experiences they describe. As we shall see in chapters 4-8, investigators draw important information from miners accounts of local experiences, but they do not always systematically represent information encoded in gesture or a speaker s tone and body movements. 

Embodied Experience Representing Risk in Speech and Gesture... 

When miners talked about risk, the viewpoints that they assumed in speech and gesture differed from laboratory subjects viewpoints in several important respects. These differences reflect the uncertainty of risky environments and the nature of miners embodied experience in local sites. Because laboratory studies of gesture ask subjects to recall events they have observed in cartoons, laboratory subjects cannot describe themselves within the space of the narratives they recount in speech and gesture. When speakers remembered events they themselves had experienced and spaces they themselves had occupied, they could reenact and analyze their own experiences within the spaces they describe in both speech and gesture. 

Analysis of miners speech and gesture suggests, first, that individuals can represent themselves and others as characters in their narrative (mimetic view point) and second, that they can move outside of this embodied experience to observe and analyze events from a distance (analytic viewpoint). When speakers assume a mimetic viewpoint, they enact events directly with no rhetorical distance between themselves and the action. When speakers assume an analytic viewpoint, they place temporal and spatial distance between their current position (as observers or narrators) and the events they describe. 

If Libby lacks a language to express her embodied experience, it is also possible that trainers did not provide a language that could provide an adequate representation of the process. Written instructions without gesture are rhetorically incomplete—like Libby s sing-song chant—unless writers can capture the dynamic, imagistic constructions of experience that are expressed more naturally in gesture. 

Gesture thus helps Libby organize the recurrent pattern in her gestures within a simple rhetorical frame like milking a cow. When she pauses to reflect, she isolates the pattern of hand movements required to insert the bolt, establishes a rhythm for her action, and creates a vivid and comic image that helps her audience remember the pattern in the future. Her embodied actions demonstrate how an expert miner can step outside of her embodied experience rhetorically to observe and analyze her work. 

Sauer, B. (1999). Embodied experience Representittg risk in speech and gesture. Discourse Studies, 1(3), 321-354. 

As we shall see in the chapters that follow, conventional written documentation may fail to capture an individual s embodied sensory experience. Conventional forms of workplace discourse like instructions and procedures can render invisible the diverse viewpoints of observers situated literally and physically in a different relation to risk. Written documents may also fail t(t capture knowledge embodied in speech and gesture. Before we can speak with confidence about what audiences know, we must find ways to fill the gaps in our own rhetorical practice. 

As the previous chapter suggests, miners learn to understand danger as instincts, hunches or feelings. Miners describe the ability to sense these physical phenomena as pit sense, an embodied sensory knowledge derived from site-specific practice in a particular working environment. When miners describe their experiences, their gestures convey the physical presence of this embodied sensory experience. 

Miners frequently express two different viewpoints simultaneously in speech and gesture. When miners employ two distinct viewpoints in speech and gesture, they can frame their discourse in one viewpoint and reenact their embodied sensory experience in another. They can introduce irony or view themselves and others from a distanced analytic viewpoint. They can analyze and comment upon another s action in speech while they simultaneously reenact events and experiences as characters in their gesture. 

In The Rhetoric of Risk, 1 begin the project of understanding how the practice of documentation can be extended to include the knowledge embodied in speech and gesture. Ultimately, my work suggests, we must reexamine what it means to document experience in script, video, or multi-media construction. To understand how these new forms of documentation might func-... 

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