Simultaneous Viewpoints in Miners Representations of Risk

Hand in a fist, hends elbow and quickly brings fist to shoulder (analytic viewpoint gesture) 

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 following example, E5 uses the same gesture that E3 used to depict himself holding the wheel (which we characterized as a mimetic gesture). In this case, however, E5 reenacts another miner s experience—her sister s— while she describes the same events from her own viewpoint from a safe distance on the other side of a ventilation curtain (Fig. 7.9)  

E5 My sister was on the crew, and she was putting supplies on the bolter, and when I got up she was still standing there holding on to the plate. 

Analytic Viewpoint (Self) in speech Miner stands a distance from the event as it occurred. As she tells the story, she does not reenact her own experience in speech, but instead, calmly describes what she saw happening in the space in front of her. 

---