Viewpoints Gesture

McNeill hypothesizes that children use dual-viewpoint gestures because they may not differentiate the viewpoint of the observer from the events of the story itself. In adults, he suggests, dual-viewpoint gestures may fill a logical gap in meaning, create new meanings, or allow a speaker to express two meanings simultaneously. ... 

FIG. 7.2. E3 holds the wheel intensely. In this mimetic viewpoint gesture, he reenacts his physical struggle to control the machine with his entire body. 

Mimetic Viewpoint Gesture Miner raises hands, grasps bars, shakes them. 

McNeill notes that observer-viewpoint gestures are more likely to accompany static and intransitive verbs. This feature of observer-viewpoint gesmres may reflect the type of verbs speakers generally employ to describe physical dimensions of objects they observe (the nxrf is high the arches ate like I-beams). See McNeill, 1992. 

From an institutional perspective, ETs narrative serves a rhetorical function as both example and warning of the consequences of the victim s carelessness getting on the belt. El frames this narrative with an institutional warning that even the best lockout system will not prevent an accident if miners fail to follow safe practice. In these analytic viewpoint gestures (indicated within the narrative), he depicts the miner with his hand and fingers only—not with his entire body. The action appears in front of El—at arm s length ... 

Quick presentation of both hand forefingers pointing towards each other (analytic viewpoint gesture)... 

Missing Experience. Novice miners use both character viewpoint gestures and observer viewpoint gestures to describe machines and proces.ses un-... 

When speakers assume mimetic viewpoint gestures, audiences observe the speaker as an actor who re-presents events and situations that are temporally and spatially distant. When speakers assume analytic viewpoints, speakers and audience share the same rhetorical relation to the objects and situations... 

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. 

Chapters 4 and 5 examine two specific features of this documentation the writer s viewpoint and the representation of embodied knowledge in speech and gesture. Chapters 6-8 look at ht)w these rhetorical features affect two. specific moments of transformation—in accident reports and training. 

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. 

The present chapter demonstrates how individuals are able to manage multiple perspectives in speech alone. Chapters 7—9 show how individuals employ both speech and gesture to represent two and sometimes even three separate viewpoints simultaneously. This research has important implications for workplace discourse as well as ethnographic studies based upon speech (or its transcription) alone. 

To answer these questions, this chapter analyzes videotaped interviews with expert and novice coal miners over a six-month pericxl from July 1995, to January 1996, in the United States and Great Britain. As the following discussion suggests, miners gestures are not merely pictorial or emotional embellishments to speech. Like speech, gesture can express both semantic content and a speaker s viewpoint. ... 

Recent research in psychology shows that speakers can express two different viewpoints in gesture-—reenacting events as characters in their narrative (character viewpoint) or representing events as an observer (observer view-p(hnt). This chapter extends previous rhetorical and psychological studies of gesture in order to understand how speakers use gesture rhetorically when they represent their experiences of risk. 

One surprising finding of this analysis is that speakers can describe two distinct viewpoints simultaneously—t)ne in speech and one in gesture. (One ex-... 

Goldin-Meadow and Alibali (1995) have extended McNeill s analysis to study speech-gesture mismatch in children (where what a child says is different from what he or she gestures when explaining a problem). These studies show that speakers can represent two different semantic meanings or viewpoints simultaneously in speech and gesture and that these two distinct meanings may represent different or transitional approaches to a problem. 

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. 

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