Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity

Embodied Family Choreography documents the lived and embodied practices employed to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships in the family, examining forms of control, care, and creativity. Making use of the extensive video archives of family interaction in the US and Sweden, it presents the first investigation of how touch and interaction between bodies, in conjunction with talk, constitute a primary means of orchestrating activities through directives, thus creating rich relationships through supportive interchanges, and engaging in playful explorations of the world. Through close investigation of the sequential and simultaneous engagement of bodies interacting with other bodies, this book makes visible the important role touch plays in the context of contemporary Western middle class family life and is pioneering in its analysis of how the visual, aural, and haptic senses (usually analysed separately) mutually elaborate one another. As such, Embodied Family Choreography will appeal to scholars of child development, the sociology of the family and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Distinguished Professor Emita of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. She is the author of He Said She Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children and The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion.

Asta Cekaite is Professor in Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden and co-editor of Children’s Peer Talk: Learning from each other. She is editor for Research on Children and Social Interaction.