Self-Making Man: A Day of Action, Life, and Language (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives)

This book portrays one day in the communicative life of the owner of an auto repair-shop in Texas. He walks, looks, points, shows and explains engines, makes sense by gesture, speaks, manages, makes his life-world, and in the process reproduces social structures and himself as individual. Self-Making Man is the first comprehensive study of a communicating person; it reveals socially shared and personal practices, as well as improvisational actions by which a person inhabits and makes sense of the world with others. After decades of discussion on embodiment, this study is the first to investigate one body in its full range of communicative activities. Grounded in phenomenology and committed to the methodological rigor of context analysis and conversation analysis, Self-Making Man departs radically from contemporary research practice: it shows that, to take embodiment in human interaction seriously, we must conceive of it as individuation and organic, self-sustaining life: as autopoeisis.

Jürgen Streeck, Professor of Communication Studies and Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, is known for his ground-breaking work on gesture, embodied interaction, and the bodily foundations of meaning. Among his publications are Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning (2009), Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World (edited with C. Goodwin and C. D. LeBaron, 2011), and Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction (edited with C. Meyer and J. S. Jordan, 2016). His articles have appeared in Gesture, the Journal of Pragmatics, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Annual Review of Anthropology, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Universität Bielefeld, Germany, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, and Carl V. Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany.