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Embodied Experience: Representing Risk in Speech and Gesture

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

This article investigates the ways in which individuals assume two distinct viewpoints in both speech and gesture - both simultaneously and sequentially - when they represent the uncertain knowledge that characterizes risk. In the mimetic viewpoint, individuals represent events as characters in their own narrative or mimic the character viewpoint of an Other. In the analytic viewpoint, individuals move outside of embodied experience to analyze events from a distance. As part of a larger study investigating viewpoint in discourses of risk, this study suggests the important role of viewpoint in understanding individual accounts of risk. Together, speech and gesture provide a richer representation of risk than either speech or gesture alone. But viewpoints represented in gesture may be rendered invisible in written accident reports and investigations (Collins, 1990; Sauer, 1994). This study suggests that individual accounts of risk ultimately reflect highly local sensory experiences that are situated - literally and physically - by an individual's position in institutional and material sites. Within these institutions, individuals can access a range of analytic and mimetic viewpoints in both speech and gesture in order to represent their experiences. This research has important implications for rhetorical theory and risk and decision science.

Key Words: coal • gesture • miners • perspective • rhetoric • risk • risk communication • technical communication • uncertainty • viewpoint • workplace

Discourse Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3, 321-354 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/1461445699001003003


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