Christian Meyer

ZusammenfassungDie Rituale der Umbanda verlangen von ihren menschlichen Medien bei der Verkörperung von Geistwesen in der Trance einerseits ein hohes Maß an spontaner performativer Kreativität, damit sie unterhaltsam sind und im multi-religiösen Brasilien Publikum anziehen. Andererseits aber fordern sie auch eine große performative Genauigkeit, damit die Geistverkörperung auch als authentisch bewertet wird. Immer wieder kommt es dazu, dass die Geistwesen allzu offensichtlich die Interessen der sie verkörpernden Medien vertreten, so dass das Publikum das menschliche Medium als Urheber von deren Taten und Worten vermutet. Dieser Gratwanderung zwischen einer glaubwürdigen Geistperformanz und deren Nutzung zum Verfolgen menschlicher Interessen wird der Aufsatz anhand einer Untersuchung des Sprechens der Geister, das paradigmatisch für agency ist, nachgehen.

There are two possible reactions to the finding that the turn-taking system as proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) has been revealed not to be universal in all its specifics. One reaction to this finding would be the “bongo-bongoist” stance that Douglas (1996: xxxv) has once called “the trap of all anthropological discussion”: “Hitherto when a generalization is tentatively advanced, it is rejected out of court by any fieldworkers who can say: ‘This is all very well, but it doesn’t apply to the Bongo-Bongo’.”

Conversations on the village square start when, after their noon, afternoon, evening and night prayers in the mosque, several of the elder men extend mats under one of the shadier trees of the square and settle down. The people who meet know each other very well, since they have grown up together in the village and every day spend hours on the village square in conversation, at least during the dry season. In what follows, I analyze several of the informal conversations in regard to their conversational organization.

This book draws inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeality to offer a new, multidisciplinary perspective on the body. By drawing attention to the body's ability to simultaneously sense and be sensed, Merleau-Ponty transcends the object-subject divide and describes how bodies are about, into, and within other bodies. Such inherent relationality constitutes the essence of intercorporeality, and the chapters in this book examine such relationality from a host of diverse perspectives. The book begins with an introductory chapter in which the editors review the current research on bodily interaction, and introduce the notion of intercorporeality as a potentially integrative framework. The first section then offers four chapters devoted to clarifying theoretical and developmental perspectives on intercorporeality. Section 2 contains three chapters that provide insight on intercorporeality from evolutionary, historical, and cross-sectional perspectives. In Section 3, four chapters examine the intercorporeal nature of meaning-making during human interaction. Section 4 then presents three chapters that explore the intercorporeal nature of multi-agent interactions and the role that non-animate bodies (i.e., objects) play in such interaction. Throughout all the chapters, the authors work to integrate research in their specific discipline into the larger, transdisciplinary notion of intercorporeality. This collection provides an indisputably unique perspective on bodies-in-interaction, while simultaneously offering an interdisciplinary way forward in contemporary scholarship on bodies, meaning, and interaction.

Tracing different kinds of semiotic practices in boxing, in our text we provide a detailed reconstruction of the way athletes and other participants interpret each other’s actions and integrate these interpretations in their own course of motor action. Drawing on an ethnomethodological approach we argue that these interpretations should not be seen as being isolated from their contextual background. This context (such as the rules of the sports) and the semiotic actions taking place within them mutually elaborate one another. Analyzing several video recordings and their transcripts, we show how the social interaction of boxing fights consists of a “multi-layeredness of semiotic practice.” These layers of semiotic practice are complemented by what we introduce as asemiotic practices. Asemiotic practices exploit semiotic routines that are a part of boxing and attempt at weakening and overcoming the opponent during the fight thus eventually destroying his or her semiotic capacities.

Human sociality is shaped and realized most notably in embodied practices of interpersonal interaction. At the same time, the social nature of human beings is open for cultural influences. This book inspects the foundations of human sociality theoretically drawing on recent debates in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, and empirically by the example of interactions on the central square of a Wolof village in Northwestern Senegal. Menschliche Sozialität gestaltet und realisiert sich zuallererst in den vielfältigen verkörperten Praktiken zwischenmenschlicher Interaktionen. Die Sozialnatur des Menschen ist dabei offen für kulturelle Einflüsse. Dieses Buch inspiziert die Grundlagen menschlicher Sozialität theoretisch anhand jüngerer Diskussionen in der Soziologie, Ethnologie, Anthropologie und Linguistik und empirisch am Beispiel von Interaktionen auf dem zentralen Platz eines Dorfes der Wolof Nordwestsenegals.

In this text, I discuss the concept of culture that ethnomethodology suggests. First, I will review the sources that Garfinkel refers to: While he draws heavily on Parsons’ conception of culture, he also criticizes it with reference to Schütz. I start the second part with examining Garfinkel conception of ethnos—that suffixes ‘ethnomethodology’—to then present six salient dimensions of the ethnomethodological conception of culture: recognizability; normatively interspersed knowledge and cooperative continuation; familiarity and trust; indexicality and vagueness; practice; and fractality and fragmentation. The text ends with some thoughts comparing the ethnomethodological notion of culture to other conceptions.

Le Liber quatuor distinctionum, première section du Liber introductorius composé par Michel Scot à partir de 1227 à la cour palermitaine de Frédéric II, contient deux chapitres consacrés à l’ars musica. Le premier traite principalement de la musique dans la perspective de l’harmonie des sphères, tandis que le second s’ordonne autour d’une théorie de l’échelle des sons et de la théorie des modes recueillies à partir de la tradition d’enseignement de Guy d’Arezzo. Ces chapitres ne sont connus que par la “version longue”, et relativement tardive, de l’ouvrage. L’analyse du De noticia suggère que ce traité pourrait avoir été ajouté par l’éditeur responsable de cette version du Liber introductorius