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The embodiment of social structures of action – Saul Albert


The summary of an upcoming article written by myself and Dirk vom Lehn, who will soon be freed from the stuck R&R cycle of the pandemic year. Draft available if you’re ready to give feedback!

Abstract

While dance often features in sociological theory, there are relatively few empirical studies exploring the social practices through which people learn to dance together. This article takes as its starting point the way in which partner dancing is often presented as a metaphor to illustrate theories of social order and interaction. We examine a body of video data collected during a one-day workshop and explore how beginning dancers learn to perform some of the basic steps of a social dance in rhythm with their partner and with the rhythmic environment. The analysis shows how dancers use rhythm, bodies, language and other resources to organize their social interactions and shows how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis provide a critical perspective for examining sociological theories on the relationship between the body and the social.

Keywords: ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, multimodality, dance, culture,



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