books by Michael Lempert
From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale
coedited journal issues by Michael Lempert
a few articles / essays by Michael Lempert
In Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power. Edited by Matei Candea, Taras Fedirko, Paolo Heywood and Fiona Wright., 2025
Gesture, 2019
For gesture research outside anthropology, the promise -and challenge -of anthropological method ... more For gesture research outside anthropology, the promise -and challenge -of anthropological method stems from one or more of its core commitments: its pursuit of human variation, both diachronic and synchronic; its insistence on naturalistic rather than experimental research design; and its integrative sensibility that situates human behavior in relation to an expansive sociocultural context. This essay reflects on this last sensibility. As we envision an anthropology of gesture and weigh its potential for gesture studies, we should pause and reflect on the fitful history of gesture in anthropology. As a parable for the present, I revisit a neglected anthropological voice from twentieth-century gesture research: Ray L. Birdwhistell, whose ambitious postwar science of kinesics teamed film-based microanalysis with American linguistic structuralism. At stake in Birdwhistell's work was a problem that looms large here, that of how and at what cost a science of gesture can contextualize its object integratively.
“Mechanical objectivity,” which Daston and Galison trace to the mid−19th century, often coincided... more “Mechanical objectivity,” which Daston and Galison trace to the mid−19th century, often coincided with efforts to inscribe nature ‘directly’, such as through automatic registering machines; but what did this inscription entail? Addressing this requires that we re-examine indexicalization: the shift in semiotic ideology whereby medial technologies are imagined and acted upon as if they preserved material traces of the real. Indexicalization is no simple reflex of mechanical objectivity and is more varied and consequential than commonly imagined. I demonstrate this by returning to the sciences of face-to-face interaction, which crystallized in postwar America but drew inspiration from earlier research on talk therapy. Returning to efforts to record “objectively” psychoanalysis sessions in the early 1930s, I chronicle a shift in the technosemiotic mediation of knowledge. Whereas transcripts were originally “verbatim” records of literal content, researchers came to seek tacit, symptomological signs. And whereas mechanical recording was introduced to avoid an observer effect, it was later deemed necessary to preserve indexical traces for fine-grained analysis. This indexicalization had ontological as well as epistemological effects, and it was inspired not by mechanical objectivity but by the parallel capacities of the perceptive psychoanalyst and receptive mechanical recorder, both virtuosic in registering the indexical richness of the communicative unconscious.
From: Signs and Society. Volume 6, Number 1 | Winter 2018
Metasemiosis and Social Life: Essays in... more From: Signs and Society. Volume 6, Number 1 | Winter 2018
Metasemiosis and Social Life: Essays in Honor of Michael Silverstein
Research on manual gesture has been preoccupied with unconventionalized and conventionalized extr... more Research on manual gesture has been preoccupied with unconventionalized and conventionalized extremes. Homesigns developed spontaneously by deaf children unexposed to standardized sign languages have been used as a window onto more general socio-cognitive processes of semiotic systemization. Spontaneous, idiosyncratic gesticulation has been contrasted with shared, highly regimented "emblematic" or "quotable" gestures to reveal a cline of conventionalization. I direct attention here to the vast and relatively understudied middle ground in which manual gesture shows evidence of only partial conventionalization. Using a corpus of televised political debate data from a US presidential campaign cycle, I note, first, that there is nothing as coherent and systematized as a "register" of political gesture here. Focusing on gesture variation in precision-grip and index-finger-extended gestures of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I identify form-functional "pragmatic affinities" among gestures that have not crystallized into stable types or classes. Dwelling on the specificities of gesture variation, with its mercurial forms and incomplete conventionalization, may allow us to appreciate the processual complexities of gestural enregisterment in social and historical life.
Imitation
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Ordinary ethics' suggests that everyday discursive interaction -interaction mediated by actual la... more Ordinary ethics' suggests that everyday discursive interaction -interaction mediated by actual language use -has tacit ethical dimensions. This line of inquiry is productive for the anthropology of ethics and has the potential to reframe long-standing languagebased research on everything from conversational turn-taking to politeness displays, but what does it mean to speak of discursive practice as a locus for ethical life? To what extent is the ethical inscribed in the ground-rules of interaction, or conditioned from below (e.g. biologically-based cooperative predispositions) or from without (e.g. culturally-institutionalized moralities)? The presumption that ethics is immanent in practice continues to distract from the problem of how to narrate, and theorize, the entanglements of discourse and ethics.
Gesture in political oratory and debate is renowned for its nonreferential indexical functions, f... more Gesture in political oratory and debate is renowned for its nonreferential indexical functions, for the way it purportedly can indicate qualities of speaker and materialize acts of persuasion -functions famously addressed in Quintilian's classic writings but understudied today. I revisit this problematic through a case study of precision-grip (especially thumb to tip of forefinger) in Barack Obama's debate performances (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008). Cospeech gesture can index valorized attributes of speaker -not directly but through orders of semiotic motivation. In terms of first-order indexicality, precision-grip highlights discourse in respect of information structure, indicating focus. In debate, precision grip has undergone a degree of conventionalization and has reemerged as a second-order pragmatic resource for performatively "making a 'sharp' , effective point. " Repetitions and parallelisms of precision grip in debate can, in turn, exhibit speaker-attributes, such as being argumentatively 'sharp' , and from there may even partake in candidate branding.
coauthored by Michael Lempert
Language & Communication, Jan 1, 2007
Papers by Michael Lempert
In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living b... more In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here. According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Green-land whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants. Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination?
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books by Michael Lempert
https://bibliopen.org/9780226832494
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https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo232019948.html
coedited journal issues by Michael Lempert
a few articles / essays by Michael Lempert
Metasemiosis and Social Life: Essays in Honor of Michael Silverstein
coauthored by Michael Lempert
Papers by Michael Lempert