Lecture | Sonya Pritzker | Embodiment, Emotion, and Intimacy at the Intersection of Linguistic and Biocultural Anthropology

Drawing upon data from an ongoing ethnographic study of embodiment and emotion in everyday interaction among cohabitating couples in the U.S., this presentation engages with key theoretical and methodological questions involved in conducting ethnographic research at the intersection of linguistic and biocultural anthropology. My discussion, specifically, focuses on video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in couples’ homes alongside time-matched psychophysiological data on moment-to-moment shifts in each partners’ respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) —an aspect of heart rate variability (HRV)—gathered with a mobile impedance cardiography device (Mindware Technologies, Ltd. Westerville, OH). In analyzing video data, I demonstrate how the theories and methods of linguistic anthropology complicate a quantitative approach to emotion-in-interaction that often hinges upon the identification of specific, discrete “emotions” and/or designation of particular interactions as either “conflict” or “agreement” (see, e.g., Gottman & Driver 2005, Cribbit 2013, Han et al. 2021). Emphasizing the co-emergence of emotion-in-interaction, this talk thus foregrounds the multimodal ways in which talk-in-interaction constitutes an intersubjective, embodied process of co-operative action as people variably orient to being co-present with one another in any environment (Goodwin 2018). Asking how couples’ RSA values, as quantitative data, might complement and/or productively complicate rather than “reduce” such an analysis, this talk thus centers the question of how we might unsettle the binary between quantia and qualia in ethnographic research more broadly (Shweder 1996).