Language and Body in Place and Space: Discourse of Japanese Rock Climbing

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Description

Drawing on the authors experience as a sociolinguist and a mountain climber, this book shows how the expertise and affect-laden experience of Japanese rock climbers can be illuminated through linguistic methods and theories. Through a detailed investigation of multimodal interaction among climbers, the book explores a number of significant sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological themes, including spatial frames of reference, intersubjectivity, chronotopic configurations, and poetic formations of talk. In doing so, it presents climbing as a condensed locus of human interactions in which the integrated analysis of semiotic processes brings to light a new set of relationships between humans and their surroundings. Grounded in an extended and focused participation in rock climbing activities and interviews with other climbers, Kuniyoshi Kataoka examines the assemblage of semiotic resources including the language, the body, and the space mediated by their climbing equipment and the surrounding environment. The result is a showcase of interdisciplinary multimodal approaches to climbing discourse analysis in and around the gravity-sensitive zone, ranging from expert climbers instruction to novices, gossip and narratives on near-death experiences, to a multi-participant discussion of a critical accident. As well as demonstrating how language reflects extraordinary experiences on the vertical plane, the findings also offer a chance to learn more about climbing, which is attracting a growing number of participants and competitors worldwide.

Reviews

In rock climbing, interactions, gestures, bodies, objects and space all synchronize together. Kuniyoshi Kataoka has developed a richly textured analysis of Japanese rock climbers practices in naturalistic settings. This innovative book will inspire future research on how humans move through space and guide each other as they do so. -- Niko Besnier, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Kataoka has provided amazingly rich ethnographic descriptions of the practices, narratives and poetry associated with mountain climbing. This is a great book for anyone interested in Linguistic Anthropology, Japanese Pragmatics, and Interaction Studies and will be a vital resource for years to come. -- Akira Takada, Kyoto University, Japan

Author Bio

Kuniyoshi Kataoka is Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Aichi University, Japan.