Queuing interaction bodies. Indexicality and (mis)interpretations of bodily-spatial arrangements in spaces of consumption.

Singh, Ajit; Eisewicht, Paul

Abstract

In this chapter, we address the empirical question of how bodies are interpreted, understood, or even misinterpreted in everyday life and how meaning and social order are produced through embodied forms of action. The prototypical phenomenon of our investigations are visible actions of queuing in front of shops (a bakery at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic), which we situate in the context of consumer action. In a theoretical sense, the interaction body and its situational, indexical, and context-bound “readability” and interpretability become the focus of our consideration. We define the interaction body as a socially enculturated body endowed with knowledge that stands in an indexical and sign-like relation to other bodies, but whose meaningfulness cannot be interpreted separately from its local embedding in spatial, temporal, and material structures. Finally, this chapter emphasises that, while the intelligibility of bodies is tied to situational communicative action, some bodies’ ambiguity poses a problem – not just for the analysing sociologists, but also for the participants who encounter each other in casual or familiar social situations.