Lovers, wrestlers, surgeons: a contextually motivated view of interpersonal engagement and body alignment in surgical interaction

Models for describing how body alignment contributes to the meaning-making of human social contexts have tended to yield elaborate but instance-bound 'thick descriptions'. While this allows for very rich accounts of particular cases, these approaches do not lend themselves to systematic empirical comparison, for instance of how participants in a highly charged endeavour like surgery align their bodies to each other in ways that may construe different meanings under different conditions - e.g., different types of surgery, different phases of surgery, different levels of fatigue, engagement or personal involvement in the procedure at hand, when taking different agentive roles, when working with different teams, or just the effects of working on different days. The need for such empirical analyses in areas like surgery is increasing as we find more and more evidence that a team's sense of engagement is crucial to its capacity to avert and reduce errors (Wilson et al. 2005; Healey et al. 2006; Bezemer et al. 2011; Weldon et al. 2013). Recently, systemically oriented accounts have been emerging which hold promise for dealing with these kinds of empirical analyses. In particular, Martinec (2001) has offered a framework for analyzing the means of construction and expression of interpersonal relations through action, drawing on Hall's (1959, 1966) classic analysis of spatial distance between bodies, and incorporating his own analysis of reciprocal body angle. Yet what is missing from the leading models of body alignment is a systematic account of how the same distance and orientation selections may have quite different meanings even in subtly different contexts; that is, there is no systematic account of the dynamic role of context in the meanings attributed to movement and position. In this chapter, I examine what we can gain by emphasising the stratal rapport between context, semantics and expression choices in multimodal analyses, starting with the issue of how body alig