Boonyalakha Makboon’s research while affiliated with Auckland University of Technology and other places

In this article, we take a multimodal (inter)action analytical approach, showing how objects in everyday life are identity telling. As social actors surround themselves with objects, multiple actions from producing the objects to acquiring and placing them in the environment are embedded within. Here, we investigate examples from two different ethnographic studies, using the notion of frozen actions. One of our examples comes from a five-month long ethnographic study on identity production of three vegetarians in Thailand (Makboon, forthcoming); and the other example comes from a four-month long ethnographic study of three working parents on the East coast of North America (Norris, 2006, 2008). We illustrate the frozen actions embedded in particular objects and argue that the analysis of frozen actions allows us to partially understand how identity is produced and experienced by social actors in everyday life.

Multimodal discourse analysis is an emergent field that began around the verge of the millennium with books such as Reading Images: A Grammar of Visual Design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996/2006), Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction (Scollon, 1998), Multimodal Discourse (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), and Analyzing Multimodal Interaction: A Methodological Framework (Norris, 2004). Initially, multimodal discourse analysis was primarily the domain of mediated discourse analysts, social semioticians, and systemic functional linguists. While early developments were somewhat overlapping in time, these works resulted from, and aligned with, two separate major paradigm shifts stemming from previous work in discourse analysis...

In this article, I analyze gestures produced during a dharma orientation lecture. The dharma orientation lectures are a part of the I-Kuan-Tao cult in Thailand. The analysis undertaken draws on multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011a) providing the description of the interaction through multimodal transcripts of how different types of gesture simultaneously interplay with other modes in creating meaning. I begin with a frame analysis (Goffman, 1974; Tannen, 1993) of the interview transcript, where the primary participant consistently positions himself as ‘the chosen one’. Next, I analyse how the ‘chosen one’ uses different types of gestures to convey such ephemeral religious concepts as the ‘cycle of reincarnation’, ‘soul’, and ‘nirvana’ during the I-Kuan-Tao dharma orientation lecture. I demonstrate that gestures utilized by the participant, namely deictic, iconic, metaphoric and beat gesture (McNeill, 1992; Kendon, 2004) show the participant’s belief that he is ‘the chosen one’.