Requesting another to taste: Passing food and the distribution of agency in the organization of bodily trajectories

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the organizational features of passing food objects as a commonplace embodied social practice to accomplish requests to another to taste food during joint cooking activities. Situated within the cognate frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, the sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains the formal features of passing food from hand to hand and from hand to mouth as distinct practices with distinct micro-sequential organizations. The study draws on a corpus of 14 hours of video-recordings of naturally occurring joint cooking activities in which the participants speak German, Swedish, and English. Focusing on the projectable aspects of bodily trajectories, the analysis reveals how the request sequences are achieved through the participants’ early projection of how to pass the food objects and their stepwise mutual adjustments to their conjoint action trajectory. In progressively establishing who does what next and how during the food transfer, the participants orient to the relevance and distribution of interactional agency. When the normative organization of the step-by-step transfer is disregarded, an ambiguity emerges concerning what action the practice is doing, which prompts the participants to engage in significant interactional work to re-negotiate on what terms the transfer can resume. This shows how issues of interactional agency are exerted and exhibited in and through the sequential organization of social interaction. The results contribute to, and elaborate, prior findings on requests and advances our understanding for the close attention that participants to interaction pay to the detailed aspects of multimodally formatted actions and the normative expectancies that make up to their intelligibility, reflexively elaborating each other.