深めて！南山GLS　学生の活躍　GLS教員リレーエッセイ

From Interaction to Society

Rue Burch

Take a moment and look at the various things around you. The device you're reading this on. The furniture you are sitting on. The building you are currently in. Anything that is in the environment around you that was made by people.

Choose one of these things and think about what made that object possible. What had to happen for it to be there? What had to happen for that action to be possible? And for that action to be possible?

Go ahead. Reading this essay can wait. The good thing about the written word is that it doesn't have anywhere it needs to go and can be very patient. It will still be here when you're ready.

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Have you thought about it? Really?

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All of the objects that are in your environment are there as the result of humans cooperating. The device you're reading this on is there in front of you because of the people who worked together to design it, the people who worked together to get the materials for building it, the people who worked together to put it together in a factory, the people who worked together to get it to the store that you bought it at, and the people at the store who worked together to keep the store open. The building the store is in was built by people who worked together. The roads that allowed the vehicles to move to and from that store were built by people who worked together.

This could go on forever, because the level of cooperation and coordination that is necessary is nearly infinite.

And the level of cooperation that has made all of this possible has only been possible because of our ability to interact, to do things in such a way that we're able to understand each other.

This interaction doesn't have to include talk. In some activities, talk only occurs when there is a problem, or when the people are talking about something other than the activity (Enfield & Sidnell, 2021). Pounding mochi is a good example. The two or three people (one or two people pounding the rice and one person flipping it) understand each other and their timing is generally perfectly coordinated. Indeed, the only time talk is involved is when someone doesn't understand the activity correctly, as when I tried it - I was deathly afraid of doing it wrong and accidentally hurting someone, and the others had to talk me through it! And, believe me, the talk definitely slowed the activity down.

But while there are activities such as mochi pounding that don't require talk, much of our interaction does require us to speak with each other. And though we may say that "action speaks louder than words" (行動は言葉よりも雄弁です), what we do with words IS action (Stokoe, 2018). For example, even the simplest greetings help to create and keep relationships. Think of the times you have greeted someone, but they didn't greet back for some reason. Did you worry about what is meant for your relationship, or maybe that you had done something wrong? Or think about offering to help an elderly neighbor. This simple action can make their day better, and maybe even make your day better too.

These are examples of how our interaction is "cooperative action" (Goodwin, 2018), because even something as simple as a greeting or an offer requires more than one person to be involved. More complex cooperation and coordination between people is often made possible through what Drew & Couper-Kuhlen (2014) called "recruitment," which can include requests and orders but even some actions we don't have words for. An example: imagine you're in class, and your pen has stopped working. What do you do? You'll ask a classmate or the teacher for a pen, right? Think of how many different ways you could do this. Think of the polite or friendly words you would use. Think of whether you would say "borrow/借りて" or "lend/貸して.

If your best friend is sitting next to you, would you even say anything? Or might you just gesture or just grab a pen from their desk? Think about why your way of getting that pen would be different depending on who you're getting that pen from.

Your way of doing this not only shows the type of relationship you have with that person, it creates that relationship. This is how we change and develop our relationships with people over time.

This type of interaction, our cooperation and coordination with other people through different types of recruitment, counts for a lot of how and why societies work. The same norms that shape how you feel when someone does or doesn't greet you, or how you will borrow a pen in class, also shape the world we see around us.

Like buildings being built.

Trains arriving on time

Doctors and nurses helping patients at a hospital

Or someone making sure there are fresh vegetables at the supermarket.

We are the building blocks of society, and society is the result of our actions and interactions.

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Now think of all the challenges the world faces right now. Climate change. Poverty. People without access to education or health care. These challenges will require people to cooperate and coordinate with each other in order to solve them. Since we shape society by being part of society, we have a choice when it comes to how we will participate in solving these challenges. And those solutions will require interaction. We have to be willing to speak, to interact, in order to get things done.

REFERENCES

Drew, P. & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2014). Requesting - from speech act to recruitment. In P. Drew and E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), Requesting in social interaction (pp. 1 - 34). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Enfield, N.J. & Sidnell, J. (2021). Intersubjectivity is activity plus accountability. In N. Gontier, A. Lock and C. Sinha (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/
9780198813781.013.25

Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press.

Stokoe, E. (2018). Talk: The science of conversation. Robinson.