Touch and Social Interaction

Our understanding of touch as a basic and complex sense is informed by phenomenological perspectives on our corporeal "being-in-the-world" and the notion of intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty 1964) as well as by sociological perspectives on social life as organized and accomplished through corporeal participation and the interaction order (Goffman 1983). Intercorporeality involves sense-making of oneself and copresent others as body subjects, active in (re)producing a corporeal interaction order that is understood as tactile as well as visual and sonorous. In our review of contemporary ethnographic work, we direct our attention to touch and social interaction and discuss (a) ritualized supportive interchanges; (b) moves of compassion that calm a distressed child; (c) forms of control that socialize the body and gain attention, in particular to create multisensorial, instructional environments; and (d) forms of touch during care and bodywork in medical and therapeutic contexts.