ABSTRACT
In Chapter 7, we investigate ethnographically relations of care entailing forms of touch, used in coordination with other semiotic resources, for building intimate human relationships in the family. We explore the simultaneous use of body and voice, important for emotion work and emotion management. Engagements of care include grooming, games of nose tapping, consoling a hurt, ill, or crying child through caresses and gentle touch, reconciling dispute through the hug as an apology, providing empathic understanding of an emotionally hurt parent through hugging. Bodies work with other bodies to produce emotional stance or alignment to the current activity in proposals about how to engage with the other and in responses to such proposals. Stances are intrinsically multiparty, metamodal intercorporeal displays, actions that entail multiple concurrent entanglements of bodies.
