In rock climbing, interactions, gestures, bodies, objects and space all synchronize together. Kuniyoshi Kataoka has developed a richly textured analysis of Japanese rock climbers' practices in naturalistic settings. This innovative book will inspire future research on how humans move through space and guide each other as they do so.

Niko Besnier, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Kataoka has provided amazingly rich ethnographic descriptions of the practices, narratives and poetry associated with mountain climbing. This is a great book for anyone interested in Linguistic Anthropology, Japanese Pragmatics, and Interaction Studies and will be a vital resource for years to come.

Akira Takada, Kyoto University, Japan

Through discourse analysis of a gesture-intensive environment, Kataoka makes significant contributions to linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics by demonstrating how the close examination of the interplay between speech and gesture in situated interaction can enrich our understanding of embodiment, sociality, and cognition. The book will serve as a key reference for the integration of approaches that intertwine spoken and embodied aspects of language into discourse analysis.

Language in Society