Tightening the gap between actions & recollections: A methodological toolkit for analytical descriptions of bodily know-how

Abstract

The article offers a hands-on methodological toolkit for researchers who are not able to embody the bodily dimension of the cultural practice they are researching. This is not about extracting one kind of knowledge from another one, but about coming to (partial) representations of embodied knowledge. Knowing that bodily knowledge is hard to put into words, the article deals with how to trigger different modes of communication in informants in order to, as a researcher, come to more accurate analytical descriptions of bodily know-how. This article discusses a combination of techniques that trigger informants into these different modes of communication. Bundled together I call these elicitation techniques trigger techniques to emphasize the importance of combining different types of techniques prompting different levels of sensory experiences. Taking de-escalation of Dutch night-life security as an exemplary case, this article illustrates the merits of a combination of the following trigger techniques: personal and repurposed YouTube video elicitation; situational drawings; joint interviewing; multivocal vignettes; on-the-spot triggering; and reenactments. The combination of trigger techniques tightens the ‘interpretation gap’ between pre-reflective bodily know-how and the accounts thereof for scientific purposes and in that sense provide a beneficial tool for researcher and participant. By narrowing down the range of interpretation between social reality and scientific reconstruction of the phenomenon researchers can do more justice to bodily practices.