Unpacking physiotherapy exercise instructions with Sacks’s sociological approach to indexical expressions

Abstract

This contribution addresses a topic of investigation that receives considerable attention in Sacks’s lectures but is otherwise underexamined in sociology: members’ methodical use of indexical expressions, for example “now” and “here”, to achieve the intelligibility of activities for what they are from within a given setting. Drawing on Sacks’s approach to indexicality, our contribution is based on synchronized video-recordings that feature therapeutic exercise instructions given during two physiotherapy consultations, one face-to-face and one remote. More specifically, it investigates uses of the Swiss German indexical expression “do; here” occurring within embodied instruction sequences in the two distinct settings. Our descriptions of the exercise instruction sequences reveal how members’ methodical use of “do; here” relies on and at the same time constitutes its embeddedness in physiotherapists’ and patients’ distinct instructional practices. In the face-to-face setting, the practices involve the precise articulation of “do; here” with touching-being touched to monitor, assess, correct, etc. the patient’s instructed actions. In the remote setting, the practices are accomplished through the skillful embedding of “do; here” in contrastive chains of embodied instructional demonstrations that the physiotherapist provides for the patient, who is sitting in front of the laptop watching her.