The social accountability of burn displays

This study examines the social accountability of displaying to burn oneself during naturally occurring joint cooking activities. The sequential, multimodal analysis of responding actions to burn displays allows to discuss publicly available displays of perceptual experiences as related to social action. The study specifies three sequential trajectories following displays of heat-occasioned experiences, including (i) orienting to the unfortunate character of the event, (ii) orienting to issues of responsibility and (iii) questioning the validity of burn displays. The study shows that the question of what observable conduct is physiological and what is social is a members' problem, including whether, how and to what extent the burn display is proportional to the object's thermic features, and the sequential and moral implications that the burn display makes relevant. The study contributes to our understanding of retrosequences as a sequence organization that incorporates the relevance of sensorial practices in and for social interaction and of how an EMCA approach to the study of sociality can be particularly productive for further investigating the intricate relation between physiological experiences and the social accountability of action. The participants speak French, Swiss-German and German as first and second language.