Greetings are a good way of getting into the analysis of human encounters.
Greetings are ubiquitous, repetitive, and apparently easy to recognize. At the same time, like all social phenomena, the more we study greetings the more we learn about their complexities. To experience such complexities, you will be taken in the midst of real interactions, recorded on video camera by different video-ethnographers. As you will have a chance to listen to the participants' words and look at their actions, you will start to experience some of the thought processes expert analysts go through when they analyze the culture of human encounters.