The perspective from which I want to reflect on the promise and challenge of analyzing gestures as metaphors is that of the microanalysis of interaction, instantiated, for example, by conversation analysis. The first question that conversation analysts ask about an object - a bit of talk, a gesture - is why that now?: what is accomplished by it in a sequence of turns and actions? The focus, thus, is on the doings of conversational objects, including gestures. Among the many things that people do through gesture are the mapping out of aspects of the structure of their utterance, the display of its illocutionary role or the preferred uptake it is to receive, and the managing of the interactional process of taking and allocating turns. I call these practices pragmatic gesture. The idea of metaphoricity is particularly applicable to pragmatic gesture. For example, pragmatic gesture abounds with instantiations of the conduit metaphor (McNeill, 1992), that is, gestures that articulate aspects of the process of speaking in interaction (and interacting through speaking) as if it were a process of transaction of physical objects. (Jürgen Streeck)