gestures

gestures According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘gesture’ refers to ‘a significant movement of limb or body’ or the ‘use of such movements as expression of feeling or rhetorical device’. This is a broad definition, encompassing essentially the whole carriage and deportment of the body. Though this was the original meaning of the term, today it is generally limited to indicating a movement of the head (including facial expression) or of the arms and hands. A gesture may be inadvertent (blushing, fumbling with one's clothes, etc.) or deliberate (nodding, making the V-sign, etc.). Most scholars agree that a degree of volition should be implied. They also acknowledge that there are no watertight divisions between posture and gesture, or between voluntary (or ‘conventional’) and involuntary (or ‘natural’) gestures; indeed, these divisions have a history of their own.

Many gestures function independently of the spoken word. A lucid survey of such ‘autonomous’ gestures may be found in Gestures: Their Origin and Distributions (1979; revised as Bodytalk: A World Guide to Gesture in 1994) by the ethologist Desmond Morris. Particular types of autonomous gesture are the sign languages of the deaf and dumb and of various tribal and monastic communities.

Since the 1970s most studies undertaken by anthropologists, sociolinguists, and social psychologists have focused on gestures that accompany speech (‘gesticulation’). Using video and other audio-visual techniques it was shown that speech and gesticulation are produced together, as though they are two aspects of a single underlying process. Many studies have been devoted to the nature of this matching, to the question of how phrases of speech production are related to phrases of gesticulation. In addition, older classifications of speech-related gesture were qualified and new ones introduced. A well-known classification is that of ‘beats’, ‘pointers’, ‘ideographs’, and ‘pictorial gestures’. Beats (or ‘batons’) beat time to the rhythm of the words. Pointers (or ‘indexical gestures’) point to the object of the words (either a concrete referent in the immediate environment or an abstract referent, such as a point of view brought forward by the speaker). Ideographs only refer to abstract referents; they diagram the logical structure of what is said. In contrast, pictorial gestures, essentially the gestures of the mime artist, refer to concrete objects and activities.

Gesture has been studied (and practised) from many perspectives. Since antiquity, speech-related gesture has been part of rhetoric. For example, both Cicero (106–43 bc) and Quintilian (c. ad 35–100) wrote extensively on delivery (Greek hupokrisis; Latin actio or pronuntiatio), deeming it no less important than the other four departments of oratory: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and memoria. Quintilian was the first to explicitly distinguish delivery into vox (voice) and gestus (i.e. the general carriage of the body). Interestingly, Cicero was already using notions such as ‘body language’ (sermo corporis) or the ‘eloquence of the body’ (eloquentia corporis).

Both Cicero's and Quintilian's writings were crucial to the flowering of rhetoric in the Renaissance. Delivery, however, had a modest impact. It is true that classical ‘contrapposto’ was more or less ‘reconquered’ by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) (and by later authors such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Georgio Vasari, and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo) on the basis of a passage from Quintilian. However, it is significant that the text in question was not on delivery. It merely referred to the Discobolos of Myron (c.450 bc), one of the finest examples of classical contrapposto, as an illustration to elocutio. Just as this statue in abandoning the straight line suggests movement and grace, the speaker too should favour an ornate style and introduce grace and variety. Even when, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the complete text of Quintilian's Institution oratoria and Cicero's rhetorical works became available, scholars kept complaining about the impracticability of classical delivery. They found it hardly conducive to contemporary oratory and some, including the German rhetorician Philippus Melanchton (1497–1560), disposed of classical pronuntiatio altogether.

The tradition of the ‘civilization of manners’ is another perspective in which the study and practice of gesture has been prominent (and still is!). The sixteenth century experienced an explosion of such texts, though many of these display a disinterest in classical actio or pronuntiatio similar to that in the contemporary texts on rhetoric. One can hardly say, as did Jacob Burckhardt and so many later historians, including Norbert Elias, that the rules propounded in these manuals originated in the classical or courtly tradition. As was shown by the English historian Dilwyn Knox, many of these texts derive from the disciplina corporis, from the monastic and clerical precepts of comportment which from the thirteenth century on had been communicated to the laity. For example, it was this tradition — reaching back to the De institutione novitiorum, possibly composed by the canon regular Hugh of St Victor (d. 1142) — that provided the framework for Erasmus' idea of civilitas, set forth in his De civilitate morum puerilium (1530), and for all the texts based on it, including other manuals on proper comportment, the numerous Latin school curricula, and the regulations of the new Catholic orders, including the Jesuits.

The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a new interest in gesture. At this time notions of civility were adopted in most European countries, both by the court and by the urban elite. Generally, this development followed a course of restraint, compared with the excess of gesture attributed to the peasant population, the inhabitants of southern Europe (in particular, from the seventeenth century onwards, the Italians), and many of the newly-discovered peoples in the East and West. At the same time, the concept was set off against the mere appearance of manners and all exaggerated civility. The background to all of this was the late medieval aesthetic-cum-moral conviction already implied in the monastic and clerical codes of comportment of a close correspondence between physical expression and inner disposition.

It was also in this emphasis on the moral, or universal, rather than the conventional nature of gesture, that civility and the study of physiognomy came together. An informative example is De humana physiognomonia, published in 1586 by the Neapolitan dramatist Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615). Later studies related physiognomy to the passions, as in the Conférence sur l'expression (1698) by the French court painter Charles Lebrun (1619–90), or to the so-called ‘moral sentiments’, as in the Ideen zu einer Mimik by the German scholar Johann Jakob Engel (1742–1802). As these studies reveal, gesture was now also studied and practised from the perspective of contemporary painting and stagecraft.

The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also witnessed a philosophical interest in gesture. In 1572, for example, the Spanish scholar Arias Montanus published his Liber Ieremiae, sive de actione (also dealing with dress!), in which he argued for the universality of gesture. Similarly, Giovanni Bonifacio's L'arte de' cenni (1616) and John Bulwer's Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644) were conceived as manuals of rhetorical delivery. However, both authors professed their belief in a natural, universal language of gesture, opining that its often noted diversity could be reduced to a few general principles, thus facilitating the conduct of trade, not only in Europe, but also in the recently discovered New World and Far East. In the process, classical delivery was revalued, as ‘natural’ gesture — in contrast to merely ‘conventional’ gesture — became increasingly identified with the Graeco– Roman tradition. Eventually this philosophical interest inspired the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions on universal language schemes.

A quite different, strongly antiquarian, approach to classical gesture was offered by the Neapolitan scholar Andrea de Jorio in his La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire Napoletano (1832). Based on the idea that the lively gestures of his poorer fellow townsmen, the volgo, were a direct legacy of the Romans, he interpreted them as a key for understanding the mimic codes on antique vases, murals, and reliefs. Offering an extensive survey of all the gestures he witnessed in the streets of Naples, de Jorio's study is still highly original. At the same time, he was very much a nineteenth-century scholar in his selection of a contemporary phenomenon among the lower classes, not for its concrete significance to these individuals, but as a ‘relic’ or ‘survival’ of the past. In the same decades the romantic folklorists, in particular Jacob Grimm, professed a similar approach aimed at the Germanic past, just as later in the century well-known evolutionists, including E. B. Tylor or Wilhelm Wundt, took an interest in gesture, not for its role within their own contemporary culture, but for the entry it was supposed to afford to the origins of language. Remarkably, both evolutionists were careful not to associate the more lively gesticulation of Italians (and southern Frenchmen) with a ‘lack of civilization’ or with any ‘primitivism’.

In a famous essay, called Les techniques du corps (1935), the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss discussed gesture independently of any evolutionary schemes. Defined as ‘the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies’, his ‘techniques’ included a wide range of phenomena: from sitting, standing, walking, dancing, swimming, and sleeping to table manners and matters of hygiene. At the same time his comparative approach ranged from the gait of American nurses (Mauss spent some time in a New York hospital), to the delicate balancing of the hips displayed by Maori women in New Zealand. Anticipating the writings of American anthropologists, in particular those of Ruth Benedict and Mary Douglas, Mauss was greatly interested in the ways physiology, psychology, and sociology converged in his techniques, and he emphasized the role of education, adopting (well before Pierre Bourdieu) the notion of habitus in its Aristotelian and Thomist sense of hexis or ‘acquired ability’.

Mauss' essay is one source of inspiration for current research, another is David Efron's Gesture, Race and Culture (1972; first published in 1941, under the title Gesture and Environment), actually the first systematic study of cultural difference in gesture. Encouraged by the anthropologist Franz Boas, for two years Efron studied the use of gesture of two ethnic groups in New York City: Jewish Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and immigrants from southern Italy. Using drawings, photography, and film, Efron and his colleagues found some significant differences. The Italians, for example, used both arms, generally needed more space for their gesticulation, and stood mostly apart from one another. In contrast, the Jewish immigrants gestured mostly in front of their faces or chests, stood together in small groups, and touched one another frequently. Similarly, the Italian immigrants displayed a range of ‘symbolic’ gestures (many corresponding to de Jorio's inventory), while the Jews displayed a preference for ‘beats’ and ‘ideographs’. Arguing against theories that regarded gesture as racially determined, Efron could also show that the various differences were already less conspicuous in the second generation of the two groups, as they absorbed much of the American mimic code they saw around them. Efron's study was also one of the first to focus on speech-related gesture.

In the 1950s, a group of anthropologists, sociolinguists, and social psychologists turned to the study of non-verbal communication. The anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell coined the notion of ‘kinesics’ (the study of communicative body movements), just as his colleague, Edward T. Hall, and others introduced such terms as ‘proxemics’ (the study of the distance people keep from each other when talking), ‘haptics’ (the study of the way they touch each other during the conversation), and ‘social space’. In the following decades many of these insights were included in the fast-growing fields of studies on face-to-face interaction and semiotics. In the 1970s, art historians, such as Michael Baxandall and Moshe Barasch, turned to the study of gesture in Italian painting of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, followed in the 1980s by a much broader interest in gesture (and also in posture and comportment) on the part of intellectual historians — literary historians; historians of rhetoric, the stage, and dance; and a wide range of historians of everyday life, including Jean–Claude Schmitt and Peter Burke. Only recently, however, have attempts been made to develop an interdisciplinary approach: to integrate more fully the insights of anthropologists and sociolinguists with a historical approach, and also to follow the history of gestures as encoded in everyday life and in their ‘recoded’ quality in painting, sculpture, stagecraft, literature, and so on.

Herman Roodenburg

See also body language.