Gesture - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2006

This paper begins with a brief introduction to gestures in the context of communication, multi-process selection theory, and evolutionary socio-ecology. Evolutionary ecology asks, and seeks to answer the question of under what ecological conditions selection favors what kinds of characteristics including the behavioral characteristics oriented towards the physical environment and other species. While communication is sometimes involved in interactions among species, it is most prevalent among members of the same population or species. Evolutionary socio-ecology then asks and seeks to answer the same question about ecologically versus socially oriented characteristics as well as about the purely social. In discussing some general principles of the evolutionary socio-ecology of communication including gestures, this paper pays particular attention to the sometimes cooperative, sometimes antagonistic, and often mixed nature of social communication. It concludes with a discussion of what determines the ‘loudness’ of signals such as the vigor of gestures and what ‘rituals’ are communicating.

Gesture is mostly a function of the upper limbs of Homo sapiens and is constrained by the skeleton and neuromuscular apparatus which have evolved under the selection pressures of arboreal environments. This article raises the issue of the early adaptations which determined the range of movements which made possible the emergence of gesture both technical and cultural. It addresses the problem of explaining in evolutionary terms the multi-functionality of the human hand and arm. It suggests that once early humans became bipedal further pressures combined to conserve and expand the range of adaptations afforded by the upper limbs through selection processes such as exaptation, niche construction and the Baldwin effect. It concludes that a theory of gesture must integrate evolutionary and developmental considerations.

Fundamental dimensions of behavior include approach, withdrawal, domination, submission, indicating and dearousing maneuvers. Generically, approach involves flexion at many joints, withdrawal involves extension. Dominating involves moving upwards, submitting involves moving downwards. Indicating involves pointing. Repetitive meaningless motions control anxiety. These movement patterns are found in behaviorally simple animals, and in young infants, except for pointing, which emerges in babies at about 11 months of age. When human adults express thoughts that have directional attributes in fact or in metaphor, co-occurring gestures are likely to have corresponding characteristics that are observed early in neuromotor development.

This paper explores the ways in which gestures, understood in their widest sense as “technical gestures,” are used in metaphorical language to highlight aspects of cultural transmissions and religious actions. By selecting a few examples from different textual traditions, an attempt is made to show that the metaphorical inscription of gesture in religious discourse reflects the very notion of religion. Contrary to what may be expected, however, this notion is less concerned with aspects of belief than with recollection and scrupulosity. The metaphors at stake also seem to thematize some of the problems and paradoxes associated with a tradition that has to keep something intact by giving it away.

It has often been claimed that there is a natural or universal language of gesture, one that communicates directly without words. The present essay critically scrutinizes some older efforts to recover such a natural language of gesture, including John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century Chirologia and Chironomia, and the classical South Asian systems of Natyashastra and Tantra. Although these older systems lay claim to communicate and even to represent nature directly, often by virtue of a posited iconic or mimetic relationship to nature, closer examination reveals that they signify only in terms of a conventional code. Moreover, the very effort to replace gesture with a verbal gloss held to constitute its “meaning” reveals a gap between signifier and signified that is analogous to the gap between culture and nature, as well as present and past, that these systems of gesture attempt to bridge rhetorically. These systems demonstrate, not the existence of a natural language of gesture, but rather the function of the idea of such a language in an ideology in which gesture is to nature as speech is to culture. Although the failure of such earlier systems does not vitiate modern, scientific studies of gesture, it does suggest greater circumspection regarding what may be hoped to be achieved by such studies.

The ways in which the performing of gesture is inscribed into the very texts of Shakespeare’s plays constitutes a “meta-theatrical” and “meta-gestural” discourse which this article analyses with reference to Hamlet, Othello, The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is shown to be a “gestural writer”, well versed in the rhetorical tradition and sensitive to the subtleties of body language within and without the world of stage.