Gesture - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2008

This paper deals with ways in which gestural “pictures” are made, i.e., manual depictions of phenomena in the world. The view that “iconic” gestures uniformly function by way of some resemblance between signifier and signified is rejected, giving way to an understanding of depiction by gesture as the achievement of a heterogeneous set of practices, some of which rely on relations of contiguity or indexicality to evoke commonly known objects or scenes. Others seem to be derivative of other representation methods (e.g., drawing on surfaces). The paper reviews some existing work on gestural depiction methods, offers a working heuristics, and illustrates some of its categories. It is suggested that some of the basic ways in which actions of the hands evoke the world in gesture correspond to fundamental modes of existence and activity of human hands in the world: hands depict by enacting their familiar, “real-world” capacities as users, transporters, experiencers, assemblers, molders, and shapers of things.

This study explored the relation between parents’ production of gestures and symbolic play during free play and children’s production and comprehension of symbolic gestures. Thirty-one 16- to 22-month-olds and their parents participated in a free play session. Children also participated in a forced-choice novel gesture-learning task. Parents’ pretend play with objects in hand was predictive of children’s gesture production during play and gesture vocabulary according to parental report. No relationship was found between parent gesture and child performance on the forced-choice gesture-learning task, although children’s performance was negatively correlated with their verbal vocabulary size. These data suggest a strong link between parental input and the children’s use of gestures as symbols, although not a direct link from parent gesture to child gesture. The data also suggest that children’s overall expectations that gestures can be symbols is unaffected by parental input, and highlight the possibility that children play a role in transforming the symbolic play behaviors that they observe into communicative signals.

The gestures that accompany improvisation in Indian vocal music, like the gestures that accompany speech, are closely co-ordinated with vocalization. Though linked to what is being sung, these movements are not determined by vocal action; nor are they taught explicitly, deliberately rehearsed, or tied to specific meanings. Students tend to gesture recognizably like their teachers, producing lineage-based gesture dialects, but the gestural repertoire of every vocalist is nonetheless idiosyncratic. This paper aims to trace a brief history of song gesture in India, and to show some of the links between gesture and vocalization. It also adapts Katharine Young’s theory of the “family body” to the transmission of gesture dialects through teaching lineages. Gesture and sound are taken to be parallel channels for the expression of melody.

In recent discussions there has been a tendency to refer to ‘gesture’ and ‘sign’ as if these are distinct categories, sometimes even as if they are in opposition to one another. Here I trace the historical origins of this distinction. I suggest that it is a product of the application to the analysis of sign languages of a formalist model of language derived from structural linguistics, on the one hand, and, on the other, of a cognitive-psychological view of ‘gesture’ that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. I suggest that this division between ‘gesture’ and ‘sign’ tends to exaggerate differences and obscure areas of overlap. It should be replaced by a comparative semiotics of the utterance uses of visible bodily action. This will be better able to articulate the similarities and differences between how kinesics is used, according to whether and how it is employed in relation to other communicative modalities such as speech.