Gesture

The interpretation of gestures, their origin, and the long history of gesticulation, has attracted the attention of students whose discussions, even if intermittent, have shed interesting Sculpture relief depicting the goddess Tyche of Palmyra. Throughout history, from ancient civilization to contemporary times, works of art have frequently incorporated gestures to convey mood and concept. Christ before Caiaphas (1304–1306) by Giotto di Bondone. Fresco. Gestures have long been a part of religious ritual and imagery. Many gestures of this genre, though they may differ from faith to faith, are universally recognizable. THE ART ARCHIVE /SCROVEGNI CHAPEL PADUA/DAGLI ORTI (A) light on the problems that emerge in the study of gestures. In recent decades, concern with the human body and its manifold manifestations has attracted increasing attention to gestures, both conventional and spontaneous.

Reflections on gestures, however fragmentary, are found in the literature of early history. In the Bible, prayer gestures are described as self-evident: "And when ye spread forth your hands, … when ye make many prayers" (Isaiah 1:15). Reflections on specific gestures are scattered throughout the literature of classical antiquity, especially in texts on physiognomics and rhetorics, but references to gesticulation are also found in other writings. Homer abounds in allusions to gestures and expressive movements, as may be seen for instance in his reference to mourning (The Iliad, 18:23–27).

In Roman civilization the "eloquence of the body" (eloquentia corporis) commanded a great deal of attention. Two categories of professionals in particular, orators and actors, studied gesture intensively. Bodily gestures follow movements of the Coin depicting Roman Emperor Domitian at surrender of Germany. Distinctive gestures have been a component of military organization since ancient times. Ritualized gestures are frequently seen as a method of fostering unity among soldiers. soul. Cicero compared man's body, face, and voice to the strings of a harp: "They sound just as the soul's motion strikes them" (De oratore 3.216). And Quintilian says simply: "Gesticulation obeys our mind" (Institutio oratoria XI, chap. 3, 65). The most detailed and careful description of gestures that survives from ancient literature is found in Quintilian (XI, chap. 3). Since he saw gesticulation as part of the delivery of a speech, he included a discussion of gestures in his teaching of oratory. The Roman stage was another place for the formalization of gestures. As stock types were preferred on the stage, gestures were basic and strictly codified. Broad gestures, such as shaking the head or slapping the thigh in anger, were typical of slaves.

In antiquity, another field of knowledge pertaining to our subject was defined and flourished: physiognomics, the reading of character from the structure and movement of body and face. The literary legacy of ancient physiognomics influenced thought in modern times. The works of the Renaissance scholar Giambattista della Porta, the great French artist Charles Le Brun (around 1700), and the Swiss scholar Johann Lavater in the eighteenth century are ample testimony to this influence in the culture of Europe.

In the Middle Ages, especially in the earlier part of the period, codified gestures seem to have played a particularly important part in legal transactions. Since most people could not read or write, documents were frequented validated through the use of prescribed gestures. A richly illuminated late medieval manuscript, the Sachsenspiegel, gives us some inkling of the variety and role of conventional gestures in the legal and political life of the time.

Supplicating barbarian. Bronze figurine. Gesture and physicality commanded a great deal of attention in ancient Roman culture. Gestures in stage productions of the period were often broad and eloquent.

In Renaissance culture, which gave so much thought and attention to the comportment of people (especially the nobility) and to their education, the problem of gesture was approached from a new point of view. The concern was with how the educated should behave in their bodily presentation, and how the child and young person should be taught so that, as an adult, he or she would behave in a proper manner. Some of the central figures in Renaissance culture, such as Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Courtier, and Desiderius Erasmus, devoted much attention to proper gesticulation. Erasmus wrote a little book on the education of children (Institutio principis Christiani [1516; Education of a Christian Prince ]) which in the sixteenth century alone went through eighty editions in Latin, and was certainly a factor in forming habits of movement and views of gesture.

In spite of this long history, however, it is safe to say that the critical, scientific study of gestures is a product of the nineteenth century. It was also then that the major approaches to the interpretation of gesture crystallized. Reduced to basic distinctions, two lines of thought emerge. One of them may be called universal language (or universalizing), the other particularistic (or particularizing).

The notion of gesture as a universal language is based upon the assumption that all people and societies in all ages make Illustration of hand and facial gestures. Comprehensive study and classification of gestures did not properly begin until the nineteenth century. Early pioneers in the field were Charles Darwin and Wilhelm Wundt. essentially the same gestures under similar conditions and as a response to similar situations. This interpretation was put forward in explicit and systematic form for the first time by Charles Darwin in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In this work Darwin devoted a great deal of attention, both in particular observations and in comprehensive classification, to gestures of the body and the face. Summing up his ideas, he says that he has "endeavored to show in considerable detail that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world."

When we consider Darwin's work within the earlier prevailing tradition of interpreting human gestures, two features stand out. First, Darwin's observations are exclusively observations of Crucifixion of Christ (1515) by Matthias Grunewald. From the Isenheim Altarpiece, oil on wood. During the Renaissance, much emphasis was placed on bodily comportment and gesticulation, a trend readily apparent in creations by artists of the period. PHOTO CREDIT: ERICH LESSING /ART RESOURCE, NY Melencolia I (1514) by Albrecht Dürer. Line engraving. A gesture does not always require movement to be understood. Often, the positioning of the body is enough to indicate mood or meaning. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK Quarrel in Naples, by Andrea de Jorio. In 1832 de Jorio published a study of the gestures of his fellow Neapolitans. He sought to understand how ancient gestures were manifested in contemporary society as a means to interpret the body movements in classical plays. nature, that is, observations of the behavior of living creatures; he excludes literary texts or pictorial representations. The cultural artifact is beyond the scope of his study. In the introduction he even explicitly states that the artistic representation of figures dominated by an emotion (suffering) follows principles differing from those of nature, and are therefore misleading as materials for the student of natural reality. Second, an idea permeating Darwin's study is that there is a continuity from the bodily behavior and gesticulation of some kinds of beasts to the gestures commonly performed by human beings. While there are some gestures that are characteristic only of man, most of the expressive movements are found, to some degree, in certain classes of animals.

One of the many examples that Darwin adduces is the facial expression of rage. The physiognomic changes undergone by a human in the grip of rage, and the typical gestures he or she performs in this condition, have occupied the human mind in all ages; already in antiquity books were being written on the subject—for example, Seneca's De ira. In art the features of an angry man's face have been firmly established. Darwin finds the physiognomic contortions of the angry human face also in beasts, in such expressions as snarling and prominently exhibiting the teeth. "Considering how seldom the teeth are used by men in fighting," he says, the "retraction of the lips and the uncovering of the teeth during paroxysms of rage, as if to bite" are remarkable. In this facial gesture the memory survives of our ancestors, the higher primates, that still really fight with their teeth. This theory further supports the doctrine of the universality of gesture language.

The influential German scholar Wilhelm Wundt, who in 1900 published the first volume of his Völkerpsychologie, which contains an extensive discussion of gesture, claimed that primordial speech was a kind of gesticulation that "mirrored the soul."

In modern kinesics, the systematic study of the relationship between nonlinguistic body motions and communication, and related fields of study (especially some branches of linguistics), communicating gestures are regarded as a kind of language, possibly even the predecessor of spoken language in general. Students have compiled dictionaries of expressive body movements. Of particular interest are collections of such movements performed by aboriginals. In the background of these scientific studies one finds the idea of gesture as a universal language.

The other, altogether different interpretation of the origin of gestures sees individual modes of behavior, as they developed in small groups living under specific conditions, as the true origin of, and the force shaping, our expressive movements. The first text of modern gesture study presented this view. La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, written by Andrea de Jorio, a cleric from Naples with wide intellectual interests, was published in 1832. In this work, which may be considered the birth certificate of the modern discussion of gestures, the author devotes his main efforts to the observation and description of the actual gestural behavior of Neapolitans of his day. The northern nations, de Jorio believes, are restrained in gesture; southerners, especially people living in and around Naples, have rich gesticulation. His motive, however (as he explicitly states it), was not to study the habits of contemporary Neapolitans. He wanted to contribute to a better understanding of the plays of antiquity. De Jorio believed that there was a long and continuous tradition leading directly from some of the ancient communities to people in the Naples area in the early nineteenth century. In this tradition gestures were transmitted through the ages, and if we look at people in Naples we can, therefore, grasp what ancient poets meant when in their plays they alluded to body movements. Gestures, then, do not have a universal origin, but emerge from specific conditions prevailing in individual societies. Gestures are inherited from such particular traditions and remain in use for ages.

In the middle of the twentieth century this trend of thought received a classic formulation from the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss. His most influential study of the subject, "Les techniques du corps," reverberates in the study of gesture to this day. Mauss describes his approach as "descriptive ethnology" and focuses on the specific forms of gesticulation in specific societies. Based on heritage and tradition, we continue to perform gestures in the form we inherited from former generations and as they were shaped by education and experience. He focuses on social and cultural differences rather than a supposed common origin and universal validity. Mauss believed that he could identify a girl educated in a convent by her comportment and way of walking: she will walk with her hands closed into fists.

Another view of the particular interpretation of gestures is the influential concept of the body and its manifestations as formulated by the anthropologist Mary Douglas in which she perceives the body as a symbol of social relations. As social relations change, the body and its movements—the gestures we make—manifest these changes.