Introduction

Gesture, ritual and memory

Paul Bouissac

The articles brought together in this special issue of Gesture are selected from the proceedings of a symposium that took place at the University of Toronto (Victoria College) in May 2004, and on a series of research seminars on the same topic organized during the following academic year. The symposium, titled Gesture, Ritual and Memory, and the subsequent meetings which were designed to further explore some of the problems raised during the symposium discussions, involved representatives of several disciplines: developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, history of religions, communication and literary studies. It is indeed obvious that the notion of gesture, which historically emerged as a technical concept in rhetoric, then acquired a scientic status in the context of modern psychology and linguistics, is relevant to a broader array of disciplines, albeit in a variety of capacities. The theme of the symposium had been chosen in view of the fact that gesture research has focused so far almost exclusively on the synchronic perspective by developing methods of observation and recording, and elaborating classications and systematizations of the data in a conceptual framework within which the temporal dimension merely provides more or less signicant variables. Of course, gesture, as language, ows in time as does the observer. However, the inuence of structural and functional linguistics that prevailed when the possibility of a science of gesture was conceived imposed some epistemological constraints which have been rarely questioned. This is why it was thought appropriate rst to heuristically consider gesture from the point of view of evolution, development, interaction, transmission and transformation. Gesture must indeed be conceived as originating in deep biological and cultural time, carried forward by genes as much as cultural memory, and leaving decipherable tracks in language, artifacts and ritual.
Gesture 6:2 (2006), 776. issn 15681475 / e-issn 15699773 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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One of the rst conclusions of the participants in the May symposium was to note that gesture had been used during the proceedings with a challenging range of meanings, from the restricted sense of intentional communicative movements of the hands to the more general reference to ritualistic or technical skills, whether or not in relation to some material objects. It also often spread beyond the sphere of upper limbs motions to include various dynamic congurations of the face and the whole body. This, of course, is a long-standing issue in the eld of gesture studies and the position taken here is that gesture cannot be restrictively dened at the outset but will eventually emerge in the future, possibly under any other name, once all the theoretical avenues have been more fully investigated. For the time being, it seems that the traditional use of the term gesture at times overlaps, and at other times collides with denitions that derived from inquiries into domains lying beyond the technical realm of rhetoric where it originated. Given the state of the art in gesture studies, it is indeed dicult to come to a clearly demarcated denition of gesture, mainly if the etymology and the metaphorical uses of this term are also taken into consideration. It has always been uneasy to decide where exactly a gesture starts and ends, both in time and in space, both in the emitter and in the receiver; what is and what is not a gesture, particularly in cases when hardwired behavior appears to be entangled with learned patterns of action, or when technical and communicative strands of movements are simultaneously produced; how a gesture relates to the dynamic of the whole body; how it is generated and perceived in the brain; how it is represented in memory; how it is acquired through evolution, development or imitation; how it relates to the natural and articial environment; how its practical and symbolic functions can be disentangled; and how it depends on others behavior within dyadic, triadic or multi-polar social structures in ux. All these problems are compounded by the issue of scale: should the units of observation be determined according to the distinctions provided by natural phenomenology ltered by language categories, or should the analysis of gesture be conducted on micro-levels, accessible only through scientic devices, in terms of millisecond measurements, patterns of neuron rings, and pixels? Or should gestures be approached from more comprehensive theoretical perspectives such as evolutionary biology, sociology, or psychology? In all these domains and on all these levels, the theorization of gestures and their contexts is still lacking. In view of this situation, it seems preferable to leave open the question of denition and to accept various historical and heuristic determinations of the object and scope of gesture research. This is not an endorsement of absolute

Introduction 73

epistemological relativism but simply the acknowledgement that the science of gesture is a work in progress that straddles several paradigms. The only thing about which there can be any certainty is that progress in this domain of inquiry cannot be achieved by any single discipline. This is why this special issue calls upon a great variety of disciplinary resources, as did the symposium that initiated this multifaceted reection. The rst two papers (Marion Blute and Paul Bouissac) attempt to cast gesture in the wide, speculative framework of evolutionary ecology. Rather than taking gesture for granted, they ask: why is there gesture? In what respects is gesture adaptive? Their tentative answers might clarify the biological status and the particular morphology of these complex context-sensitive body movements. Such an approach is mostly based on arguments elaborated in view of the knowledge provided by paleontology, archaeology and comparative ethology. These speculations could lead in the future to formulating falsiable hypotheses such as, for instance, correlating gesture and social integration or dominance, or measuring the contribution of gesture to physiological as well as psychological functions. Marcel Kinsbournes paper moves the discussion to the empirical realm of developmental neuro-psychology. He asks what kind of hard-wired nonverbal communicative behavior is observed in neonates and infants, and how more elaborate movements appear during the early years of human socialization. He addresses the crucial issues of the relationship between basic forms of gestures such as approach (exion at many joints) and withdrawal (extension), or upward and downward movements, which are pre-wired, and the diversity of culturally patterned gestures. It shows that many gestures, including ones that are ostensibly socially constructed, reect in their form the organization of the nervous system. Although they are intentional, they simulate postural shifts and movements that constitute automatic motor overow from brain activity during thinking and feeling. This article builds upon the authors recent works on imitation (Kinsbourne, 2002, 2005). The temporal depth of gesture observations has been considerably extended by the availability of video recording, and the possibility of varying the speed at which movements are recorded or visualized has immensely improved the quality of the data to be analyzed. But the great problem of gesture studies is how to capture and preserve the ow of ever changing morphologies in a manner which escapes the predicaments of a single vantage point. This remains perhaps the most challenging methodological problem of gesture studies in natural context, that is, outside the laboratory.

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Another, related challenge concerns the historical depth of gesture. How can cultures preserve through accurate transmission the exact gesture patterns that are the basis of productive skills and supposedly ecient rituals. These gesture resources are sustainable only with the support of a reliable memory. But given the relative fragility of human memory, articial memory systems have been created quite early in cultural evolution both in the form of artifacts and in the form of mnemonic devices. For most of human history and prehistory, gesture must be inferred from static representations, artifacts and language. Some institutions may also have preserved some kinds of gesture in skills and rituals through uninterrupted chains of imitation or systematic memory training reserved to initiates. Although traditions have often been reinvented, some particular gesture may still be a faithful echo of immemorial techniques of the body as Marcel Mauss contended long time ago (1936). Texts and iconographic documents can also provide interesting glimpses of the gestures of our historical past (e.g., Schmitt, 1990).These considerations greatly expand the scope of gesture research. But gesture cannot only be inferred from the remnants of material culture, art and descriptive or prescriptive narratives. Gestures leave also traces in literal and metaphorical languages. Comparative philology may provide access, albeit faintly, to the early inscriptions of particularly signicant gesture into the lexicon, perhaps even the syntax, of archaic texts selectively set in collective memory and orally transmitted over very long periods of time before literacy provided means to record them symbolically. Peter Jackson tests this hypothesis by examining Vedic, Greek and Latin examples. Robert Yelle scrutinizes the interface between rituals and rhetoric in a cross-cultural perspective with reference to South Asian and western traditional discourse on gesture, thus expanding on his earlier work on the pragmatics of mantras (2003). He construes the quest for a natural language of gesture as an ideology of origins that is destined to remain conditioned by conventional systems of purely cultural signicance. Finally the reexive presence of a metalanguage of gesture can be mined not only from works of rhetoric and poetics but also from theater itself. John Astington explores this resource in Shakespeares plays, showing how the playwright is a subtle gesture writer sensitive to body language both on stage and beyond. It is hoped that the multidisciplinary scope of this eclectic set of approaches to gesture study will be found useful by researchers, both in the humanities and the sciences, whose interests bear upon the ways in which humans engage their physical and social environment through the mediation of their

Introduction 75

hands and arms. At the very least, this volume will illustrate the fact that the epistemological construction of an object of research always implies the selection of particular spatial and temporal dimensions to serve as the basis of phenomenological observation. The explicitly selected, or merely implied time frame and scale of the object also determines the range and nature of the inferences that can be made in the process of theory construction. Whether gesture is conceived in evolutionary or developmental time, in prehistoric or historic time, or within the temporal frame of face-to-face interactions, has an impact on the very denition of the object of inquiry. But even if gesture appears to be nothing more than a heuristic notion, a kind of virtual unit or class of phenomena, it proves to be a fertile one in the context of each one of the articles that form this special issue. If it is true that, as it has often been pointed out, gesture research suers from a theoretical decit, this volume may contribute, through the mere juxtaposition of dierent approaches, to a much needed epistemological reection.

References
Kinsbourne, Marcel (2002). The role of imitation in body ownership and mental growth. In Andrew N. Meltzo & Wolfgang Prinz (Eds.), The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution, and Brain Bases, (pp. 311330). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kinsbourne, Marcel (2005). Imitation as entrainment: Brain mechanisms and social consequences. In Susan Hurley & Nick Chater (Eds.), Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science. Vol 2. Imitation, Human Development and Culture, (pp. 163172). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Mauss, Marcel (1936). Les techniques du corps. Journal de Psychologie, 32, 34. Schmitt, Jean-Claude (1990). La raison des gestes dans lOccident mdival. Paris: Gallimard. Yelle, Robert (2003). Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Dream of a Natural Language in Hindu Tantra. London: Routledge.

Note on the spelling of Greek and Sanskrit words:

Two of the contributions to this volume (papers 4 and 5) contain numerous Greek and Sanskrit words, which have not been presented according to the existing transliteration standards. While the average reader of this journal is not expected to possess particular interest in philological minutiae, a simplied system of transliteration has been used. Long accentuated or unaccentuated vowels (otherwise written with accentuated or unaccentuated macron []) are

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marked with a circumex (). A Sanskrit sh represents either a palatal sibilant (otherwise written with acute accent) or a cerebral sibilant (otherwise written with a dot). All dots under or above other consonants have been omitted. In the standard South Indian transliteration system, dots are used to dierentiate a guttural n, cerebral t, th, d, dh, l, lh, n, a sibilant, a pure nasal, and a voiceless spirant from the ve dentals t, th, d, dh, n, the semivowel l and aspiration. Palatal n (otherwise written with tilde []) has not been distinguished from dental n. Most of these phonemes are represented as distinct letters in the classical Indic writing systems.