{"title":"Recent and forthcoming events","authors":"","doi":"10.1075/gest.00049.rec","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.00049.rec","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59504579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nicholas Vest, Emily R. Fyfe, Mitchell J. Nathan, M. Alibali
Teachers often produce gestures, and, in some cases, students mimic their teachers’ gestures and adopt them into their own repertoires. However, little research has explored the role of gesture mimicry in technology-based learning contexts. In this research, we examined variations in the rate and form of students’ gestures when learning from a computer-animated pedagogical avatar. Twenty-four middle school students received a lesson on polynomial multiplication from a gesturing avatar video instructor. After the lesson, students were asked to provide an explanation of what they learned. Students varied in their gesture rates, and some students produced gestures that were similar in form to the avatar’s gestures. Students who produced gestures that aligned with the teacher’s gestures scored higher than those who did not produce such gestures. These results suggest that middle school students’ gestures play a key role when learning a mathematics lesson from an avatar instructor.
{"title":"Learning from an avatar video instructor","authors":"Nicholas Vest, Emily R. Fyfe, Mitchell J. Nathan, M. Alibali","doi":"10.1075/GEST.18019.VES","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/GEST.18019.VES","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Teachers often produce gestures, and, in some cases, students mimic their teachers’ gestures and adopt them into their own repertoires. However, little research has explored the role of gesture mimicry in technology-based learning contexts. In this research, we examined variations in the rate and form of students’ gestures when learning from a computer-animated pedagogical avatar. Twenty-four middle school students received a lesson on polynomial multiplication from a gesturing avatar video instructor. After the lesson, students were asked to provide an explanation of what they learned. Students varied in their gesture rates, and some students produced gestures that were similar in form to the avatar’s gestures. Students who produced gestures that aligned with the teacher’s gestures scored higher than those who did not produce such gestures. These results suggest that middle school students’ gestures play a key role when learning a mathematics lesson from an avatar instructor.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43094187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Further information and weblinks","authors":"","doi":"10.1075/gest.00047.fur","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.00047.fur","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46007869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At the dawn of anthropology, gesture was widely considered a “universal language”. In the 20th century, however, this framing fell out of favor as anthropologists rejected universalism in favor of relativism. These polemical positions were largely fueled by high-flying rhetoric and second-hand report; researchers had neither the data nor the conceptual frameworks to stake out substantive positions. Today we have much more data, but our frameworks remain underdeveloped and often implicit. Here, I outline several emerging conceptual tools that help us make sense of universals and diversity in gesture. I then sketch the state of our knowledge about a handful of gestural phenomena, further developing these conceptual tools on the way. This brief survey underscores a clear conclusion: gesture is unmistakably similar around the world while also being broadly diverse. Our task ahead is to put polemics aside and explore this duality systematically – and soon, before gestural diversity dwindles further.
{"title":"Universals and diversity in gesture","authors":"Kensy Cooperrider","doi":"10.1075/gest.19011.coo","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19011.coo","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 At the dawn of anthropology, gesture was widely considered a “universal language”. In the 20th century, however,\u0000 this framing fell out of favor as anthropologists rejected universalism in favor of relativism. These polemical positions were\u0000 largely fueled by high-flying rhetoric and second-hand report; researchers had neither the data nor the conceptual frameworks to\u0000 stake out substantive positions. Today we have much more data, but our frameworks remain underdeveloped and often implicit. Here,\u0000 I outline several emerging conceptual tools that help us make sense of universals and diversity in gesture. I then sketch the\u0000 state of our knowledge about a handful of gestural phenomena, further developing these conceptual tools on the way. This brief\u0000 survey underscores a clear conclusion: gesture is unmistakably similar around the world while also being broadly diverse. Our task\u0000 ahead is to put polemics aside and explore this duality systematically – and soon, before gestural diversity dwindles further.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49156334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scientific interest in the diversity of gestural signalling dates back to the figure of Charles Darwin. More than a hundred years later, there is a considerable body of work describing human gestural diversity across languages and cultures. However, the question of communicative culture in our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates, is relatively unexplored. Here, we will stir new interest into this topic by (i) briefly summarizing the current knowledge of animal culture, and (ii) presenting the current knowledge on gesture cultures, diversity and usage in the most common model for early hominid behaviour, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). We will focus particularly on well-established behaviours being customary in some and absent in other chimpanzee communities, and recently discovered social customs that have been suggested to differ in their form, and/or meaning across populations. We also introduce latest findings on chimpanzees’ gestural diversity, providing further evidence for the role social negotiation plays in gestural acquisition. We conclude that the field has been hampered by misconstruing great ape gestures as fixed action patterns, a strong research bias on the perspective of signalers, and a lack of coherent methodology to assess the meaning and context of gestures across sites. We argue for systematic cross-site comparisons by viewing communicative exchanges as negotiations, enabling a unique perspective onto the evolutionary trajectory of culture and communication.
{"title":"A new window onto animal culture","authors":"S. Pika, T. Deschner","doi":"10.1075/gest.19012.pik","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19012.pik","url":null,"abstract":"Scientific interest in the diversity of gestural signalling dates back to the figure of Charles Darwin. More than a hundred years later, there is a considerable body of work describing human gestural diversity across languages and cultures. However, the question of communicative culture in our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates, is relatively unexplored. Here, we will stir new interest into this topic by (i) briefly summarizing the current knowledge of animal culture, and (ii) presenting the current knowledge on gesture cultures, diversity and usage in the most common model for early hominid behaviour, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). We will focus particularly on well-established behaviours being customary in some and absent in other chimpanzee communities, and recently discovered social customs that have been suggested to differ in their form, and/or meaning across populations. We also introduce latest findings on chimpanzees’ gestural diversity, providing further evidence for the role social negotiation plays in gestural acquisition. We conclude that the field has been hampered by misconstruing great ape gestures as fixed action patterns, a strong research bias on the perspective of signalers, and a lack of coherent methodology to assess the meaning and context of gestures across sites. We argue for systematic cross-site comparisons by viewing communicative exchanges as negotiations, enabling a unique perspective onto the evolutionary trajectory of culture and communication.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46762914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Current anthropological studies of gesture give extensive attention to communities of study from a synchronic perspective while also focusing on semantic, cognitive, and linguistic analyses of gesture. However, less well explored is how the uses and meanings of gestures can change over time within societies and the role of gesture in social interactions. In addition, individual, interpersonal, and societal level politics can also influence what gestures mean and how they are strategically used. This paper uses careful analysis of European missionary reports and trader accounts written in the late 17th and early 18th centuries to focus on shifting power relations in the pre-colonial era Kongo Kingdom in West Central Africa. Larger social transformations will be used to contextualize three key incidents where gestures were at the center of complex negotiations about meaning and power. The paper argues for gesture studies scholars to consider deep, contextual, and historically grounded examinations of gestures and the role they play in shaping relationships and societies.
{"title":"Temporality, social interaction, and power in an anthropology of gesture","authors":"Yolanda Covington-Ward","doi":"10.1075/gest.19021.cov","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19021.cov","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Current anthropological studies of gesture give extensive attention to communities of study from a synchronic perspective\u0000 while also focusing on semantic, cognitive, and linguistic analyses of gesture. However, less well explored is how the uses and meanings of\u0000 gestures can change over time within societies and the role of gesture in social interactions. In addition, individual, interpersonal, and\u0000 societal level politics can also influence what gestures mean and how they are strategically used. This paper uses careful analysis of\u0000 European missionary reports and trader accounts written in the late 17th and early 18th centuries to focus on shifting power relations in\u0000 the pre-colonial era Kongo Kingdom in West Central Africa. Larger social transformations will be used to contextualize three key incidents\u0000 where gestures were at the center of complex negotiations about meaning and power. The paper argues for gesture studies scholars to consider\u0000 deep, contextual, and historically grounded examinations of gestures and the role they play in shaping relationships and societies.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41564731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Research on narratives in an Australian language demonstrated surprising facts about speakers’ spatial orientation and knowledge both in the insistent use of morphologically hypertrophied spoken directional terminology and in accompanying gestures. Pursuing comparable phenomena in a Mayan language from the other side of the globe revealed correspondingly complex gestural devices for communicating about location and direction but with very different kinds of support from speech. Evidence from a new sign language, emerging in the same Mayan context, suggests that mechanisms for signing about space both resemble and depart from the gestural practices of the surrounding speech community. In particular, they invoke spatial “frames of reference” not used by speakers to sign about location and direction, and they employ signed “spatial grammar” to express syntactic argument structure.
{"title":"Space as space and space as grammar","authors":"J. Haviland","doi":"10.1075/gest.20014.hav","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.20014.hav","url":null,"abstract":"Research on narratives in an Australian language demonstrated surprising facts about speakers’ spatial orientation and knowledge both in the insistent use of morphologically hypertrophied spoken directional terminology and in accompanying gestures. Pursuing comparable phenomena in a Mayan language from the other side of the globe revealed correspondingly complex gestural devices for communicating about location and direction but with very different kinds of support from speech. Evidence from a new sign language, emerging in the same Mayan context, suggests that mechanisms for signing about space both resemble and depart from the gestural practices of the surrounding speech community. In particular, they invoke spatial “frames of reference” not used by speakers to sign about location and direction, and they employ signed “spatial grammar” to express syntactic argument structure.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46836182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A considerable body of literature points at parallels between gestural elements and sign language structures. This raises the question to what extent variation in gesture environment may lead to related variation across sign languages, or,mutatis mutandis, to what extent similarities in gesture environment may lead to similarities across (otherwise unrelated) sign languages.This article will address that question by reviewing a series of studies relating to size and shape specifying (SASS) signs and gestures in signed and spoken languages in West Africa. The review finds that the use of body-based SASS gestures coincides with the use of body-based SASS signs in the sign languages studied, which in turn aligns with (a) restrictions on the number and types of handshapes used in space-based SASS signs, (b) limited use ofspace-based size depictionin lexical items (Nyst, 2018), and (c) a gap in the repertoire of phonemic handshapes.I conclude that culture-specific patterning in gesture environment may impact on cross-linguistic variation in SASS morphology and handshape phonology. As such, the gestural environment presents an explanation why SLs may be alike or different, in addition to shared ancestry, language contact, and iconicity.
{"title":"The impact of cross-linguistic variation in gesture on sign language phonology and morphology","authors":"Victoria Nyst","doi":"10.1075/gest.19009.nys","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19009.nys","url":null,"abstract":"A considerable body of literature points at parallels between gestural elements and sign language structures. This raises the question to what extent variation in gesture environment may lead to related variation across sign languages, or,mutatis mutandis, to what extent similarities in gesture environment may lead to similarities across (otherwise unrelated) sign languages.This article will address that question by reviewing a series of studies relating to size and shape specifying (SASS) signs and gestures in signed and spoken languages in West Africa. The review finds that the use of body-based SASS gestures coincides with the use of body-based SASS signs in the sign languages studied, which in turn aligns with (a) restrictions on the number and types of handshapes used in space-based SASS signs, (b) limited use ofspace-based size depictionin lexical items (Nyst, 2018), and (c) a gap in the repertoire of phonemic handshapes.I conclude that culture-specific patterning in gesture environment may impact on cross-linguistic variation in SASS morphology and handshape phonology. As such, the gestural environment presents an explanation why SLs may be alike or different, in addition to shared ancestry, language contact, and iconicity.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45085607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents an analysis of a data set consisting of instances of body-directed gesture that occurred in racializing expressions of social difference during ethnographic interviews with two neighboring peoples of Ecuador: the indigenous Chachi, speakers of the Cha’palaa language, and Afro-Descendant people, who speak a variety of Spanish. When talking about differences among social groups and categories, a particular sub-type of body-directed gestural practice was salient: using indexical-iconic self-directed gestures as a way to describe other people’s physical bodies or appearances, including references to skin color, hair texture, clothing and ornamentation, and embodiments of carrying objects close to the body. The paper describes the trends seen in the forms and meanings of these gestures in their role here as part of socially categorizing and racializing discourses in the Latin American socio-historical context.
{"title":"Body-directed gesture and expressions of social difference in Chachi and Afro-Ecuadorian discourse","authors":"Simeon Floyd","doi":"10.1075/gest.19034.flo","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19034.flo","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper presents an analysis of a data set consisting of instances of body-directed gesture that occurred in racializing expressions of social difference during ethnographic interviews with two neighboring peoples of Ecuador: the indigenous Chachi, speakers of the Cha’palaa language, and Afro-Descendant people, who speak a variety of Spanish. When talking about differences among social groups and categories, a particular sub-type of body-directed gestural practice was salient: using indexical-iconic self-directed gestures as a way to describe other people’s physical bodies or appearances, including references to skin color, hair texture, clothing and ornamentation, and embodiments of carrying objects close to the body. The paper describes the trends seen in the forms and meanings of these gestures in their role here as part of socially categorizing and racializing discourses in the Latin American socio-historical context.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43524976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For gesture research outside anthropology, the promise – and challenge – of anthropological method stems from one or more of its core commitments: its pursuit of human variation, both diachronic and synchronic; its insistence on naturalistic rather than experimental research design; and its integrative sensibility that situates human behavior in relation to an expansive sociocultural context. This essay reflects on this last sensibility. As we envision an anthropology of gesture and weigh its potential for gesture studies, we should pause and reflect on the fitful history of gesture in anthropology. As a parable for the present, I revisit a neglected anthropological voice from twentieth-century gesture research: Ray L. Birdwhistell, whose ambitious postwar science of kinesics teamed film-based microanalysis with American linguistic structuralism. At stake in Birdwhistell’s work was a problem that looms large here, that of how and at what cost a science of gesture can contextualize its object integratively.
{"title":"What is an anthropology of gesture?","authors":"Michael P. Lempert","doi":"10.1075/gest.19019.lem","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19019.lem","url":null,"abstract":"For gesture research outside anthropology, the promise – and challenge – of anthropological method stems from one or more of its core commitments: its pursuit of human variation, both diachronic and synchronic; its insistence on naturalistic rather than experimental research design; and its integrative sensibility that situates human behavior in relation to an expansive sociocultural context. This essay reflects on this last sensibility. As we envision an anthropology of gesture and weigh its potential for gesture studies, we should pause and reflect on the fitful history of gesture in anthropology. As a parable for the present, I revisit a neglected anthropological voice from twentieth-century gesture research: Ray L. Birdwhistell, whose ambitious postwar science of kinesics teamed film-based microanalysis with American linguistic structuralism. At stake in Birdwhistell’s work was a problem that looms large here, that of how and at what cost a science of gesture can contextualize its object integratively.","PeriodicalId":35125,"journal":{"name":"Gesture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43656787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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