Kinesics

Kinesics is the study and interpretation of human body movements that can be taken as symbolic or metaphorical in social interaction. According to anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell, who coined this term in 1952, kinesics encompasses facial expression, gestures, posture and gait, and visible arm and body movements. Expressive movements taken as symbolic actions display or emphasize thoughts, feelings, moods, intentions, and/or attitudes and may be used in combination with, or instead of, verbal communication. In order to have a shared communicative value, bodily activity must become conventionalized, or widely understood. Theories on kinesics have been included consistently in the canon of communication theory, especially within the study of nonverbal communication, since the 1950s.

The study of gesture started in ancient times. The Greeks and Romans considered gestures to be a persuasive accompaniment to rhetorical discourses, where the use of gesturing was studied intensively at drama schools in order to improve acting. In the Middle Ages, since most people could not read or write, documents were often ratified through the use of specific gestures: The illuminations of a medieval manuscript, the Sachsenspiegel, illustrate the conventional gestures used at that time in legal and political spheres. The use of gesture in dance and the theatre was studied by Natya Shastra in India about 200 BCE. This work addressed how emotions can be performed and inspired in the audience through appropriate kinesic movements.

In 1644 John Bulwer analyzed a great number of hand gestures and offered a guide for their effective use in public speaking, and in 1872 Charles Darwin wrote The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, posing for the first time the nature-nurture question. In 1882 Garrick Mallery made a comparison among North American Plains Indian sign language gestures and those of other people, including the deaf, offering detailed structural descriptions and modern theoretical insights.

In 1921 the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt conceived gestural communication as a kind of universal language, asserting that universal meanings enable people to understand one another when they use gestures. Paul Ekman later supported this opinion, but Birdwhistell rejected it. More recent cross-cultural research indicates that perhaps eight emotions can be universally communicated through facial expressions: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, contempt, and interest.

In 1941 David Efron investigated the influence of race and environment on behavior, using systematic sociolinguistic methods. He showed that race has no influence on the repertory and use of gestures, whereas sociological processes could have. Other comparisons between different cultures were made by the ethologists Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Desmond Morris in the 1970s.

The research of anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell conceived of kinesics as a complex structure of body movements, which can be seen as a formalized [Page 582]language code. Birdwhistell conducted his study using the methods and concepts of American descriptive linguistics of the late 1940s; indeed the influence of linguistics in his study can clearly be seen in the process and method he used and the terms he coined. For instance, Birdwhistell considered kinesics to be as systemic and socially learned as verbal language: There are no universals in kinesics, he stated, because the information conveyed by gesture and movement is coded differently in various cultures. Moreover, he affirmed that the rules of nonverbal signs and language are learned, although people may be only partially aware of the process. Finally, he claimed that the structure of kinesics is very similar to that of verbal language. For this reason, he asserted that body motion, as well as verbal language, could be broken down into an ordered system of elements that can be isolated and are comparable to those of verbal language.

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