A Cultural History of Gesture.

For the non-specialist, one of the charms and fascinations of anthropological documentary films is the image they provide of how a foreign people move. To the uninitiated eye, the gestural vocabulary of an unknown culture is at once informative and bewildering, more transparent than an unknown tongue but still half opaque. The anthropologist, of course, through patient work, can come to read and explicate the gestural vocabulary of the host society. It is one mark of the increasing anthropologization of social history that this same phenomenon, the semiotics of gesture, is now the subject of a lively, intelligent collection of essays. It is at once apparent that what is easy for the modern anthropologist and not even too difficult for the traveler or the casual watcher of a film is, for historians, hard indeed. Though postures, through art, are retrievable, past kinesthetics are devilishly elusive. Nevertheless, travellers' tales and prescriptive manuals leave some hints to work with.

The kinds of gesture at issue here are several. At ground level, and most difficult to retrieve, is that gestural vocabulary least imbued with formal meaning, the habitual body language of a place, time, and social group. It is somewhat easier to uncover the physical actions to which a culture attributed formal meaning, the bowings, kisses, handshakes, raised hats and other gestures of accommodation, insult, respect, seduction, greeting, and farewell. Most accessible of all, for Europe, are the formal liturgies of church, state and corporate body. These three levels of gesture are of course not sharply bounded.

A very European work, this book offers two essays on antiquity, one on the middle ages, five on the early modern period, one on modern Spain, and one which roams at liberty over European kisses. The volume stems from a conference held at Utrecht in 1989. Among the contributors are one Pole, one American, one German, two English, two French, and four Netherlanders. The scholars are relatively experienced, most of them in mid-career. Attractively, they have reworked their essays in light of the conference; many of the papers comment on one another, as if the writers had listened well and learned much from their collaboration. Keith Thomas offers a handsome overview. Jan Bremmer traces the evolution of conventions of heroic striding and submissive sitting from Homeric to late classical Greece. Fritz Graf, in a comment on the gestures of Roman orators, makes clear that many of the hand-signs on the podium were highly conventionalized and, to us, very foreign. For instance, as Quintilian wrote, to express surprise and admiration, "the right hand turns slightly upwards and the fingers are brought in to the palm, one after the other, beginning with the little finger; the hand is then reopened and turned round by a reversal of this motion" (p. 41). Could so precise a gesture have had a non-forensic home? Unlikely, for it needed teaching. At the same time, some of the general rules of controlled deportment espoused in Rome are more familiar for they will return in the Renaissance under humanist sponsorship. Jean-Claude Schmitt, arguing for complexity and centrality, strives to compress a whole new book on medieval gestures into eleven pages. Peter Burke surveys "gestural reform" in Counter-Reformation Italy and speculates on the increasing difference between northern reserve and Italian demonstrativeness. Joneath Spicer, in a richly documented essay, traces the rise of the "Renaissance elbow," a cocky emblem of male power in Netherlandish art. Robert Muchembled, as always interested in the difference between high culture and low, explores an evolving French sense of the early-modern boorish. Herman Roodenburg puzzles over the obscure origins of the handshake, originally a North European gesture not of greeting but of peace and agreement. In a vivacious essay, Maria Bogucka explores the very expansive habits of the Polish upper classes in the age of the baroque. The striking deportment of the Sejm suggests a whole new field of legislative ethology.

Discontent was very often shown by waving swords and banging batons. Enthusiastic support would be demonstrated by throwing hats and caps into the air. On the other hand, deputies sometimes physically trampled on or chopped up unpopular bills.

Willem Frijhoff meditates on the difference between the public and the private kiss. Henk Driessen, an anthropologist of modern Andalusia, explores the cojone-clutching bravado of the country bar. He argues eloquently against the notion that Spanish gesture is uninhibited; the banter, play and swagger are all very ritualized and deeply embedded in codes of gender and station.

This entire book is in the shadow of Norbert Elias, who, fifty years ago, argued that the early modern period was a time of ever growing restraint. Control of the body, the mark of high station, gradually spread downwards, taming Europeans and, Foucault would add, estranging them from their physical selves. The contributors accept neither Elias nor Foucault as gospel. With an eye to gender, status, place and time, they test the famous hypotheses. There are important issues here, both for the history of high culture and for that of everyday human relations.