The politics of gesture: Historical perspectives
Gestures can be powerful means of communicating affirmation and solidarity and, for the same reason, can be powerful means of expressing dissent. Class, gender and generational relationships are all expressed and reproduced in gestural codes; so, too, are ethnic identities. Such codes are therefore central to the process of structuration described by Giddens: through individual actions we express, and reproduce, broader social relationships (structures). By the same token, transgressive gestures, or infractions of gestural codes—such as failing to take off a hat, or an over-familiar use of the hand shake, for example–-can modify or even transform the patterns of social interaction, leading to a more coercive expression of power or, in the absence of such, a dilution of the cultural weight and effectiveness of authority. Gesture, in other words, can be the battleground over which divergent visions of social and political order are fought. Of course, these clashes can be unconscious—for example, in unintended miscommunication at moments of inter-cultural contact—but such unfortunate miscommunications are no less important for their accidental nature, nor less revealing to historians of larger assumptions about social relationships and their regulation.
On the whole, historians have paid more attention to the politics of ritual than of gesture. Ritual, like gesture, has these functions, and is regularly reproduced, but the distinction perhaps centres on the more consciously articulated and choreographed performances implied by the term ritual, and the greater regularity of gesture. That more attention has been paid to ritual is in part a reflection of the sources, and by the same token, this has tended to restrict the range of arenas in which these ritual politics are studied, for example by privileging royal and religious authority. Histories of gesture, on the other hand, have often been preoccupied with chronological change rather than with politics and contestation: for example, shifts from one bodily regime to another, the rise of politeness, or the self.
This conference brings together a distinguished group of speakers, whose research interests range in time from early medieval to contemporary history, and in space across East and South Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Together, their papers approach gesture (as opposed to ritual) and focus more closely on who is communicating what (and with what success), in order to gain access to a wide range of politics—within the home, between generations and status groups, or between ethnic groups—and of politics in routine situations. We hope through in this conference to open up discussion of the politics of gesture, adding a more explicitly political dimension to cultural histories of gesture while broadening to the range of politics which have been addressed through studies of ritual.