[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Tracing Gestures — the inaugural offering in Bloomsbury’s World Archaeology Series — presents a dozen papers organized around a simple premise, namely, that gesture can and should be given more attention in archaeology. For, as co-editors Amy J. Maitland Gardner and Carl Walsh argue in their introduction, archaeological analyses of gesture and corporeal communications are poised to shed light on the shape and character of ancient societies, and on the lived experiences of individuals within those same populations. The individual contributions — from a conference of the same name at UCL in 2014 — operate with the understanding that gesture is embedded in society. Gesture, moreover, derives its meaning from the socio-cultural contexts in which it manifests, and from the participants, agents and recipients, in that culture.
But how exactly does this volume define “gesture”? In the editors’ introduction, gestures are defined as movements occurring at virtually every scale, from the extension of an individual’s finger to the procession of large groups of people. Such actions are “traceable” in the archaeological record through investigations of gesture’s material residues, found in visual depictions and through analysis of objects that were subject to gestures (e.g., a drinking vessel; a staircase). Twelve chapters follow and familiarize the reader with a great variety of material culture — painted ceramics, figurines, and architectural structures — and with peoples in and beyond the ancient Mediterranean. In different ways and to varying degrees of success, authors model how archaeologists can identify and interpret the material vestiges of gesture, thereby privileging synthesis of lived experiences in scholarly discourse. For this, the volume and its contributors merit recognition.
Yet the innovativeness of this call to study gesture in archaeology, as opposed to doing so in the social sciences broadly, is not immediately apparent from the volume’s introduction; the scholarship review contained therein is markedly brief.[1] The editors place their collection in dialogue with contemporary archaeological interest in body-centered research, and theoretical work on embodiment, phenomenology, and the senses. After rapid citations of relevant scholarship in this vein, however, the introduction is silent on the roles that gesture has played in this work, a curious omission, given occasional references to gesture in, e.g., a sensory study on touch and ancient ceramics. Rather we are left to understand gesture as merely tangential in previous scholarship. Indeed, the editors mark synthetic, focused study of bodily communication in archaeology as “small,” “under-researched,” and largely limited to catalogues of visual representations. For Maitland Gardner and Walsh, this is in part a consequence of “limited connectivity” among archeologists and scholars studying gesture in other disciplines: in psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and in recent years gesture studies. And yet, the introduction does little to bridge these disciplinary divides; it does not trace the deep history of gesture studies both before and after the rise of gesture as a field of inquiry in its own right. The contributions of ethnographer/archaeologist Andrea de Jorio, sociologist Marcel Mauss, and psychologist Adam Kendon are mentioned here, but only cursorily.[2] A more substantial “state of the field” vis à vis gesture studies is a desideratum, if only because the volume professes its utility as a “stepping stone” towards “holistic and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of gesture.”
The body chapters provide explication of valuable theoretical approaches and scholarly movements in and beyond archaeology, and are organized into three sections: papers in Part I investigate the relationships between gesture and material objects, with emphasis on three-dimensional objects; Part II’s papers examine visual depictions of gesture (mostly finger, hand, and arm movements of painted figures on ceramic vessels); and Part III’s papers engage with interdisciplinary work in psychology and art / design respectively. A wide range of methods are treated in these chapters, and some contributions are more fruitful than others. The remainder of this review therefore brings attention to ambitious or especially innovative syntheses of gesture traces in this collection.
Most chapters in Part I treat objects as conduits to individual or group behaviors, with different theories guiding each analysis. This approach is most successful with objects that require user manipulation, e.g., Isabelle Vella Gregory uses performance theory to think through several stone figurines from Neolithic Malta with removable heads; Audrey Gouy analyzes Etruscan doppieri, or multi-user vessels, using motor praxeology. These doppieri, found in tombs of elite women, required coordinated actions of their users, whether offering, receiving, drinking, or sharing the cup. Rituals around wine consumption in pre-Roman Italy, these cups suggest, were carefully orchestrated around a series of sequential gestures. Gouy’s article cites a fresco depicting a banqueting male-female couple to demonstrate that drinking rituals and their associated gestures were a means of reifying male-female partnerships and gendered roles (possibly with eschatological implications). But Gouy’s analysis is frustratingly brief, and this chapter, like several others in this volume, privileges a lengthy introduction to the cultures in question and the theoretical lens in place.
The chapter by Walsh — the only architectural study in the collection — also reconstructs social dynamics by tracing gesture, but with an eye towards class hierarchies. Using texts, iconographies, and Mauss’ concept of body techniques, Walsh asks how architecture at the Bronze-Age palace of Ebla (Syria) instructed visitors in actions appropriate to their station. Walsh draws attention to the plan of an open-air audience court in the palace, accessible from both a monumental staircase and two smaller doorways. These entrances choreographed movements so as to maintain class distinctions, with bodies entering in different ways: groups climbed up and out from a monumental staircase, while small doorways stemming from the palace interior compelled users to walk single-file into the courtyard, presumably towards a nearby raised dais. These different routes also prepared bodies to exercise appropriate gestures once in the courtyard — e.g., those on the dais sat, elevated above the much larger crowd standing below. After several case studies Walsh concludes that gestures in court settings reinforced social hierarchies and identities. Readers will not necessarily be surprised by this, but the author’s attention to the dialectic between architecture and bodies — bodies responding to built space, which itself responds to movements of bodies, real or imagined — is a thoughtful contribution to ongoing work in performance and phenomenology.
Several analyses use objects to reconstruct experiences associated with ancient rituals (e.g. Morris and Goodison; Calabro). Mireia López-Bertran’s chapter on the protective function of Phoenician-Punic masks stands out. Made from the late 2nd millennium through the Hellenistic period and known throughout the Mediterranean, these masks are characterized by exaggerated facial features such as enlarged smiles and eyes; most scholars accept an apotropaic function. López-Bertran pointedly asks how these protective masks worked, and what the faces communicated to ancient viewers. The author’s discussion of the so-called Sardonic smile on these masks connects it to sensory altercations experienced by mourners and religious leaders in the context of funerary processions (most masks were found in tombs). The enlarged mouth may allude to song, lament, or even muscular contractions induced by psychoactive plants ingested in funerary consumption rituals. All of these actionsfeasting, singing, mourning — are protective gestures of care, community, and commemoration, the impressions of which are still visible in these grinning faces.
López-Bertran’s interest in the origins of gestures, and in the lives and experiences that presumably inspired them, also characterizes the chapters by Maitland Gardner and David Calabro. In different ways, both authors ask readers to think about the spheres in which gestures are created and institutionalized. Maitland Gardner’s article pushes back at top-down models dictating gestural depictions in classical Mayan figural art, postulating that non-elite classes originated and disseminated gestures like, e.g., the open-palm hand, which signals giving or receiving, simple conversation, or crop scattering. This claim — that gestures may belong to more quotidian culture — is welcome, although it is not always convincingly borne out in the analysis itself because of the multivalent meaning of most visual depictions of hand gestures (see also McNiven; Kuehn).
On gestural origins and mutable meanings once more, Calabro’s chapter presents a diachronic study of ritualized hand gestures in Near Eastern culture from antiquity to the present, using ancient Near Eastern texts, Levantine art, and a visual recording of a modern ritual practice, a 2011 rally in Homs (Syria). Despite the possibly contentious use of ethnographic comparisons, a salient point on the transposition of a particular gesture from one sphere of life to another emerges. Unlike raised hands, clapping, Calabro argues, is not typically a ritual action in [ancient] Near Eastern art; clapping may express grief or anger, but does not convey loyalty or group acclamation as it does at the modern Homs rally. At the latter event, the author contends, the crowd demonstrated enthusiastic support, and so a gesture characteristic of sporting events accrued new meaning and identity as ritually charged. Yet Calabro’s study makes overly broad assumptions of temporal continuities and conservatism across Near Eastern cultures and religions; this argument is also an argument from silence (i.e. about an absence of clapping in ANE arts). Calabro’s final point — about clapping and the meaning of gestures as contextual — obtains, but feels somewhat redundant within the larger collection (see also Vella Gregory; McNiven; Maitland Gardner; Kuehn).
Concerning the future of residual gesture traces in archaeology, Part III speaks to the promise of interdisciplinary work. Josef Fulka’s chapter on Freud — a self-professed archaeologist of the human psyche (!) — provides a glimpse into the analyst’s interpretative strategies around gesture, using case studies of female patients with hysteria. Freud believed that gestures convey meaning, but Fulka’s synthesis of his work offers a cautionary tale for this reader and underscores the human element in any kind of synthetic interpretation, from scholarly agendas to biases and overdeterminations. Alice Clough and Fo Hamblin’s collaboration, written by an anthropologist and an artist in a non-traditional manner, is equally thought-provoking. Their article documents the process of creating a work of art. Gesture is defined as thinking action and objects are haptic renderings, encoded with traces of their makers’ movements and thoughts. This chapter’s detailed explication of making is a powerful reminder of the many gestures involved in an object’s production, independent of any later use. Objects are imprinted with material residues of a myriad of gestures over the course of their long lives; how many are recoverable is a question that archaeology is perhaps best equipped to answer. To summarize, Part III is a fitting bookend to a volume advocating holistic interpretations of gesture traces. These papers also underscore the value of reading this volume in its entirety, despite some interpretive repetition in earlier sections.
In closing, Tracing Gestures is a valuable resource on the manifold ways to approach and analyze material evidence for gesture, even if the number of theoretical positions favored by individual contributors is somewhat diffuse. Certain themes are also better represented than others, e.g., most of the reconstructed experiences are ritual experiences, and the visual depictions of gesture discussed here are almost exclusively hand movements. There are a good number of illustrations throughout, although there are no color plates, which is unfortunate given the number of polychrome frescoes and ceramics discussed. Endnotes and bibliography conclude each chapter, which helps those reading individual chapters versus the collection in its entirety. As is true of most edited volumes, some contributions are stronger than others, and better representatives of the volume’s welcome directive: to advance our understanding of corporeal communication in ancient societies via attention to the material residues of gesture in the archaeological record, however faintly preserved.
Authors and titles
Introduction: Tracing Gestures in the Ancient World, Amy J. Maitland Gardner and Carl Walsh
- In Touch with the Minoans: Gestural Performance and Experience in Bronze Age Crete, Christine Morris and Lucy Goodison
- Performing Bodies and Theatrical Palaces: Courtly Gestural Vocabularies at Early Bronze Age Ebla, Carl Walsh
- Aspects of Non-Verbal Communication and Rituality in Pre-Roman Banquets: The Gestures of Union (Eighth to Fifth Centuries BCE), Audrey Gouy
- Gestures and Social Relations: The Late Neolithic Figurines of the Maltese Islands, Isabelle Vella Gregory
- Gestures of Protection: Clay Masks of the Phoenician-Punic World, Mireia López-Bertran
- The Pitfalls and Potentials of Visual Evidence for the History of Gestures: The Example of Athenian Pottery, Timothy J. McNiven
- Langue du geste over the longue durée: On the Diachrony of Ritual Gestures in the Near East, David Calabro
- Tracing the Semantics of Ancient Maya Gestures, Amy J. Maitland Gardner
- Gesture, Posture and Meaning in the Ulúa Cultural Sphere, Kathryn M. Hudson and John S. Henderson
- Idealized Divinity versus Identification: Ancient ‘Lifelike’ Gestures of the Buddhist Sculptures 五百羅漢 (500 Rakan), Christine Kuehn
- Freud’s Approach to Gesture and Its Archaeological Inspiration, Josef Fulka
- Gestures of Making: An Exploration of Material / Body Dialogue through Art Process, Alice Clough and Fo Hamblin
Epilogue: Touching on the Future of Gesture, Amy J. Maitland Gardner and Carl Walsh
Notes
[1] Maitland Gardner and Walsh, “Introduction,” 1–4 (quoted material in this paragraph is drawn from these pages).
[2] A. de Jorio, La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano. Naples: Fibreno, 1832; A. Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; M. Mauss, “Les Techniques du Corps,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 39 (1935) 271–93. N.B. the introduction directs the reader to Kendon, e.g. 2004, 17–83, for “excellent overviews of the history of gesture studies” (7, n.3).