Rhythm and Body Movement

p. 71. What can the body tell us? Plenty – if we observe how people actually move: whether they move together in synchrony or not, the kind of rhythm they are moving to, as well as the many tiny, unnoticeable events that make up any transaction. The publication of Birdwhistell’s Introduction to Kinesics, in 1952, marked the beginning of the technical study of body movement; since then, many people have been stimulated and influenced by Birdwhistell’s work.

Syncing, or “being in sync”, may be a new concept to some readers, but for others it is very familiar. People in interactions either move together (in whole or in part) or they don’t and in failing to do so are disruptive to others around them. Basically, people in interactions move together in a kind of dance, but they are not aware of their synchronous movement and they do it without music or conscious orchestration. Being “in sync” is itself a form of communication. The body’s messages (in or out of awareness) … seldom lie…

p. 75. Whites do not move the way working-class blacks do or the way Puerto Ricans move or Mexicans or Pueblo or Navajo Indians, Chinese or Japanese. Each culture has its own characteristic manner of locomotion, sitting, standing, reclining, and gesturing. To demonstrate this, one has only to take one of the small, popular Super-8 cameras and record people walking in public where ethnicity can be identified with certainty. Then record another group, and view the movies over and over at slow speed. After these repeated viewings, the differences will become clear. One of my students, a young black woman, was able to identify some fifteen differences in walking behavior between whites and Pueblo Indians by using this very simple procedure.

Birdwhistell has defined kinesics as the way one moves and handles one’s body. One of the most basic of all modes of communication, kinesics as communication was well established before the emergence of mammalian life. Lizards, birds, and mammals communicate this way among themselves… People recognize posture and body movement even at a distance. (p. 76) But unlike other mammals, we have specialized the language of the body so that it is integrated and congruent with everything else we do. It is therefore culturally determined and must be read against a cultural backdrop. That is, the significance of a posture or act is only partially readable across cultural boundaries. In new and unknown situations, in which one is likely to be most dependent on reading nonverbal cues (NVC), the chances of one’s being correct decrease as cultural distances increase. Even two people as closely related as the Americans and the English have problems reading each other’s kinesics. I do not want to give the impression that there are not innate responses such as the smile (Ekman and Friesen and Eibl-Eibesfeldt). But even smiles must be seen in context.

p. 81. Like anything else, knowledge of NVC can be misused. The danger is that people will (as they’ve already done) attach a specific meaning to parts of unconscious nonverbal systems - …touching or caressing the nose means you think the other person or what he said stinks, etc. (…) And while a person may touch the end of his nose when speaking, it’s impossible to tell what stimulated this action. It could be an association released by something… NVCs must always be read in context; in fact, they are often a prominent part of the context in which the verbal part of the message is set. Context never has a specific meaning. (p. 82) Yet the meaning of a communication is always dependent upon the context.

The language of behavior is extraordinarily subtle. Most people are lucky to have one subcultural system under control – the one that reflects their own sex, class, generation, and geographic region within a country. Because of its complexity, efforts to isolate out “bits” of nonverbal communication and generalize from them in isolation are doomed to failure. (…) Far from being a superficial form of communication that can be consciously manipulated, NVC systems are interwoven with the fabric of the personality and into society itself…

Nonverbal systems are closely tied to ethnicity…

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 731