brenda farnell, ethno-graphics and the moving body

Ethno-Graphics and the Moving BodyAuthor(s): Brenda M. FarnellReviewed work(s):Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 929-974Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3033975 .

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ETHNO-GRAPHICS AND THE MOVING BODY

BRENDA M. FARNELL

University of Iowa

The article opens with a brief comment on a photograph from Evans-Pritchard's work to illustrate a fundamental problem with Western ways of viewing human movement. I suggest that despite an upsurge of interest in 'the body', an understanding of the person as a moving agent is still absent from cultural theory and ethnographic accounts. I argue that the new realist perspective on person and agency, and not the existential philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, offers the necessary philosophical grounding to accomplish an embodied definition of social actors. Once people are conceived as persons empowered to perform signifying acts with both speech and action signs, then the way is clear to develop strategies for the systematic investigation of embodied action. I discuss the adoption of a movement script (Labanotation) as a methodological resource adequate to this task and critically examine methods used to record (American) Plains Indian sign language. The article returns to Evans-Pritchard in recognition of his later interest in the idea of a literacy for movement.

... and there is more in the action than meets the eye Evans-Pritchard (1956: 231)

In Evans-Pritchard's classic monograph on Nuer religion (1956) there is a photograph illustrating a wedding dance, the caption under which reads, 'Movement in the Wedding Dance' (fig. 1). This photograph raises an important anthropological question: where is the movement? Rather than single out Evans-Pritchard for unwarranted criticism, I intend to use this as an instructive example; a clear instance of an interesting yet serious stumbling-block with regard to Western ways of 'seeing' or not seeing human body movement. It is not uncommon to find actions reduced to a position or to a sequence of positions in this manner, such that a series of photographs, sketches, diagrams, or positions of limbs plotted on a two dimensional graph are presented as records of movement.1 In this article I suggest that such a conception of movement and its attendant practices have had the unintended effect of removing the medium of bodily movement itself from serious consideration as a component of social action. This has compromised anthropological inquiry by distorting our understanding of ways of knowing and being that do not evince the kinds of philosophical and religious biases against the body that can be found tlhroughout the history of Western philosophy and within social theory.

Man (N.S.) 29, 929-974



930 BRENDA M. FARNELL

Move!ent in wedding dance

FIGURE 1. Photograph from Nuer religion, E.E. Evans-Pritchard 1956.

Embodiment and agency in social theory

Freund (1988) and Turner (1984) suggest that the curiously disembodied view of human beings that has permeated the social sciences until recently stems in part from a revolt against a biological imperialism which, as feminist critiques have shown, was not without its political uses as a means to justify sexist and racist assumptions about 'human nature' (Birke 1986). Such a stance was also part of the effort to establish an autonomous social scientific discourse. Ironi- cally, acceptance of the deeper philosophical assumption of a mind-body dualism was shared with biological determinism: social science assigned mind priority over body and severed it from its embodied form, while biologism assigned priority to the organism (Freund 1988: 839).

Perhaps it is now the case that we are about to enter a 'paradigm of embodiment' (Csordas 1990). Recently, there has been a virtual explosion of literature on 'the body', much of it stimulated by the work of Foucault2, although in anthropology this explosion also represents renewed interest in a long-standing, if relatively minor, anthropological tradition.3 This attention is part of a radical reconstruction of classical precepts about the nature and role of person and agency and the dualistic thinking that has not only separated body from mind, but also created oppositions between subjective and objective, mental and material-behavioural, thinking and feeling, rational and emotional, and verbal and nonverbal.4



BRENDA M. FARNELL 931

Recent interest in the body has centred primarily on the physical body as cultural construct: on its regulation and restraint, as metaphor and machine, represented by such topics as the medical body, the sexual body, the civilized body, the decorated body, the political body and the body as social text. This focus should come as no surprise, perhaps, given a virtual cult of the body in contemporary Western societies, with fetishes ranging from fitness to fat control, and from politically correct body types (Pollitt 1982) to political dissidents' use of fashion as a non-vocal rhetoric (O'Neill 1972).

These varied explorations all seek an adequate account of the embodiment of persons and should be fruitful for anthropology because, at the very least, they draw attention to the ethnocentricity that has until recently permeated our spoken-language-centred approaches to systems of meaning.5 However, in these developments there remains one major lacuna: the human body as a moving agent in a spatially organized world of meanings. While Turner (1984) has brought to our attention the long-standing absence of the body in social theory and its submerged, furtive history in the West, those who specialize in the anthropology of human movement note that in Turner's book, as with those of Armstrong, Foucault, Freund, Hudson, Martin and others, 'the body', albeit a social and cultural one rather than a biological or mechanistic entity, nevertheless remains a static object. Absent, on the whole, are accounts of persons enacting the body, that is, using physical actions in the agentive production of meaning; actions that may be either out of awareness through habit, or highly deliberate choreographies.6 It seems important that we attempt to connect these interesting discussions to the moving body - to the person as physical actor in the social world - so that an anthropology or sociology of the body develops which truly transcends Cartesian limitations rather than simply re- states, however interestingly, some of the results.

It is precisely here that theoretical choices play a crucial role, so I shall first set forth certain fundamental theoretical assumptions in order to clarify the meaning and rationale of the perspective that follows. Specifically, this will reveal how the intention to make the actions of a moving agent central to a definition of embodiment (and therefore to social action) has meant choosing the new realist philosophy of science espoused by Harre over the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Only when grounded in Harre's notion of causal powers do Merleau-Ponty's suggestions for embodiment remain fruitful.

If Bourdieu can be considered the heir of Merleau-Ponty's position, and his work an attempt to go beyond it, it is not clear that he has been successful. Bourdieu's (1977) notions of'habitus' and 'hexis' have been important sensitizing constructs because they draw attention to the role of bodily practices and spatial organization in social action. Problematic, however, is a residual Cartesianism that keeps any involvement with thought and language separate from 'bodily praxis'. In addition, the false nominalization of 'the habitus' sets up a Durkheimian region of social causation that violates the logic of causal powers, because it separates the power from the particular and allows causal power to be located separately, either inside (e.g. 'the unconscious') or outside, in a mysterious social realm separate from the action of people (see Harre & Madden 1975; Harre 1984). Giddens's (1984: xxii) tripartite division into




'discursive consciousness', 'practical consciousness' and 'unconscious' remains problematic for similar reasons (see Farnell 1994a). Ryle's (1949) distinction between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that' avoids this kind of mentalist rhetoric when referring to those aspects that are out of focal awareness through habit, and to skills that are not normally put into words. Polanyi (1958) calls this 'tacit knowledge'. We can go further in this direction than Bourdieu or Giddens by clarifying the exact nature and role of agency in the production of action and by developing systematic strategies for the inclusion of body movement into definitions of what counts as social action. Harre's perspective, in achieving the former, has allowed Williams to achieve the latter.

In this area, as elsewhere in social theory, investigators have been searching for a cogent alternative to the pendulum that has been swinging between Cartesian intellectualism and phenomenological existentialism for several dec- ades. Descartes's position was that the whole nature of the body consists of it being an 'extended thing' and that there is absolutely nothing in common between thought and extension (1986: 93).7 Stemming from this radical separation of mind (as rational, non-material [i.e. occult]) from body (as irrational, mechanical, sensate matter) are objectivist views of human movement as 'be- haviours', or as 'raw' physical data of some kind, the result of biologically triggered impulses, survivals from an animal past, perhaps.8 The Cartesian perspective privileges mind as agency to the exclusion of the body, but the agent is in fact powered from nowhere because mind is an occult non-materiality; as Ryle (1949) put it, we are left with a ghost in a machine.

In opposition to Descartes, though he was equally reductionist, Merleau- Ponty (1962) swung the pendulum as far as possible in the other direction and attempted to reclaim the body within a phenomenological existentialism grounded in the subjective experience of the 'lived body'. Unfortunately, instead of successfully transcending Descartes's mind/body dualism, he posited instead a 'bodily intentionality' that relocated an equally ambiguous notion of agency in the body. Although this was an important and sensitizing corrective at the time, it must now be seen as transitional. Merleau-Ponty was correct to reject the Humean model of causality and substance, but the substance-less qualities model he offered instead fails to provide an adequate substitute. As Varela has shown (and see also Grene 1985), such a conception cannot offer a definitive solution to the problem of the disembodied actor in the behavioural sciences. The proper location of causation and agency, and a genuine conception of the person are required. As Varela puts it:

The reversal of the centre of privilege in Cartesian dualism is ultimately rooted in the tacit acceptance of the conceptual incompatibility of causation and agency prescribed by the Humean tradition. After all, if mind is a ghost in the machinery of the body, moving or not, the body is the only 'reality' for the location of causation and agency. But if the body as machine, the objective body, is rejected as such because of its deterministic status, then the body as 'lived', the subjective body, must, it is thought, be accepted as the only alternative. Somehow then, as a Jamesian act of faith, it is viewed as nondeterministic as long as it is 'lived'. And so the subjective body is mistakenly viewed as the only proper location for agency (Varela 1992: 7).

Varela's analysis articulates several conceptual errors found in recent attempts to return to the work of Merleau-Ponty in order to find ways to transcend the




exclusion of 'the body' from social theory.9 To emphasize that part of Merleau- Ponty's existential phenomenology that deals with the 'lived body' and 'intentionality' and to exclude his attention to the problem of connecting bodily gesture with language (1962: 174-99; 1968: 155, 203), in fact, brings his approach to a dead end. Indeed, Varela argues that in order to accept Merleau-Ponty's invitation to discover that connexion between language and gesture one must go to theoretical and philosophical resources beyond Merleau-Ponty's work itself Such resources exist in the new realist philosophy of science articulated by Harre, and the ethnogenic standpoint that he has developed from it for the purposes of sociocultural investigations. It is these resources that provide the ground for Williams's semasiological approach to human movement and that inform my use of her work (see Williams 1982; 1991). In my view, these developments together successfully transcend Cartesian dualism without renouncing the significance of Merleau-Ponty's suggestions. 10

As mentioned above, resort to 'the body' as lived, experienced, or intentional does not transcend Cartesianism because agency remains a ghost. It has simply been relocated from being in the mind to being in the body1l and we are left with what Hamlyn has been tempted to call a 'solipsism with a body' (1987: 328).12 The new realist philosophy of science argues instead for a definition of agency that properly connects it to a conception of substance that is compatible with causation (as causal power, not the Humean variety). Without causation there can be no agency, and for causation to be possible there must be substance for its grounding. A new conception of substance has been articulated that is neither the materialist nor the phenomenalist version, but a dynamic one: an immaterialist model of substance as a structure of powers and capacities in which, in our case, the natural powers for agency grounded in the unique structure of the human organism make possible the realization of personal powers that are grounded in, and thus are afforded by, social life. Causal powers thus belong to the embodied person, not to a pre-cultural or a-cultural biological organism, and the Cartesian material/immaterial dichotomy under- lying the body/mind duality becomes obsolete. The key is the primacy of the person, gesture (including vocal gestures), and social action, not the primacy of the body, experience and individual perception.13 Since powers are grounded in social life, the biological organism, in becoming a person empowered for agency, is thus transformed into the body viewed as a bio-cultural entity. Em- bodiment, the cultural fact of the body, is therefore the result of the social construction and empowerment of the person.14

The new realist position thus neither loses nor obscures substance and cause, and so recovers person and genuine authorship. The person is a substantial being who is causally empowered to author dialogues with other authors. Such a conception of substance and cause is important to an anthropology of physical being and of human movement: this transcendence of the Cartesian materiaVnonmaterial dichotomy forges a view of human beings as embodied because they are personal agents in the utilization of action signs and words.

In order to avoid the current theoretical stalemate summarized in fig. 2, it is useful to reinterpret Merleau-Ponty in terms of the new realist perspective.15




Merleau-Ponty's major shift was to take the Cartesian 'I think' and convert it into 'I can'. If left there, however, we would only have the aforementioned opposition between the intellectualist and the phenomenological perspectives (current terminology would label these as the objectivist and subjectivist positions respectively). Merleau-Ponty's 'I can' is itself ambiguous but need not be interpreted in such a way that we are left with an opposition. 'I think versus I can' (according to Merleau-Ponty) is actually 'I think versus I feel, experience, sense'. If, however, 'I can' is interpreted according to the new realist perspective as indicating our natural capacities and powers for all kinds of action (thinking, feeling, talking and enacting the body) it remains useful. Clearly, Merleau- Ponty reduced this general power of 'I can' to one specific power of feeling as experience. Figure 3 summarizes several ideas around this theme. We now have three perspectives, rather than an opposition between a fallacy and its corrective. A person can think objectively and talk about her own or anyone else's body; a person can feel and talk of her bodily experiences; and a person can enact the body (i.e., move) and thus 'talk'from her body. The point is that none of these positions removes the moving body from the person as agent: bodies do not move and minds do not think - people do. My approach takes as its point of departure an interpretation of the Merleau-Pontian 'I can' as 'I can act'. In this way, instead of a stand-off between two opposing perspectives - in which one is labelled a fallacy and the other the only alternative - we now have three genuine agentive alternatives, different kinds of linguistic practices with their appropriate rhetoric and purposes. The 'I can' is not in opposition to 'I think' but an indicator of our natural capacity to be socially, personally, and physically empowered through membership in a culture to engage in all kinds of semiotic practices.

Descartes Merleau-Ponty

"I think" "I can [experience]"

Talk about the body Talk of the body

3rd person objectivist 1st person subjectivist

body as "it" (not me) "I" feel, experience

"/ can see it" "/ can feel my..."

A reduction of body to A conflation of body

biological organism with organism

or social object

Model of Causality Model of Causao = a substance and its qualities = substanceless qualities

Ghost and the machine Ghost in the machine

Talk about actions using Talk of actions using

word glosses word glosses

FIGuRE 2. The objectivist versus subjectivist pendulum.




Modes of registration and specifcation

Edwin Ardener's (1989b) seminal paper on the analysis of events has proved particularly helpful for thinking about Western perceptions and conceptions of body movement. He reminds us that the particular events that are registered depend on our modes of registration and specification, that is, the means by which they are apperceived. He advises that we should know as much as possible about these modes because 'our definition of... the "events" depends upon the modes of registration available to us' (1989b: 87). The ability to perceive movement as a processual flow of events in space rather than as a series of body positions depends, then, upon having modes of registration and specification adequate to the task. Thus I raise the question, what modes of registration are operating when we begin the anthropological process by making records of some kind, and are these modes of registration adequate for the translation of action?

As Harre puts it, in the Western philosophical tradition the body has been 'left on the butcher's slab more or less since Descartes credited it only with extension' (1986: 52). As noted earlier, the long-standing neglect of the body and human movement in the Western philosophical tradition, bolstered by the Christian disdain for the body as flesh, has, in turn, deflected most social theorists from taking the embodiment of persons seriously. As a result, many sociocultural anthropologists (although they are certainly not alone in this) literally do not 'see' movement empirically, and when they do, it is conceived of as 'behaviour' rather than 'action'.16 Drawing on Ardener's insight, we can attribute this shortcoming to the lack of any mode of registration or specification adequate to the task. Many investigators find it hard to imagine how body movement might 'mean' at all beyond a kind of emotional incontinence, far less contribute anything to our understanding of social structure and cultural

Talk about the body Talk from the body Talk of the body

1st person agentic "Io act

" can act as a person"

agentic entitlement through causal powers and capacities: the body as cultural entity enacted by the person

socially entitled to be a certain kind of actor.

Model of causality = dynamical immaterial

Records of actions via movement scores

FIGURE 3. New realist/semasiological perspective.




practices. On the whole, the need to translate actions from one culture to another is ignored, as gestures and postures are interpreted according to an entirely, for instance, English or French set of conventions (Chapman 1982: 134); and methods of recording that would facilitate analyses of bodily actions as a component of social action have neither been adopted nor sufficiently developed.

I am suggesting that detailed attention to the moving, visual component of human action and interaction in social events has been neglected in the social sciences to date because of fundamental philosophical difficulties inherent in the objectivist separation of mind from body, reason from imagination, cogni- tion from emotion, and verbal from nonverbal, all of which have prevented modes of registration and specification for body movement becoming part of the conceptual resources, and therefore of the research practices, of Western academics. In the absence of such modes of registration and specification, action sign systems such as idioms of dance, systems of ceremonial and ritual action, the martial arts, sign languages and other gestural practices have, on the whole, been denied the status of forms of knowledge.

This is not to imply that attention to 'the visual' has been lacking. On the contrary, the positivist legacy in anthropological theorizing created a mandate for an observationalist perspective that involved a clear separation between observer and observed (Fabian 1983: 106). This tends to be a static visualism, however, that creates objects of vision well removed from the body of the observer. The participant-observer may participate in a ghostlike manner, wan- dering through the ethnographic groves, making notes, drawing diagrams, learning to talk and ask questions, but not, for the most part, learning how to dance, how to gesture appropriately, how to make fires or build a hut, make dry meat, pound grain or put a baby to sleep, and all the other myriads of activities that constitute tacit and embodied knowledge in cultural practices.17

Jackson (1989: 135) offers a revealing glimpse into the possible depth of this problem for investigators socialized into the mores of Western academia in the course of a confessional account of his own alienation from 'bodily praxis'.18 He recalls his conversion experience, from participation characterized as 'to stand aside from the action, take up a point of view and ask endless questions', to participation characterized by the learning of practical everyday skills and dancing. He admits that this was an important precursor to many of his most valued insights into Kuranko social life. In semasiological terms we can say that Jackson discovered the necessity of paying equal and serious attention to signifying acts enacted by the body (action signs) as well as signifying acts achieved with speech. Such serious attention involves learning the structure and semantics of bodily action and requires an investment of time and energy equal to that normally invested only in spoken language learning. The problem for anthropology is how to develop modes of registration and specification that will facilitate such learning, allow adequate records of action to become a normal part of fieldwork practice, and so lead to the presence of enacted forms of knowledge in ethnographic accounts.

Unfortunately, in Jackson's case this discovery of the body leads him to the romantic assumption that 'recognition of the embodiedness of our




being-in-the-world is to discover a common ground where self and other are one' (1983a: 340). To assume, however, that the sheer fact of embodiment allows one to inhabit the world of the Other, is to reduce cultural body to biological organism (Varela 1992). This kind of conflation only perpetuates the frequently held assumption that what looks the same (because we share a common physiology) will mean the same across linguistic and cultural boundaries and will therefore be experienced as the same. Jackson also writes, 'The manner in which a person lives this [existential] struggle cannot be explained wholly in terms of his or her social identity, for we are speaking here of an issue that arises from human existence itself before it is apprehended or elabo- rated in culture-specjftc terms' (1989: 50, emphasis added).19 The theoretical consequence of adopting Merleau-Ponty's ontology in this manner, however, is to continue that tradition which posits a reality sans language, sans culture, sans history, that has been criticized by Rorty (1979). If my interpretation is correct, Jackson appears to propose a reality in the experience of the body apart from semiotic practices, cultural context, beliefs and intentions - a position that strikes one as extraordinary for an anthropologist who also honours social construction theory.

Equally unhelpful then, Cartesianism has also meant that the realm of human movement has long been, for some, the last refuge from language and it is romantically viewed as a final bastion of the natural, the unspoiled, the preconceptual and the primitive; a retreat from the moral responsibility and complexity of the 'verbal' condition. Conversely, as Ardener has suggested, for others, language has long figured as a refuge from materiality.

Movement literacy

In light of the clarification of agency outlined above, Ardener's call for attention to modes of specification and registration requires a methodological shift. Perhaps the most significant technological breakthrough towards a genuine anthropology of embodiment will turn out to be, not, as might be supposed, video and film technology (although they are important aids), but the invention of an adequate script for writing human actions. What is required is a script that will provide the means to become literate in relation to the medium of movement just as we have been able to achieve literacy in relation to spoken language and music. By 'literacy', I mean the ability to read and write movement so that translation into the medium of words is unnecessary for creating ethnographically appropriate descriptions of actions. The breakthrough that is represented by a movement script (in contrast to various forms of mnemonic devices) is that it provides the means to think and analyse in terms of movement itself In Ardener's terms, a script provides a mode of registration and specification that enables the apperception of movement events in ways that are otherwise extremely difficult, if not impossible. It enables body movement to be seen as movement flow rather than as 'successive positions', and as agent- centred action rather than as raw behaviour.

Without a doubt, we know as much as we do about the speech components of discursive practices because we remove them from the flow of 'real time' by writing them down for the purposes of analysis. We are able to do this because




of the invention of the alphabet and phonetic notation systems, and because we are literate in relation to spoken language. These scripts provide a clear mode of specification for components of spoken languages at a phonological level. A script designed for use in the production of movement texts would establish similar conditions for the specification and registration of the bodily, spatial and dynamic components of actions.

Extant European records indicate that since the fifteenth century numerous attempts have been made to invent writing systems for dances or gestures, but it is only in the twentieth century that generalized systems have emerged. The one I have chosen to use is Labanotation.20 After a brief overview of some basic principles of the Laban script, I will show how, in my view, it offers certain conceptual and analytic advances over methods of recording such as word glosses, diagrams, photographs, and film or video, precisely because it provides a mode of specification and registration specific to the medium. Prior attempts to record Plains Indian sign language provide interesting material for the sub- sequent discussion, since a survey of literature on the subject indicates that the difficulty of recording movement data was a major problem for early investigators. Although the data I examine span the past hundred years, the problem remains a salient one in both anthropology and linguistics, not only in the continued study of ceremony, ritual action, theatre and dancing, but also as developments in pragmatics, ethnopoetics and performance theory increasingly emphasize the role of gesture, spatial orientation, indexicality and deixis in verbal performance.21

Labanotation: a scriptfor writing human actions 22

Different disciplines in Western academic contexts clearly reflect dualistic thinking in the ways they choose to define, measure and record human movement. There is, for example, a fundamental distinction between the methods used in biology and physiology, and those employed in the social sciences and humanities. Investigations of the biologicaVphysiological kind are usually con- cerned with metric measurement and involve such notions as angles of displacement, muscle force, velocity and principles of mechanics. Such methods are generally adopted in kinesiological and biomechanical contexts and, in contrast to social scientific and humanistic investigations of human movement, make no attempt to deal with meaning. This tradition continues to separate a 'natural' entity, the human organism, from the person.

In contrast, a movement script must be capable of writing all anatomically possible bodily action in ways that will preserve the identity of the movement, make possible accurate reproduction of it and maintain its semantic content. This entails a concern with recording action rather than gross physical movement. The difference is captured in the well-known philosophical example of the difference between 'the arm goes up' (a description of a gross physical movement) and 'I raise my arm' (a description of an action). As Best puts it, 'one cannot specify an action, as opposed to a purely physical movement, without taking into account what the agent intended, that is, there are reasons for, and purposes to, actions' (Best 1974: 193). Equally important is seeing actions in context; 'most of what we may want to know about a person's




FIGURE 4. A transcription of the action 'I raise my (right) arm' using the Laban script.

intentional action cannot be understood by a narrow concentration upon his physical movement but by... standing back from it and seeing it in context' (Best 1978: 78). Harre and Secord present the difference as follows:

What we see in social reality is not, for example, an arm moving upwards, but a man trying to attract attention, a man greeting a friend and so on. When we see an action of a certain sort we thus connect what we see with a conceptual context utterly different from that involved in seeing movements, and this context determines the form of explanation that is appropriate (1972: 38).23

In this regard, it is important to note that Labanotation is always written from the actor's perspective rather than the observer's, and so has a built-in assumption of agency. Figure 4 records the action 'I (the person acting) raise my arm' rather than the gross physical movement engendered by the phrase 'the arm goes up'. To an ethnographer, however, this description remains inadequate, until some context is provided in which to understand this raising of the arm as an action with a reason or purpose. The description can then be amended accordingly. For example, three occasions of raising the arm might look identical but could be any one of the following three actions:

1) I am reaching up towards the subway strap in order to grasp it and maintain my balance.

FIGURE (1) I (2) (3) FIGURE 5. Labanotation transcriptions of three actions that look the same.




2) I am stretching my hand up away from my shoulder because I am stiff from typing at the computer all morning.

3) I am raising my hand to ask permission from the teacher to leave the room.

The differences between these three actions that are identical in appearance are clearly distinguished in the Labanotation description of them. Even without any prior knowledge of the Laban script the reader should be able to discern similarities and differences in the collection of graphic signs that constitute the

three written actions in fig. 5. Notice that the differences lie in the signsV,

A and , each of which denotes a certain kind of relationship: V denotes action towards something, A denotes action away from something,

and denotes an action that addresses something or someone. In all

three actions the actor moves the right arm from I (hanging 'place low' by the

side of the body), lifting it towards 0 ('place high' above the shoulder). In addition, however, in fig. 5 (1) the actor moves her arm toward S (the subway

l I I l I I -head

left arm -- I I I I right arm

body - - l l - body (torso,chest, pelvis)

left leg gestures I I right leg gestures

support on left I I I I support of body I I I I I I weight/ steps

LEFT RIGHT

CENTRE LINE

FIGURE 6. The basic Labanotation staff provides syntactic order for the symbols of the script.

l l l . . . -head

other body parts - other body parts

left palm/ thumb side of hand - i i - --- right palm / thumb side of hand

left hand shape and orientation 4 I I I I right hand shape and orientation

l l l l l I movement path of right hand movement path of left hand I (lower arm action)

left arm I I rght arm ., , tI II

LEFT RIGHI

CENTRE LINE

FIGURE 7. The Labanotation staff adapted for writing Plains Sign Talk.




strap); in action (2) she moves her right hand t away from the right shoulder r; and in action (3) she addresses T (the teacher). What the script records is neither talk about the body (the objectivist perspective) nor talk of the body (the subjectivist/phenomenological experience of moving) but rather 'talk'from the body - the enactment of the body in the agentive production of meaning.

The placement of the graphic signs in relation to the three vertical lines of the basic 'staff' determine that the arm is moving and not some other body part. The central vertical line divides the right side of the body from the left, and each 'column', moving outwards from the centre line, is reserved for a body part as illustrated in fig. 6.

The standard Labanotation staff shown in fig. 6 can be altered, if necessary, to accommodate specific needs. For example, in my transcriptions of Plains Sign Talk (PST) I decided to eliminate the central columns for weight support, leg gestures and torso, because movement of those parts was not involved in PST. The centre line still divides right and left, and I assign the columns as shown in fig. 7.

Keeping this distinction between action and gross physical movement firmly in mind, we can consider briefly some of the problems that a movement notation system has to solve. The problem is not only how to represent all the parts and surfaces of the body with two-dimensional graphic signs, but also how to organize the writing of those signs when some or all of those body parts are moving simultaneously and/or sequentially in three dimensions of space. All this necessarily takes place through time and occurs most often in relation to other persons who are also moving. The task is complex, but not insurmountable.

1) Body. Figure 8 illustrates how Labanotation solves the problem of representing the joints, limbs and surfaces of the body. The graphic signs are arbitrary, but iconically motivated. They thus offer an aid to memory, but the number of signs required is greatly reduced in comparison to a system that attempts a pictographic representation of the body. Such specification also provides a system of finite differentiation between body parts. Taxonomies of the body differ considerably across languages and cultures, of course, and it is desirable to have the means to take this into account. For example, Ardener (1989a: 166) reports that for the Ibo of south-eastern Nigeria, an action glossed in English as a 'handshake' engages not just the part defined in English as hand, but any part of the arm from just below the shoulder, down to, and including the hand. If a transcription of the action 'handshake' is to record the Ibo conception ofji aka,

it would have to be notated as an action involving a unit [I that corresponds to the Ibo body part called 'aka' - the whole arm from just below the shoulder, including the hand. Labanotation is flexible enough to accommodate such matters. This example also raises important questions about the inadequacies of word glosses in the translation and transcription of action, a point to be taken up in more detail later.24

2) Space. The medium in which the parts of the body move must also be made finite in some way. Problems have frequently arisen with attempts to use




JOINT SIGNS (jC (head) (head)

l' shoulder I f hip

I S 3 1 | r % t | 0 t~ elbow 4 F knee

I | < < ? % wrist I ankle

hand t foot

fingers toes

4 > left right left right

- ~ ~~~~~tub finger joint |t 1tthumbk finger tknuckle e ndt etc.

LIMBS 1 I alM b A double line 11 on the side of a joint sign indicates a limb the limb above that joint e.g. 1t upper arm, I lower neck arm etc. The surfaces of limbs can be specified

when necessary as shown below: 'tj both arms

|| t whole arm SURFACES OF LIMBS

bot~ holeg arm Al It both legs outer or under or thumb little finger

II It whole leg top back or big or little toe left right toe side side

AREA SIGNS O basic area sign SURFACES OF HAND OR FOOT

m shoulder area 1 back of hand or top of foot

~1 chest Ir palm of hand or sole of foot

E1 pelvis r'I fingertips or tips of toes

whole torso Y heel of hand or foot

Al thumb or big toe side J unit from knee to head, etc. li

n area of hand or foot l- ittle finger or little toe side nl area of hand or foot

Sides of an area can be specified using a set of minor directional pins I low, 1 middle 1 high: e.g. upper front side of chest,,i lower left back diagonal side of pelvis,[h front middle area of head, i .e. face. Signs for parts of the face are also built out of these units e.g. 'g?eyes, (bright ear, (jchin.

FIGURE 8. Labanotation: Graphic signs for body parts and surfaces.




conventional numerical measurement to solve this problem because a baseline or point is neededfrom which to measure. A different approach was developed by Laban. Utilizing a Euclidean view of space, Laban conceived of the body as being surrounded by a sphere of space, as if inside a balloon. This spherical space is divided along three dimensions by three axes perpendicular to each other (up/down, rightl0eft and front/back), with the body at the centre. Each of these major directions and intermediate divisions is assigned a graphic sign as illustrated in fig. 9. The script utilizes this simple set theory rather than men- surational measuring. Each graphic sign that refers to spatial direction is built

out of the basic rectangle P. A change of shape denotes the front /back ,

and left < /right > dimensions and a change of shading b (high) (middle),

or i (low) accommodates the up/down dimension. Again the graphic signs are iconically motivated to assist reading.

This same scheme provides a framework for indicating the direction of path- ways for the whole body (as when a person moves from one place to another). Locating a smaller imaginary cross of axes at each joint specifies the direction of individual limbs and smaller body parts. The relationship that obtains between the distal (far) end of a limb and the proximal end (nearest the torso) determines spatial direction. For example, the direction of the arm in fig. 5 is judged by the spatial relationship between the hand (distal end) and the shoulder (proximal end). The hand moves directly above the shoulder and so direction for the arm action is stated as 'moving to place high' using the graphic

sign E. Prior to being lifted, the arm was hanging down beside the torso with the hand directly below the shoulder. This position for the arm is a 'default'

position (assumed unless stated otherwise) and is described as I, having moved to, or being in, 'place low'.

As with taxonomies of the body, there are cultural and linguistic variations to spatial orientation as well as to the semantic values attached to spatial directions.25 For example, in my current research on Plains sign language (or 'sign talk' as my consultants prefer) and Assiniboine storytelling performance, I found that knowing indigenous conceptions and practices with regard to the cardinal directions was, among other things, central to understanding deictic (pointing) reference in both signs and speech (Farnell 1994a). In contrast to European and Euro-American conceptions of north, south, east and west as linear directions that stretch out away from a person, Assiniboine conceptions involve the notion of four winds (t'atetopa) or the four tracks of the winds (t'ateoyetopa) as power that comes towards a person. In addition, the four directions are conceived more as four quarters than as linear directions (fig. 10). Essential to understanding the narratives is knowing in which of the cardinal directions the storyteller is facing, even if deep inside a building in a room with no windows. Such features can also become components of movement texts. Figure 11 shows the first page of my transcription and translation of one Assiniboine storytelling performance ('Long ago, the Indians who live here now, did not live here'). At the start of the text is a spatial orientation key which




Spatial direction is determined by both the shape of the graphic sign and by different shading.

d~~~1b ii~b

up or high middle down or low

IIFi forward d forward right diagonal

P backward q back right diagonal

to the right p back left diagonal

to the left forward left diagonal

up

\ down

The three dimensional cross of axes that organizes spatial direction: the body is in the centre of this kinesphere

) < 2 g /l stepping forward

7 stepping to the right

/ stepping back right diagonal

Gestural data: a smaller cross of Track data: direction symbols for moving axes is imagined at the centre of the whole body from one place to another. each joint so that direction for each These would be placed in the central part of a limb can be specified. support column on the staff (see Figure 6).

FIGURE 9. Labanotation: Graphic signs for specifying spatial direction.




N

W E

S Euro-American cardinal directions

I

E ~ ~ ~ ~~1 W

T N

Assiniboine cardinal directions

FIGURE 10. Two different cultural conceptions of the cardinal directions.

tells the reader that this particular conception of the cardinal directions is in operation throughout the movement score; much as the key of C# minor might operate at the start of a musical score:

N W*E = EEW

S Nfi

The key is built upon the Labanotation symbol for a 'constant cross of axes'

*i which means that direction is determined from features that are 'constant' in the environment. In this example it was the cardinal directions, but it may have been other geographical features, the walls of a room, the sides of a village plaza, or the location of the musicians; whenever a person is judging direction from externally located features rather than from her own body. A constant

frame of reference contrasts with a body frame of reference +, in wvhich the body of the actor determines direction (e.g. the actor's conception would be that the hand goes forward from my body, rather than toward the East or




toward the right side of the ceremonial plaza or toward the singers). Labanota- tion provides a series of 'systems of reference' keys like this that enable these kinds of important conceptual distinctions in spatial orientation to be made clear in the text.

3) Time. Scripts of all kinds deal with time by assigning a direction for reading - an axis for the sequential flow of sound or action. Readers of languages written with the Roman alphabet read from left to right, readers of Arabic read from right to left, and readers of Chinese from top to bottom. Labanotation reads from bottom to top. This was not an arbitrary choice for Laban: he originally devised a script that also read from left to right but changed it in order to accommodate the flow of time when multiple body parts are moving simultaneously. The horizontal axis provides for actions that occur simultaneously, and actions that occur sequentially are shown in vertical succession. Reading vertically, the left/right symmetry of the body is mirrored in the script and the flow of time moves upwards as one reads. When the timing of actions is controlled by music or other rhythmic divisions, the time axis of the staff can be divided up into beats and bars in a manner similar to musical notation. Spatial direction signs normally lengthen vertically to indicate the time taken for performance, but they can also be given a standard length in action sign systems where absolute timing is not important (e.g. sign languages).

4) Additional dynamics. Actions also involve degrees of muscular tension or strength so that dynamics such as acceleration and deceleration, the impetus or initial point for the action, accents, relaxation, vibration and phrasing may also be added to the description.26

5) Relationships. Relationships between body parts, between the person acting and objects or other people are important components of social action and can be described with the kinds of relationship signs mentioned above.

These parameters of the body, space, time, dynamic and relationships, and the graphic signs that specify them, provide a means with which to record 'talk'

from the body - to record the agentive production of meaning using the semiotics of body movement. A critical examination of the methods used in the past to record Plains Sign Talk (PST) will help to illuminate the points I have been making.

Anthropological inquiry into Plains Sign Talk (PST)

The study of sign languages is not at all new to anthropology. In America, the collection and organization of data on 'sign language among North American Indians' was a major concern of the Bureau of American Ethnology at its inception (Mallery 1880a; 1881; Scott 1898-1934). Kroeber (1958) and West (1960) also made important contributions. In Britain, E.B. Tylor's (1865) interpretations were extremely significant and provided theoretical support for Mallery's approach. Tylor's interest was consistent with his evolutionism in that he saw sign languages and gesture as more 'natural' and therefore more




I e NOT

71C 4+ (negative marker)

0

o LIVE/STAY (human)

fipit. Hk

6>

T nen I

x HERE

ectake

LIVE/STAY (human)

Naktota I NAKOTA 0

nen Ii HERE

| qy Ek3 ty (juncture)

Direction of A

reading Wanaq kas LONG AGO

S N

FIGURE 11. Assiniboine storytelling with Plains Sign Talk and Nakota: Page 1 of the Labanotated score.




primitive than speech or writing. Herzfeld summarizes the evolutionist milieu in this regard:

The upper-class Victorian English regarded gesticulation as a 'natural' act, and therefore as Crude' (cf Latin rudis, 'raw', 'unformed'). As a feature of the savage stage in human evolution, and indeed as the only expressive recourse of true savages, it could be treated as both universal and fundamentally invariant: and in this regard it contrasted diametrically with the precise language of educated people - especially of the Europeans, whose linguistic diversity was but a mark of their transcendent unity (Herzfeld 1987: 136).

Tylor expected the elements of gesture to be universally recognizable and this was the source of his interest in what he called, 'the gesture language'. He compared the sign systems of deaf people in a Berlin Institute with those of a similar institution in England, but it was comparisons with data from North America that reinforced his notion of universal elements. He felt he was close to discovering the original sign-making faculty in humans that once led to the emergence of spoken language.

Tylor was able to draw upon data from North America because a fairly extensive body of data on the subject had already been collected by the 1860s, and continued to be documented at the Smithsonian Institution until 1890. 'Indian' sign language was of great popular interest during this period - and has been ever since - as a romantic marker of the Indian as 'natural man'. This was, and is, in marked contrast to popular attitudes towards sign languages used by Deaf persons, for example, where notions of 'handicap' and 'disability' in- trude.27 Despite this romantic image of the silent, stoic-faced, sign-talking Indian, the predominance of social evolutionism as a metatheoretical perspective meant that sign languages were generally classified as representing a primitive stage in the development of spoken language and the use of signs was deemed to be a significant marker that confirmed the primitive status of the Indians of the Plains themselves.

Evolutionary assumptions also left unexamined possible connexions between gestural signs and spoken language. If gestural signs were survivals of a more primitive stage of human development - declining as spoken languages evolved - then there would be no theoretical reason to examine relationships between speech and gesture. One result of this separation, and a contributing factor to its continuation, was a singular focus on Plains Sign Talk as a lingua franca among Plains communities who spoke different languages but who regularly came into contact with each other. 'While this was certainly the case, it was only one function of PST. This emphasis in the historical record was misleading because it omits the many intra-tribal functions of sign talk: more recent research indicates that it was (and is) also an integral part of the linguistic repertoire of people who did speak the same language (Farnell 1994a). Theory, of course, is a device for focusing our attention (Harre 1986a: 83), and until the theoretical position shifted, the fact that people signed and talked at the same time could not be accorded the status of evidence.

It is interesting to note that the most extensive early documentation of PST was carried out almost entirely by army officers (Col. Mallery 1880a; 1881; Capt. Clark 1885; General Scott 1898-1934; Col. Dodge 1882). They learned Plains Sign Talk, or learned about it, from Native American scouts who worked




for the U.S. army, or from the residents of Indian encampments outside army forts on the Plains during the 1860s and 70s, and later at reservation agencies. The task of recording signs was pursued in somewhat military fashion, the aim being to create ordered, dictionary-like classifications of 'signs', although this military fervour was entirely consistent with more widespread Victorian obses- sions with collecting and classifying. Capt. Clark's collection was, in fact, commissioned by General Sheridan, who was primarily interested in its potential military use rather than in any scientific or linguistic enterprise.

Col. Garrick Mallery's work provides the largest and most comprehensive example of this approach. Although employed by the U.S. Army Signals Corps, he worked at the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington D.C. and em- barked upon an ambitious master plan: the creation of a complete collection of signs obtained through correspondence with non-Indians who, by the 1870s, were resident all over the Plains. Figure 12 shows an example of the recording sheets Mallery distributed for that purpose. A generic - notably male and naked - Indian upper body was represented pictographically, with the path of movement of a sign to be filled in by the correspondent. Handshapes were represented by letters of the alphabet, and the contributor was asked to give an English translation of its meaning and a description of the actions in words.

As Native American dignitaries began to visit Washington in the 1880s, Mallery used them as informants and took photographs of them with hands positioned as if they were signing. He later used many of these as the basis for illustrations in his publications (e.g. fig. 13). He was certainly using all the means readily available to him at the time, but as we shall see, these had severe

511ith-so)lln 2a'15kitlitin. XSurrnu of- Tthnologg.

OUTLIJJES Fo() R AlkM POSITIONS IN GESUrrEURE LANGUAGE.

It 1 -'llse , ."tl , 1.,1. VImlict.lvl l* camclted lwt^iti-tit;l of arm,l ndz 1.v th.,ttd litie, t .mim-, ili t11 mlotiotol tgiml the inlitiall to the final posi- fiuvi,, %ill l-e nl%%:tv! F tlitmi tS sL4te.v ni-ptal I-, ali t)b.t-i%4- rsiceiig tlit- gt,in1rer, tliC- fit-tlt c-i Fitle atitt1111v, m otlltt, I)hilg tis,edl :1 most eoiivellient Tile

Sr pliull vt of ha:tt-i -tAit- 1. fmgI r ill bi e b eYgigttated by reterece t t "'Trrs o1r IAX lQIA SITW(NS."

1oatd or I dea expi vsCsed bs Sign: /4 0

FIGURE 12. An example of the form sent out from the Bureau of American Ethnology by Mallery (1880a) to his 'collectors' of signs out on the Plains.



950 BRENDA M FARNELL

FIGURE 13. An illustration from Mallery (1 880) showin-g how illustrations were taken from photographs. Mallery frequently used the faces and torsos from original photographs but replaced the handshapes. Sometimes costumes were altered, replacing 'white man' s'clothing with more traditional Indian items.

shortcomings. Mallery's meta-theoretical commitment did not give him any reason to move beyond the techniques that were readily available. It may appear that he simply chose the easiest solutions to the recording problem, but this merely begs the question of what conceptual orientation made such choices appear easier rather than inadequate.

I have divided investigators' attempts to record these movement data into four basic categories: (1) word glosses, (2) descriptions in words, (3) drawings and diagrams of various kinds and still photographs, (4) film records. Different problems arise from these various methods of recording and I will examine each of them in turn.

Word glosses A word gloss is a word or phrase which most accurately translates the meaning of a gestural sign into a spoken language. A 'sign' is a loosely-defined unit equivalent to 'word' or 'lexeme' in a spoken language. In the early collections of PST, not only Mallery, but also Tompkins (1926), Clark (1885) and others used this device. In their work one finds 'signs' written as English word glosses listed in dictionary fashion and frequently accompanied by a written description in English of how the hands and arms might be moved so as to produce the sign (e.g. fig. 14).

While word glosses used in this way were in one sense adequate for listing some lexical items, which was the aim of these collectors, several problems arise. First, the unsuspecting reader is led into a subtle misconception that the




a roiiii(I budllet. bhtet>w n themll (tlhis is the lbulllet), is carried to tlie left. hiand1 :alld thle tinigers relaxe(l as tliotigli pIlacing the lbtllet ini the eircuflar openilln, anid tlheni strikle do%vni oni the left hand, witlh tllc edge ot tfle righlt fist (A l) a,is tlhouglh diixiii vig the btillet lhome. This sigtn is tfiat for lo:dinig a. gun. (Dakofr IL)

To destroy. Move the, righ1t 11:uid1 (F) inl fionlt of thle body as thlollgll throwving

soniething forward, and tileii iiuake the sigin for Fir-c. (Dakota f.)

Of' thle o(d(1y. Toutch the buirint part with tite righ1t id(ex and tilell m.ake the sign

for FP ir-e. (Dakota I.) "Fro li fire."

Ilmury, To. B3otil flat anlld extended hands lhelI at armns'-lengthm lefore the abdomiii,

e(lges olownl, :Mnd about an inicil or two apart, thumbs, toutchiii; 1bo1tf halis are tlieii t,hrow,i ouitwvard towar(l thieir respective sides refeatedly, as it throwilln away fronil their upper surfaces soile liglht substa nec. Tfiemi reverse tieb iiiotion tioifr witihouit inward. (Slioshoti anId Baat(tk 1.) "Throwing upl earth from)1 a (litcli, au(d ret.turiiig it."

Uuu-. SeC 'l';lde.

C.- llI 1 .

Clintchi bothi 11:halds , liolol thieni tl)pward before time breasts, thiilimil,s touefmllillmg tliemi p:ass tleliii forward, each describing a seiiiicircle, so that the otuter edges toulcli at the termninatioim otf the gesture. (Arikara l.)

Tlmtumiib ot the, right haindi iider the fiigers; i. e., in the palmn of' the 11a1n1d, otilherwise fist (II); sniap otut the fingers ani( tlhumlb iii frotnt of thie rilit breast, aiid titeii immake the sign for Ili-. (Dakota L.) "Tlhe b)ig explosion Firoiti the smoke made, on the discharge of a cannon."

C:apt, pi'rctlllsioIU. See G111u.

Captulr'e, 'To. See IP'isoumcl, to t:aLc.

Cards, plavimug. (1) Leftt hand fully opelled, slalnt, and hel( ul) to the lev-el aiid in froiit

of' the shoulder; (2) suidden pecking mtiotion nmade with the partially- close(d fiimgers of the riglht haD(d live or six timues towvards the palll of thle opeii lef t lhandl, as tlhouighi tlirowiiti cards. (Cheyentne I.)

Go throtugih the iiiotioiI of (dcalinlg fromi a pack of canls, anid throwimig ote each to imagiiiary pla.yers, right, fronit, ami(i heft. (Dakota VI, VII.)

FIGURE 14. Word glosses of PSL signs accompanied by descriptions of movements in words. From Mallery (1880) 'Collection of gesture-signs of the North American Indians' (for collaborators only), Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Clark (1885) also used this method of recording signs.




word gloss is a written representation of the sign itself and that the description, as in a spoken language dictionary, is equivalent to details of pronunciation, meaning and use. The word gloss is not a written representation of the sign, however, but the result of a translation from one language, PST, into its nearest written English equivalent. It is important to note that this process also involves a translation across three different media: from movement to speech to the written representation of speech. Using this format, the very notion that a translation into English has occurred tends to be 'glossed over'. The accompa- nying descriptions, which are designed to assist the performance of the sign, in no way substitute for the kind of information given in a good spoken language dictionary where attention is given to the possible range of meanings of an entry in different contexts and to the ambiguities of translation. Assumptions that PST was a simple code rather than a fully developed language appear to have precluded any expectation of semantic nuance or grammatical structure.

The use of word glosses also relies on the notion of a one-to-one correlation between sign and word which does not in fact exist. Word glosses lead to a view of PST as a non-vocal version of a spoken language rather than as a language in its own right with its own unique grammatical structure. A third major problem arises with the use of word glosses as soon as grammatical components of signed sentences are taken into consideration. For example, in Hofsinde (1941: 151), 'I HUNGRY ALAS AMONG OJIBWAY TIMIDLY CAPTURE' is presented as a transcription of the signed utterance (the upper case was used to mark word glosses). Translated into grammatical English this means, 'I was so hungry, alas, that when I found myself among the Ojibway Indians I allowed myself to be captured'. Linguists, of course, frequently use literal inter-linear translations like this, prior to creating grammatical translations in the target language. What frequently happens with translations of signs, however, is that the final stage of translation into a grammatically correct form of the target language is omitted, thereby perpetuating the illusion that the signs constitute a simple, non-grammatical code. The problem with a transcription of this kind for PST is that, because there is no method of writing down the movement, a reader must translate from written English into movement while reading the word glosses. This is not at all the same as decoding from written text to speech, because graphic signs relate to a particular medium and the characters of the Roman alphabet represent spoken language units. The reader of word glosses of signs must translate into an entirely different medium in order to produce the sign itself or to think of it. The latter is a factor of considerable importance for Deaf persons who must think with movement to think in their native languages. The alphabetic characters of spoken language units represent a considerable challenge for the Deaf (Jacobs 1980); nevertheless, word glosses remain the major means of representing signed discourse in educational textbooks.

Another problem arises due to grammatical differences between spoken and signed languages. In PST, as in other sign languages, adverbs which describe the action change the performance of the sign itself Rather than being added before or after a verb as is usual with spoken language, they often occur at the same time. Thus, the PST sign glossed as WALK is performed in a certain way, but to sign WALK QUICKLY; one does not add another sign meaning QUICKLY,




rather one inflects the verb, by adding speed to the performance of the sign WALK. This feature of simultaneity is an important one in PST grammar and reveals yet another limitation in the use of word glosses, which can only order elements in linear sequence. Neither WALK QUICKLY nor QUICKLY WALK correctly represents the sign, for the two elements are produced simultaneously in one action. The Laban script can accommodate this simultaneity by utilizing the vertical axis for transcribing successive actions through time and the horizontal one for simultaneous action, as shown in fig. 15.

Glossing rapidly loses any ability to represent the relevant aspects of the signing stream. As soon as information goes beyond the simple listing of lexical items, one needs to have further means for representing the use of the hands: without such specification, a spatial grammar remains invisible.

0 T

x j-S ..

T T

!S x 7)

WALK WALK QUICKLY

FIGURE 15. Accommodating simultaneous action in PST grammar.

Perhaps the most important anthropological argument against word glosses as a method of recording action signs is the way in which translation of meaning is lost. The example cited earlier of the differences between an Ibo greeting glossed as a 'handshake' and an English greeting can be supplemented here by an Assiniboine example. Prior to the 1800s the offering of a hand to shake was a new form of greeting on the Plains, but has long since been adopted as a greeting between both strangers and acquaintances. There is, however, a distinct quality of handshake among Assiniboine and Sioux women that is a relaxed gentle touch of the fingers only, not the whole hand. This serves to transmit important information about ethnic identity for the participants. The gentle touch, not a shake, confirms that the person engaged in the act is Native American (if this is not obvious from appearance), or at least someone who is familiar with Indian ways. For the Euro-American this lack of pressure in the hand, and contact of mostly fingers rather than the whole palm, seems rather




cool and distant, because it is expected that this action contains an expression of emotion: for the 'whiteman' the firmer the grip and the wider the smile the greater the investment of 'friendliness'.

Like the Ibo taxonomy of the body, the Assiniboine (Nakota language) taxonomy does not coincide with English. Whereas 'arm' in English usually includes the hand, in Nakota, the 'arm' (ist6) extends from the shoulder to the wrist only, the 'hand' (ncape) is a different body part. It becomes clear how in these kinds of cross-cultural comparisons of action signs, word glosses such as 'handshake' often cover up distinct action signs and their meanings in unfortunate ways. As we have seen, for Ibo and Assiniboine people, a 'handshake' can involve neither the hand (as bounded by the English term) nor a shaking action.

Handshakes and the like belong to an area of human social life which is commonly taken to be the most observable, the kind of behaviour that can be relatively objectively described. Even in this apparently simple zone, however, action and thought are inextricably linked and mediated by language. In both Nakota and English, as with Ibo and English, there are apparently inter- translatable terms for the gesture of 'shaking hands' but they cannot be said to refer to the same action sign across cultures. For the Native American woman offering relaxed fingers, a hearty grip is a gesture with a different meaning; a gesture that is not only a greeting but an indication of both ethnic identity and ethnic awareness. To paraphrase Ardener (1989a: 172), the instance may appear to be socially trivial but the relationships between Native Americans and non- Indians have no more characteristic a framework than this (see fig. 16).

Descriptions of signs using words

Whereas word glosses attempt the translation of a sign into a spoken or written word, verbal descriptions provide a stream of spoken language terms that aim to provide sufficient information to allow the reader to perform the sign. Parts

z N

A B A B Ibo (Nigeria) Assinibome and Sioux

-f-

A B

Euro-American

FIGURE 16. Three distinct action signs glossed as 'a handshake'.




of the body are named along with the handshapes and types of movement involved in individual sign production. Boas (1890), Clark (1885), and many others used this method. Examples were given in fig. 14 and another typical example comes from Boas's descriptions of gestures in use on the northwest coast of British Columbia:

BOY, ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS OF AGE: open hand raised in front of breast to the height of the chin, palm turned towards face (Boas 1890: 639).

WXThile one admires the considerable skill of these writers in their attempts to render movement in the terms of spoken language, if the reader will pause a moment and try to perform the sign as instructed, it soon becomes clear that so many ambiguities arise as to make accurate reproduction impossible. The description can at best serve only as an aide memoire for someone already familiar with the performance of the action. The above example serves to illustrate several drawbacks that only become obvious by comparison with the kind of apperception made possible through a mode of specification such as the Laban script. For example:

(1) Does 'open hand' mean the hand k stretched V with the fingers

together ? Or the hand not stretched but with the fingers separated? Or 44

the hand stretched and fingers separated? And are such distinctions constituent or contingent features of a sign? Given what we know about the symbolic importance of distinctions between right and left hands, does it matter which hand is used? And what about the symbolic values attached to all the other dimensions - up/down, front/back, inside/outside?

(2) Does 'raised' mean l along a straight vertical path, or V towards the

A chin, or I away from the ground? Or simply upwards U?

(3) Does 'in front of the breast' mean F1o centrally placed? Or f, to one side; and if so, which side, that which is the same as the active arm or its opposite?

4) Are the fingertips facing [ (upwards), Fl (sideways), or [ (forward left

diagonal high)? Is the palm just facing toward the face r or addressing the face




m ~~~~~~~~~~~~~0t i'~J ? Does it maintain a relationship to the face throughout I ; or

T )

merely end in such a position Sceptics, of course, may wish to argue that Boas' s description is incomplete

only because he chose not to make a detailed study, but that he could have done. To argue thus, however, would be to miss Ardener's important insight. For such details to be registered at all depends upon having a mode of registration and specification: the script is the means by which such detail is apperceived. The idea that looking long enough somehow enables one to see, is, of course, one of the basic errors of empiricism.

Harris (1980: 9) has cautioned us, however, about being blind to the limitations of scripts in this regard. What we perceive as units of sound in spoken languages are very largely artefacts of an alphabetic script, they do not exist independently in the sound for the script faithfully to represent. In the same manner, units of movement do not exist independently in the movement for the Laban script faithfully to represent. However, just as this limitation does not remove the advantages of spoken language literacy, so it does not remove the advantages of being literate in relation to movement.28

Diagrams, drawings and still pictures

The most obvious problems with pictorial means of representing actions are the restrictions imposed by two dimensions, and representing movement as a static picture. Many authors, like Mallery, hit upon the idea of using various devices such as arrows, dots and lines in order to reduce three dimensions to two and to add information about the missing movement component (see figs. 17, 18 and 19). While a succession of pictures or still photographs might permit general recognition of the intended meaning, and identify the general direction of an intended movement path in space, the flow of movement is removed so that this form of representation does not permit the ethnographer or linguist to indicate details of rhythm, relative placement of hands, and other factors of timing and spatial organization which create the complexity of signed discourse. The use of such representations has tended to mask the fact that such syntactic and semantic structure is present and may affect meaning and interpretation. Once again, these static pictures generally call to mind the intended form, but serve only as a mnemonic device, capable of reminding the reader who already knows the language. For the naive reader or student of a sign language they may inadvertently cause confusion, and for comparativists such as Tylor and Mallery, it was all too easy to fall into the fallacy that 'what looks the same will mean the same' or its alternative, 'what means the same will look the same', leading to erroneous claims concerning the universality of gestural signs.




Ces*. Suul.isee ss1s. about esx lae aL Mowa the basds bdem q. wad ai dewnaw.d a let. leeheseeral tsies,

Cy To swq, T. With G

foreefisgen str the

eyes traea ite ct.tunes at tnt. SI etcetve, pg Ran from the Dowe (Dnnming). Hoid up ae&t tatd fsehh4, / , eyeL (BlDtai-.) Cotpt Pity. backtoide,thumb reas daup:jerkupuatd (C) / -

Fr. pkere; Ger. ediss. Fr. ste;lk dee.; Ger. lase, dr Tem.

? C_u, (Stt. oir C.. Make the sip for Wolf D_r (Tbe Sces or Welf geing ahead sad as

sAd add the sip 4ses. Compare Csside. ba to rept dasgee). Right V bhas, bat spsa. Fr. rsi; Ger. Aks. moved d&ectly sad slowly forwae f din ht of thee rght

Cat. abaldder ad then sddealy snd qukkly dras bath at CaL Saw the lorer edge of the Bat right at... the thsm e tim e the body is bak atL (Sea plm or aedge of the flat left. aka.)

_ Fr. c"pr; Ger. schnede easpee; Gee. sDe_eudea. DaSign Lt.k, Liltk, Afraid (NO. 2).

Celig up. See Moe. Fr. k dAser; Gee. ie Gefa.

.2- , ;;8 Cysts.. or WbLhL With flat right hasd, bath to Da_gm (Of a mtn). Sign Saesg sd Bad. the fthrbt Nd level rith the ridt sboulder,e maykeains Fr. dasgaesa; Ger. gefkikk upward. A very smaa one for a Sttle dust whirlwied,

S. aad lap vioeleat oe for a dageea cydonedo. D See Ckp. *U5 Fr. lF cyde; Ger. dew W i

D ~~~~~~~~~~~Do*h,Usbsees Ohiases Being the Bat basids, bath 8 . / . De. Sa.t.~. eaaoutwd, ia ft ofatela, right hand aret late, let a a

\ DaL Sip for Stre"a or Riw asd Hld. (Bahk- Sttle ahead, hads roseed, tips at fine about *p.

iot.) posite ceate of forehead; brag the ha vl erey sllghtly Fr. l aigs, Pidis; Ger. sr Da. teod flae. Compae Asha sad aUsd.

A_ Fr. eRscw; Get. Jwd. Dunis D (Peopl ju-ping topther). Bfmg the fit (o ' IS") haada in frolt of body abt height of beet, Dasgtor. Sigs Be sa Psa. with figey pating ai y up, pasl toward -atothe Fr. klalk; Gee. Js Tadis.

FIGURE 17. An example from E.T. Seton (1918) that uses all available means: word glosses, verbal description, and sketches with dotted lines.

ete Stsmoe,ie Meck z.1t Teepec 5-gmspeir Tell Me Deekl ThntsikYou

Eaii ~~~~~~~aPhases- Dick Thick Diin Thisn D?nken Thirk

Te.ps ~ ~ Ftla~Taha

Time Miid. Tired Tibet TObdCCO

Ensemble Fb~~~Mch. d. ugr .c.-rr d Eeeeiebfr

Together , Toeiahiwk Taih- Trade

4j .

L F21 le T ~Arb..T ie Fall. Trdp B-am Tree Tr.abee Tr I..in *1-wi,,g sh-s beginning awl dotted outline shows end of noveient of llandst

Students mtust C. ..pare ilach Diarg;...i witliE..l ,dawimi Fotitid on Oinp-site itage

FIGURE 18. Sketches of PST signs from Tompkins (1926) that attempt to record the movement component with lines, arrows, and dotted lines for the final hand positions.




PSALM 19 CON.

LIKE A-MAN STRONG. HERUNS-A-RACE OVER-ALL THE SKY.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

HEAT HIS COMES-TO A L L THINGS.

GOD HIS LAW A LL COOD

SAME MAKES MAN HIS LIFE WALK THE-STRAICHT-ROAD.

THE-WORDOF-GOD IS SURE, MAKING WISE THE SIMPLE.

GOD HIS BOOK RIGHT MAKINC THE -HEART -CLAD.

THE-ROAD GOD T E L L S MAN W A L KI S-A-C L E AN ROAD,

THE-SAME I S-AS L I GHT TO-TH E-EYE S.

FIGURE 19. Missionary Lewis F. Hadley promoted the use of PST for teaching Christianity and published a book and a series of cards (1893). Where his religious concepts did not fit with those of indigenous peoples, he invented new signs or stretched translations to accommodate Christian ideas as best he could, sometimes with amusing results.

It could be argued that if Mallery's drawings leave much to be desired, this may be because his understanding of PST was not very sophisticated, rather than due to the limitations of the technique of representation. Again Ardener's insight is important: Mallery's analytic understanding of PST was limited precisely because the techniques of representation which he settled for could not provide the kind of detail he needed to talk about structure, syntax and dialect variation with any consistency. The fact that contemporary investigators of sign languages of the Deaf have developed this technique to a fine graphic art, does not remove these serious problems.29 Their commendable efforts to make their work accessible to wider audiences can also be seen in negative terms as a capitulation to the hegemony of norms of representation in print. Such accom- modation may, in fact, compromise their analytic progress.




It is interesting to note that the representations of PST signs made by Plains Indians themselves, as they are found on petroglyphs and winter counts,30 contrast markedly with the kinds of pictorial records and diagrams made by non-Indian observers. They therefore provide important evidence of indigenous conceptions about movement and the sign language. Figure 20 illustrates how graphic representations of PST signs appear as rather abstract designs that contrast with the surrounding iconic representations of persons and objects. This is because what is recorded is the path of movement of a sign, not the body parts that produce that movement. This contrasts sharply with the kinds of records produced by non-Indian investigators such as Mallery (1880a), Tompkins (1926), and Hadley (1893) who diagram one or two positions of the body in the form of hands and torso and then attempt to show movement with arrows and lines attached to the body parts.31 This difference is not without import,

The characters in these pictographic stories are arranged in a spiral formation, the course of the spiral being from right to left, starting from right center and reading backwards. This form is used in Lone Dogs' Winter Count and certain other famous Sioux documents.

= SUNRISE DAY

/ \o = SUNSET

TRADE

RIVER

4 = RAIN STORM

FIGuRE 20. Graphic depictions of Plains Sign Talk by American Indians. The top part of the illustration is from Tompkins 1926; used with permission.




because it highlights the distinction between ways of seeing or not seeing human movement, which I mentioned earlier. The graphic representation of PST by Native Americans themselves, as movement patterns in space, supports my earlier statement that the predominant Euro-American view of movement as a series of body positions in space, rather than a medium that creates its own patterns and shapes, is both culture-specific and problematic.

Ironically, it was the iconic form of many PST signs (frequently given the derogatory label 'pantomimic'), that led to the system being regarded by nineteenth-century investigators as a 'primitive language'. As it turns out, it was the non-Indian view that presented a static, iconic representation, in contrast to the less obviously iconic form of the movement path chosen as a graphic representation by Native Americans.

Munn (1973: 4) has observed that the pictorial properties of Walbiri (Australian) graphic representations are also of the kind that are often overlooked by West- ern observers, since the elements are for the most part simple forms of the kind misleadingly labelled 'geometric' or 'abstract'. Walbiri graphic symbolism is also closely bound up with linguistic communication in Walbiri thought and usage, thereby providing evidence of links between the visual and the vocal in that culture also. The graphic designs are used on the body in ceremonials and in conversation and storytelling when they are drawn in the sand. Munn tells us that they enter Walbiri imagination as a kind of visual language for ordering meaning. As these also are people who use a sign language extensively (Kendon 1988), it would be interesting to know what kinds of links might exist between spoken, graphic and signed practices, and how they might compare to those of Plains cultures.

Photographic records involve exactly the same kinds of problems as diagrams and sketches, in that they too present a static and two-dimensional picture, despite the illusion of presenting three dimensions. It is interesting to note that popular publications using photographs as illustrations have been authored by Native Americans such as Iron Eyes Cody (1952), a well-known 'Hollywood Indian', and 'Grey Wolf' (Hofsinde 1941), as shown in fig. 21. The frontispiece to Hofsinde's article again presents a male naked torso, now adorned by the equally stereotypical Plains war bonnet. Such popular publications offer a random lexical selection presumed to be of interest to non-Indians, and they continue to appear (e.g. Fronval & Dubois 1985).

A writing system that is based on a script offers several advantages over iconic or pictographic representational devices whose function is essentially mnemonic. Goodman (1976) has provided a set of criteria for a writing system that have been systematically applied to the Laban system (Williams & Farnell 1990; Page 1990b; see also Wellisch 1978). They include features such as semantic and syntactic disjointedness, including character indifference and rules for making compound elements; finite differentiation; compliance with score and context and others. Ideally, with an alphabetic script there can be only one reading: each graphic sign represents one sound, according to what Sampson (1985) has called 'the phonographic principle', although in practice most orthographies that use an alphabet contain some inconsistencies. A script such as Labanota- tion can be said to create an analogous 'alphabetic' level of representation for




\\IL1 Mo hi:d IIMSawtternvd for-

\

1WH!TFIAN-4ndicaft hat

brim

bt KI ir

rkrr%

% rd, as i %%dhig on h.tnds drawvinig finager acr "s forcht-ad StNI.)\\ *Saims-wirling. ik

HOT--f1Anrh, swcr.p down and stop COLD-Fists are clenched ais when N)t MAN~-Aikis 4ombing Imir urich jitnt sfhKrt of head, like ravs of sun cold. and brought against chest fingerS.TrhiN plus 'huhIt mc4orf) girl

U~~~~~~~~~

lIi'A sign *howing puosition of 4 HA/N' 4 ru1r r 'o

"ti~. Ftrt 1&)N) (

rt*rscdtl %t prtrNwd to 'lr4no t gorioi,hrt-Al on1 hAld* rioli'Lt- -t Arsr lml % 'i,.to rls hrr

NitAro 31- tl.tr'h' AndlL

FIGuR-E 21. Photographs, In isolation or in series i'ke this (Hofsinde 1941),

were also used in attempts to record individual signs and signed utterances.




human movement that we could call kinographic, although in Labanotation more detailed features of specific performances can be included if required, depending upon the purposes of the investigation. This frees Labanotation from some of the limitations of alphabetic scripts of concern to some linguists and performance theorists (see Tedlock 1983: ch. 7). A level of representation is obtained that facilitates the accurate reproduction of actions. At issue here is the question of the identity of behaviour. Movement recorded using the Laban script, when read and performed, is identifiable as the same movement.

Film and video records

If diagrammatic forms of representation and photographs fail to provide adequate records because of their inability to capture the third dimension and the movement component, then surely, it might be supposed, video and film solve all the problems. Indeed, General Scott rushed to make a film record of PST in 1930 as soon as the technology became available to him. An often-voiced question from anthropologists, dancers and lay-persons alike is, 'Why bother with a writing system for movement when surely video and filmed records bypass the problem?' One might equally ask other linguists and anthropologists why they have not abandoned writing since the invention of the tape-recorder.

In order to understand the nature and value of literacy, it is fruitful to make a comparison between listening to a tape recording of spoken language and reading a text. The axiomatic difference is one of being freed from the constraints of 'real' time. A reader can jump backwards and forwards in the text, or slow down or stop the process, in order to concentrate upon difficult passages. The term 'read' does not simply mean decoding to spoken language, since with fluency this does not necessarily happen (Stubbs 1980). Reading essentially entails understanding and this involves reasoning, problem-solving and high- level inference.

Listening to a tape recording or seeing a video means hearing or seeing as if in an oral culture, albeit over and over again at will. I do not consider the intellectual life of oral cultures primitive, and the 'oral/literate divide' has been exposed as yet another anthropological oversimplification. Nevertheless, it is also the case that a writing system offers distinct new possibilities. As Gelb (1952) and Ong (1982) have pointed out in their discussions of the intellectual functions of written language (despite some problematic evolutionary assumptions), a writing system does provide new intellectual resources which facilitate thought in many areas: accurate records can be kept of discoveries, inventions, theories and blind alleys, so that each generation is freed from the constraints of the memory of the previous one, and this makes critical, analytic and systematic consideration much easier.

A written score of the movement component of an event offers the same kind of analytic possibilities in relation to human movement, and the same kinds of potential in intellectual reasoning and understanding about human action, that conventional written texts have afforded in relation to speech. The use of film and video instead of, rather than in addition to, written texts denies this possibility. Such technological aids can indeed be said to bypass problems




involved with the reading, writing and learning of a script, but we must seriously question whether or not, in so doing, they also bypass the possibility of reaching new levels in our understanding of the complexities and significance of embodied human action.

Other problems arise with the assumption that film or video provide adequate records; adequate that is for anthropological understanding. If a participant in a danced event, ritual setting or signed conversation, for example, turns away from the camera, then the action cannot be seen. The camera lens can only be in one position at a time; therefore only a selective and peripheral view from one or more particular angles can be obtained. This creates a front for the action rather like the proscenium stage common to Western theatre. Many ritual situations, however, are not oriented in this way at all. A particular focal point may be in the centre of a circle of people, or attached to a particular actor or object in the rite, whose position may change. In these kinds of cases, the front which a camera lens presents may not be relevant to the action, since the lens itself is on the sidelines.

In contrast to this, an investigator using Labanotation builds a movement score of an event by working with the actors outside of any particular live performance, in order to record the action from each agent's perspective. The method is identical to the way in which a linguist might work with one con- sultant at a time to analyse and interpret previously observed or recorded speech events. Within the final written movement score one finds information about the movement of each person in the event - the body parts involved, spatial directions, relationships between other movers and the intended focus of the movements - all recorded from that person's perspective. Anyone literate in Labanotation could read the score and attempt to perform the same movements, although accurate realization will, of course, depend upon the physical abilities of the reader. A fundamental difference, then, between a filmed record and a Labanotated score is that the former provides a perspective likely to be partial and peripheral, whereas the latter's perspective is actor- centred, sufficiently complete to allow full reproduction and is central to the identity of the event in question. Constituent features of the event such as the spatial relationships between participants, and between participants and objects, and the organization of space internal and external to the rite, can also be clearly recorded in the written score.

A ritual event, ceremony, dance or signed conversation has form and content that must be learned and practised. An investigator must invest time and energy learning from participants about the movement system in question and the kinds of knowledge, both explicit and tacit, that go into what counts as a particular event, and what counts as a correct or acceptable performance of any constituent actions. The recording of an event with Labanotation is, then, a process of the same order as that by which the participants are brought into preparedness to undertake the event. Frequently, a video-taped or filmed record can serve as an excellent basis for discussions with participants as the movement score is being built up.

For these kinds of reasons, it is wrong to think that one can make films in the field and then 'do' the notation back at home. Notators who have been




requested to create movement scores from film data collected by other anthropologists have found the task to be impossible because, apart from visual ambiguities, vital questions about the intentions of movers, and about the meanings of spatial relationships and spatial organization have not been asked (Page 1990a; 1990b). In addition, the often subtle links between indigenous spoken language concepts and classifications and consultants' own descriptions of movement have frequently remained unexplored. What can be written from observation alone can frequently only be a tentative beginning for a movement score, because the aim is to adhere to the long-held anthropological objective of producing a record of their understanding of their actions - to translate the 'native point of view' in so far as this is possible. Certainly this goal has been made more complex as we reach for more sophisticated standards of objectivity and reflexivity, but surely it remains. Without such attention the notated results would simply be an ethnocentric record of observed physical behaviour instead of an ethnographic record of meaningful social action.

The writing of a movement text can be no more 'purely descriptive' than can that of a standard ethnographic text; both are beset with problems of translation and interpretation. As with a standard ethnography, one builds one's interpretations over time and makes choices about descriptions as one's knowledge increases. With a movement text, however, one is aiming at a performable script that encodes indigenous understandings.

Another fundamental misconception that often arises in discussions of human action is that movement events are ephemeral phenomena that can claim no ontological status beyond their performance. For those who assume that this is the case, capturing action on film is thought to be the only 'real' way it can be recorded. The difficulty encountered here is due largely to the lack of any notion of shared resources in relation to human actions. However, the form of a particular ritual event, and the conventions that make up a dance style or sign language, exist as knowledge beyond any particular performance. Such constructs and conventions are shared cultural resources instantiated in performance.

Film and video records about events, while extremely valuable, are, like the tape recordings of the linguist, a place to start doing anthropology. It is necessary to move beyond observation to deal with the systems of knowledge involved; the shared resources, the use of which creates what is manifestly observable (see Farnell 1994b). This involves making central what it is that people say (or do not say) about what they do, and investing time in learning the particular action sign system under investigation. The use of a script like Labanotation enables the ethnographer to create a text of an event by working as closely as possible with the agents' definitions. This differs from film or video, which can be said, instead, to create a record about an event.

Conclusion

This article suggests that the new realist perspective offers the necessary philosophical grounding for a view of person and agency as embodied. Once persons are conceived as empowered to perform signifying acts with both speech and action signs, the way is clear to develop strategies for the systematic




investigation of action signs. I have suggested the adoption of a movement script as a methodological resource because it provides modes of registration and specification that meet the requirements of a social theory of embodiment. Although the institutional structure of anthropology has marginalized movement and movement writing within a specialized sub-field, I believe that they should be reintroduced into the anthropological mainstream.

Without the analytic categories of a writing system one cannot see movement in a way that facilitates in-depth analysis and understanding. 'While recognizing the limitations of any script, as well as the history of relations between literacy and power (Goody 1977; 1986; Harris 1980; Herzfeld 1987: 39), the value of literacy as a way to gain an understanding of the medium and its use is indis- pensable. For those who would accuse me of 'scriptism', let me simply say that the atomistic nature of analysis is a temporary but necessary component of investigation, and indeed creates a discourse of its own, but it is employed in the service of piecing the whole together again so that it may thereafter be appreciated in greater depth. It is not an end in itself It is also pertinent to recall how literacyfacilitates the imagination rather than restricts it.

At the present time, it seems paradoxical that while many anthropologists, linguists and folklorists are engaged in an expansion of the parameters of what counts as language and grammar, encapsulated in the phrase 'breakthrough to performance' (Bauman 1977), those of us involved in an anthropology of human movement are at the same time attempting an equally exciting breakthrough from performance - into literacy! Also paradoxical is the fact that only in the process of encoding movement into a script, which removes it from the flow of 'real' time, can movement actually be retained in records rather than being lost in a no-man's-land through its depiction as successive, static positions.

To return full circle to Evans-Pritchard; in his defence I must point out that he became well aware of the significance of movement writing in later life, recognizing the potential value of future anthropologists who could read and write movement and expressing regret that the necessary technology had been so late in coming (Williams 1990: 5). The following extract from Nuer religion illustrates very well his sensitivity to the medium:

We have noted that the lam or invocation states the intention of the sacrifice. Its words are a projection of the will and desire of the person as he turns towards Spirit; and an essential part of the action is the brandishing of the spear. As the officiant walks up and down deliv- ering his oration the movements of the spear in his right hand emphasize his words; open- ing and closing his fingers on it, poising it in his hand, raising it as though to strike, making little jabs with it into the air, pointing it towards the victim, and so on. These movements are an integral part of the expression of intention, and there is more in the action than meets the eye (1956: 231).

NOTES

This article has benefited enormously from the extraordinary attention given to earlier ver- sions by Tim Ingold. His challenging comments provided an excellent focus for the additional work needed to clarifr the presentation of these ideas and I am most grateful. Charles Varela




was also generous in providing insightful comments that helped clarify my understanding of Merleau-Ponty. Whatever shortcomings remain are, of course, entirely my own.

1 For example, Efron (1972 [1941]) placed paper grids over projected film images to measure successive position. A more recent variation on this theme appears in Gell (1985). In ex- perimental psychology, photographs are common tools of research, as also are videotapes. Ac- tion is frequently reduced to gross physical movement (behaviour) through the use of coding techniques, or by classifying with word glosses such as 'head nod' and 'forward lean', etc. Rep- resentative examples of these methods can be found in Harper et al. (1978: chap. 4 on 'kinesics'), Poyatos (1975) on 'gesture inventories', and H.G. Johnson et al. (1975) on 'emblems'. More recent examples are Calbris (1990) and McNeill (1992).

2 Foucault (1977; 1978; 1980). I do not attempt to review the broad multi-disciplinary, post- modern literature on the body. See Burroughs & Ehrenreich (1993), Lock (1993), and Scheper-Hughes & Lock (1987) for bibliographies of anthropological contributions. Contributions from sociology include Armstrong (1983), Brain (1979), Featherstone (1982), Featherstone et al. (1991), Freund (1988), Hudson (1982), O'Neill (1985), and Turner (1984).

3 See Williams (1991) for references and critical discussion. 4 The post-Cartesian shift that informs my discussion builds on the work of G.H. Mead,

the later Wittgenstein (1953), and Vygotsky (1986), and is encompassed in the social construc- tivist perspective espoused by Harre (1984; 1986b), Coulter (1979; 1989), and Warner (1990). It is grounded in the new realist philosophy of science articulated by Harre (1986c) and Bhaskar (1978).

5 Exceptions are the multisensory approaches advocated in Feld (1982), Stoller (1989), and Tedlock (1983), as well as the development of visual anthropology.

6 Exceptions are found in the work of specialists in the anthropology of dance and human movement. My point is that their influence has been largely confined to a sub-field and has not penetrated into sociocultural theory generally. Analytic attention to a moving body was pioneered by Birdwhistell's 'kinesics' (1970) and Hall's 'proxemics' (1968) and in the work of Kendon, Poyatos and others in gesture and facial expression, usually given the unfortunate label 'non verbal communication' (see Kendon 1981). Kendon (1983) and (1988) provide a rep- resentative sample of his work on gesture and Australian Aboriginal sign languages. Kaeppler (1972; 1985; 1994) has developed an 'emic/etic' approach to the anthropology of dance and other structured movement systems, while Williams (1975; 1982; 1991; 1994) has developed a semiotic approach to an all-inclusive anthropology of human movement systems called 'semasiology'. Kaeppler (1978) provides a review of approaches to the anthropology of dance in the 1970s. Williams (1986; 1991) provides critical reviews and discussion of theoretical issues in this sub-field.

7 Descartes actually wrote, 'I rightly conclude that my essence consists in this alone: that I am only a thing that thinks. Although perhaps I have a body that is very closely joined to me, nevertheless, because on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself - insofar that I am a thing that thinks and not an extended thing - and because on the other hand I have a distinct idea of a body - insofar as it is merely an extended thing, and not a thing that thinks - it is therefore certain that I am truly distinct from my body and that I can exist without it' (Descartes 1986: 93).

8 Descartes's position was not entirely new; he continued the classical Platonic disdain for the body in the modern form of a radical individualism. We need only consider the following excerpt from Plato's dialogue, the Phaedo, to find reasons for the absence of the body in West- ern social theory, and indeed in Western academic circles generally:

All these considerations, said Socrates, must surely prompt serious philosophers to review the position in some such way as this.... So long as we keep to the body and our soul is contaminated with this imperfection, there is no chance of our ever attaining satisfactorily to our object, which we assert to be truth.... The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything.... That is why, on all these accounts, we have so little time for philosophy.... It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead.... It seems that so long as we are alive, we shall continue closest to knowledge if we avoid as




much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when they are absolutely necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it until God himself gives us deliverance (Hamilton & Cairns 1961: 49).

9 For example, Jackson (1983a), Csordas (1989), Hanks (1990). 10 See Russow (1988) and Woodruff Smith (1988) for critical discussions of 'bodily inten-

tionality'. Merleau-Ponty radically calls into question all his earlier writings in his final (unfin- ished) work towards a new ontology (1968) in which he attempts to articulate a notion of Flesh/Being that is neither material nor spiritual substance, but a transcendent, primordial, generative matrix (see discussion in Madison 1981: 168-83). This is viewed as analogous to the Freudian unconscious in terms of latency, but it is non-deterministic (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 81-87). In this Merleau-Ponty violates the logic of causal powers by separating the power from the particular; the causal power is now in a mysterious realm outside the actions and interactions of persons. It should be noted that this later use of the term 'Flesh' differs markedly from his earlier notion of flesh as 'animate body' (e.g. 1969: 94). More fruitful theoretically, in my view, are the working notes that accompany Merleau-Ponty's final writings, in which he struggles towards a notion of causal powers (using terms such as the 'generation' and the 'production' of movement) and reaches for connexions between language and movement (e.g. 1968: 257), though he does not quite achieve either. He talks of things that have power that is a cause by itself (e.g. 1968: 224-5), but his rejection of physics and the natural sciences (as objectivist) means that he may have been informed by an Aristotelian bio-philosophical framework. The power of Harre's conception, in contrast, is that it espouses a naturalism that does succeed in connecting human powers to the rest of the natural world.

11 For Merleau-Ponty the body is primary, and while the focus on perception requires that body is not separate from mind, Merleau-Ponty never worked out an unambiguous conception of the relationship between body, mind and agency. From our current perspective, it is certainly possible to read the notion of person into Merleau-Ponty's use of the term 'body', and it could be said that the notion of person is often latent in his writings, though in my view, Harre's work is necessary for this to be realized. In addition, since Strawson has shown that language is a primary reality inseparable from the notion of person (1959: 87-116), it could be argued that Merleau-Ponty does not have a notion of person because he does not consider language a primary reality prior to experience. Keats (1991: 269-71) suggests that Merleau- Ponty separates language from the origin of meaning (which exists in the relation between the subject and the world), regarding it as an instrumental means to a reality that is a 'pre-logical bond' (1968: 39-40).

12 While this is certainly the case, it is also true that Merleau-Ponty moved beyond solipsism to intersubjectivity. The absence of any notion of action, however, prevents the inter- subjective from becoming interactive. Even in his later work, Merleau-Ponty remained a philosopher of the old style, reaching only the threshold of Simmel's shift towards the social nature of mind and self. Simmel, Cooley and G.H. Mead had already worked out a conception of the social nature of self, mind, and action by 1913 (see Warner 1990; Varela 1992), as had Vygotsky by 1934, and Wittgenstein by 1953.

13 Grene (1985) has advanced a similar position to that taken by Varela (1992) on the contributions of Merleau-Ponty, and suggests that the latter's ideas on perception are now scien- tifically out of date, having been updated by the perceptual theory of Jj. Gibson (see Reed & Jones (1982) and Heft (1989)).

14 The distinction I make here between organism and person is not a recasting of body/mind dualism in yet another form; my point is that developmentally, the human biological organism becomes transformed into a bio-cultural entity - that is, the body too is social, cultural and agentive but not in opposition to the 'natural' or 'individual'. The term 'person' avoids body/mind predicates that tend to prevail, even in such neologisms as 'embodied mind', 'mindful body', and 'bodymind'.

15 This section and the diagrammatic formulation in figures 2 and 3 were worked out in conversation with Charles Varela. The ideas are a collaborative effort.

16 See Ardener (1989b: 105) for critical discussion of the term 'behaviour' in the social sciences, and Williams (1991: ch. 10) with regard to the critical distinction between 'behaviour' and 'action' in a semasiological approach to an anthropology of human movement.




17 There is a common assumption that because much that is done is not normally explained in words, it requires an explanation in terms of a lack of consciousness. Much everyday action may be out of focal awareness, but so is much of everyday spoken discourse and neither would seem to be usefully explained as unconscious, preconscious, a special kind of practical consciousness, or beyond interpretation and understanding. Polanyi's 'focal and subsidiary awareness' (1958: 55) prevents the tendency to reify language and action in this way as if they reside somewhere 'in' the person prior to enactment. Not to take this position leads to absurd questions like, 'Where is the word before it is spoken?', or 'Where is the idea before it is presented?'. I agree with Harre and other new realists that, after Ryle and the later Wittgenstein, there are only physiology and semiotic discourses of several kinds. The deeper reason for this anti-Cartesian mentalism in the philosophy of science has to do with the theory of causal powers (see Harre & Madden 1975; Harre 1990; Varela 1992).

18 Playwright Alan Bennett sardonically captures the disembodied nature of academic life in his play 'Forty Years On'. In a kind of post-Wittgensteinian vaudeville, Lady Ottoline Morrell in conversation with Bertrand Russell complains of an accident in which a breast popped out of her frock. Asked if he ever has the same problem, Russell replies, 'Mutatis mutandis, no. But then I have led a very sheltered life. I had no contact with my own body until the spring of 1887, when I suddenly found my feet. I deduced the rest logically' (quoted in Schiff 1993: 92).

19 The influence of Merleau-Ponty's transcendental and primordial realm of the Flesh/Being on Jackson's work is clear. For example, Merleau-Ponty wrote, 'When we speak of the flesh we do not mean to do anthropology, to describe a world covered over with our own projec- tions, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask. Rather we mean that carnal being, as a being of depths... a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is a proto- type of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient is a very remarkable variant (1968: 136). Also, 'This renewal of the world is also mind's renewal, a rediscovery of that brute mind which, untamed by any culture is asked to create culture anew' (1964: 181).

20 Three such generalized systems are currently in use. In addition to Labanotation there are Benesh and Eshol-Wachman notations. Farnell (1989) provides a brief comparative overview of these, and Page (1990b) gives a detailed comparison of Benesh and Labanotation. Page con- cludes that the latter fulfils Goodman's criteria for a script better than the former and has some distinct advantages in anthropological contexts where the agents' conceptions and intentions play an important role in creating ethnographically relevant descriptions. Williams and Farnell (1990) provide an introduction to Labanotation for social scientists and linguists. The standard Labanotation textbook is Hutchinson (1977). Key (1977: 55-91) gives a useful bibliography of attempts to create notation systems in studies of non-verbal communication and dance.

21 For example, McNeill & Levy (1982), McNeill (1985; 1992), Kendon (1988), Hanks (1990), Havilland (1993), Sherzer (1993) and Farnell (1994).

22 Labanotation was invented by Rudolph Laban (1879-1958), a choreographer and dancer. Working in Austria and Germany (Laban 1926) he set out to devise a notation system that could record any human movement, although initially it was used only in choreographic contexts. Laban was intrigued by Greek concerns with mathematics, the movement of planetary spheres and the Bauhaus movement in visual art and architecture. He had wide interests in movement in diverse situations, from the dynamic components of the physical working environment in industrial situations to mime. Labanotation, or 'Kinetography Laban' as it is known in Europe, came to be used primarily for the recording and preservation of professional theatre and dance works in the United States and in Europe and the traditional dances of eastern Europe. This has led to an erroneous conception that it is a dance notation, rather than a movement notation system. Williams pioneered its use in anthropology when she completed a movement score of the Roman Catholic post-Tridentine mass in 1975, and it is used by several of her former students, the author included. Kaeppler also uses Labanotation in her work.

23 This model of human action is consistent with that suggested by Kant (1798) and elabo- rated by several contemporary philosophers (see Harre & Secord 1972: 37-42).

24 Ardener also points out (1989a: 166) that we do not resort to any linguistic determinism if we suppose that gestural classification rests to a certain degree on the labelling of body parts. Another milestone in overcoming Cartesianism has been the recognition that the mind that uses spoken language does not cease to operate when it comes to moving!




25 See, for example, seminal articles by Haugen (1969) and Hallowell (1955) and current work on deixis and spatial orientation by McNeill & Levy (1982), Talmy (1983), Hanks (1990), Levinson (1991), Havilland (1993), Williams (1990; 1994), Farnell (1994b). Lakoff and Johnson (1980) articulate such values as found in metaphors attached to spatial direction among English speakers. Johnson (1987) and Lakoff (1987) develop these ideas considerably in relation to embodiment.

26 Laban also created a detailed classification and transcription system for the dynamic aspects of movement that he called Eukinetics and later Effort. This work was developed further in the U.S. and is known as Effort-Shape. The emphasis on 'inner attitudes' has made this system of interest to psychology in therapeutic settings and in personality diagnosis. Assump- tions of universality are highly problematic, however, as the classifications involved and the interpretation of meaning that accompanies them tend to be made entirely according to the values that Europeans and Euro-Americans attach to different uses of energy, spatial directions and bodily use.

27 The upper case 'D' for Deaf has become standard in sign language studies and among members of Deaf communities in the U.S. It signifies those who use a sign language and consider themselves members of a Deaf culture.

28 It might still be argued that while there are obviously problems with verbal descriptions, there is nothing in principle that rules out a complete verbal description of bodily movements, however long, tedious and cumbersome it might be. Such a position reveals the depth of the problem alluded to earlier with regard to the absence of the moving body from social theory, bolstered as it is by the tenuous institutional position of movement and dancing in Western academia. Music is not subject to the same prejudices, so let us ask the same question of musical description. Surely, no-one would seriously suggest that a performable record of a song or symphony is possible with a complete verbal description of musical sounds, however long tedious and cumbersome it might be. Neither would anyone advocate that such descriptions be placed on the music stand in front of musicians. Ethnomusicological analysis and understanding of a musical tradition would not be possible if based upon such data instead of musical notations. The medium of movement is no different from musical sound in this regard. Representation in graphic signs that do not relate to the medium under investigation distorts that medium and makes accurate reproduction or analysis of structure and semantics impossible. VWhen learning any notation system, of course, descriptions in words are necessary as part of the learning process (as illustrated by my own exegesis above). The point is, however, that once learned, this intermediary function is abandoned and a direct reading occurs of movement or musical sound in the graphic sign. In emphasizing this, I am not suggesting that spoken language concepts are not involved.

29 Typical examples from sign language research can be found in articles by Pizzuto et al., Wallin, and Liddell in Lucas (1990), Baker & Cokely (1980), Bellugi & Klima (1982), Deuchar (1990), and Perlmutter (1992). Frishburg (1983) discusses problems involved in the development of writing systems for sign languages.

30 'Winter counts' are pictographic calendars that were made by several nations on the Plains prior to the twentieth century. They consist of drawings on buffalo or deer hide and each drawing represents one specific event of importance which occurred during a particular year. A year is marked by the passing of a winter season, hence the name 'winter count'. Examples can be found in Mallery (1886) and (1893). A discussion of winter counts is given in DeMallie (1982).

31 Specialists may wonder why I have chosen an illustration from Tompkins (1926) when the intended audience for his populist book was the Boy Scout movement! My reasons are partly pragmatic: Tompkins uses all six pictographs to which I refer in the same illustration. Some caution is necessary, however. Inscriptions on rock, birch bark and animal hides were widespread in indigenous North America and served many communicative and mnemonic functions, but I have not yet encountered any written using this spiral form. Tomp- kins may well have invented these pictographic stories and taken the idea of the spiral form from Dakota winter counts. However, the pictographic units from which he builds the message can all be found in the more scholarly collections of Schoolcraft and Mallery (see Farnell 1994).




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Ethno-graphiques et le corps en mouvement Resume Cet article d6bute avec un bref commentaire portant sur une photographie tir6e de l'oeuvre d'Evans-Pritchard, et qui illustre a merveille un probleme fondamental dans la perception occidentale du mouvement corporel humain. On suggere que l'int6ret grandissant pour 'le corps' n'a pas encore permis de theoriser la personne comme agent en mouvement, absentejusqu'a ce jour de la th6orie culturelle et des 6crits ethnographiques. On avance l'id6e que la nouvelle perspective r6aliste sur la personne agissante [person and agency] est plus a meme d'offrir les bases philosophiques n6cessaires a une th6orie des acteurs sociaux'dans leur corps', que ne l'est la philosophie existentialiste de Merleau-Ponty. Une fois que les gens sont congus comme des personnes ayant le pouvoir d'executer des actes signifiants a l'aide de signes aussi bien linguistiques que synergiques, le chemin est tout trace pour d6velopper les strategies n6cessaires a l'investigation syst6matique de l'action 'incorporee'. On aborde ensuite la question de l'adoption d'une 6criture du mouvement (Labanotation) qui pourrait se reveler comme etant une ressource methodolo- gique de grand secours, avant d'examiner de maniere critique les m6thodes utilis6es pour enregistrer le langage par signes d6velopp6s par les nord-am6rindiens des plaines. L'article conclut sur une louange d'Evans-Pritchard pour l'int6ret ult6rieur qu'il porta a l'idee d'un savoir et d'une ecriture du mouvement.

Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, U.S.A.



brenda farnell, ethno-graphics and the moving body

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