Kinesics and Context

Essays on Body Motion Communication

Ray L. Birdwhistell

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780812210125
• eBook ISBN: 9780812201284
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Ray L. Birdwhistell, in this study of human body motion (a study he terms kinesics ), advances the theory that human communication needs and uses all the senses, that the information conveyed by human gestures and movements is coded and patterned differently in various cultures, and that these codes can be discovered by skilled scrutiny of particular movements within a social context.

PART 1

Learning To Be a Human Body

1. “There Was a Child Went Forth . . .”*

A Human Being is not a black box with one orifice for emitting a chunk of stuff called communication and another for receiving it. And, at the same time, communication is not simply the sum of the bits of information which pass between two people in a given period of time.

Let us suppose that some wealthy and benevolent foundation was impressed with the fact that the human organism is a fantastically sensitive system capable of receiving literally hundreds of thousands of bits of information and became so concerned with the implications of this that they were willing to support extended research into the nature of the interconnections between this organism and the remainder of the universe. Let us further imagine that we decided to make up an experimental universe à deux and put two human beings in an elaborate box, and then decided to record all the informational signal units that flowed into the box and were potentially receivable by its occupants. Theoretically, the various machines would feed to a master tape some 2,500–5,000 bits (and up to about 10,000) of information per second. These recorded bits are notations of minimally discernible changes in the sound, light, and odor stream. Obviously their identity as units is dependent on the refinements of the recording devices. However we refine it, we are already swamped by the flood of data. And if we were to play this game of astronomical numbers to its awe-full end, probably the lifetime efforts of roughly half the adult population of the United States would be required to sort the units deposited on one tape record in the course of an hour’s interaction between the two subjects! Nor is there any comfort in the thought of Univac’s speedy digestive system. Univac could deliver stacks of counted units and further stacks of correlations, but at this level that is all we would have—stacks of figures. This kind of practical infinity play is all the more depressing if we are tough enough scientists to know that we deal with an interdependent universe which cannot include accidental, isolated, or finally meaningless units. Something is always happening, but if we just count signals, it has no more value than if nothing were happening. If we had to stop our studies at this point we might just as well go back to an atomistic and mentalistic model of a human being as a thing in itself. With such a model we are condemned to do our research on little balloons full of words which are somehow framed or filled out by gesticulation which we could dignify although not clarify by calling them nonverbal communications.

Fortunately, however, we do not have to engage in such elaborate census-taking in order systematically to analyze human interaction any more than we have to isolate and tag every molecule of water in order to do hydrography. All we need to do to make communication research efficient, manageable, and meaningful is to construct a methodology which will enable us to order our record so that we can isolate from it the testably significant classes of events.

The discussion here is centered around the introduction of the child into the communication system of the society. If the discussion is overgeneral or too programmatic, this very inadequacy will perhaps make manifest the need for research in this area.

The work of the ethologists and comparative psychologists in the last few years has forced us to re-evaluate our previous conceptions of the relationship between human and animal behavior. Many of us marveled at the intricacies of the associations (which we termed genetically determined and let it go at that) which are present in insect societies. We looked at apes and studied them somatically as carrying clues which might give us insight into the evolution of man. But, because of the nature of our theory and the tremendously difficult task of making sustained and verifiable observations, we were largely concerned with watching the behavior of individual animals. We described them as operating in groups, or herds, or prides, or flocks and in anthropomorphic amazement projected upon them certain human characteristics, most of which were individually psychological in nature. Recently, however, we have been forced to review if not completely to revamp these conceptions. With the work of Tinbergen, Hess, Lorenz, Blauvelt, and others, it has become increasingly evident that social living is an adaptational imperative for the membership of many nonhuman species. As we became willing to forego simplistic arguments concerning heredity and, or rather versus, environment and turned to the behavioral description of critical developmental moments in the individual’s life, atomistic theoretics began to give way before more dynamic system models.

These insights, plus the theoretical and technical achievements of the linguist and the kinesicist, in a new experimental world made possible by the sound camera, the slow-motion analyzer, and the tape recorder, have forced us to a re-evaluation of evolution. Such a re-evaluation has carried with it a new perspective on what we mean by human behavior—and by extension what is significant about the patterned interdependence of human beings. If we are willing to concede that the evolutionary ladder runs from the inorganic to the organic to the social and, finally, through many animal species to the human, we shall probably also be willing to re-evaluate our primary postulates as to the nature of man himself. Certainly we may find ourselves in a position which makes less conscionable any isolation of disease and particularly mental disease within man’s epidermatic frontiers. We are ready to look with new eyes at the life history of an individual and to ask new questions about the violence we commit when we act as though we are dealing with a preformed and plastic personality shaped by isolated traumatic events.

Who knows how any human internalizes the conventional understandings of his social group to the extent that his social behavior becomes by and large predictable to other members of his group? Even the sketchiest survey of human societies reveals that he does this. There is little solace in a so-called “learning theory,” although one is impressed with the brilliance of the learning experimentalist who can create a training situation in which human beings can be persuaded to deal with new information in a manner analogous to that apparently employed by white rats or Grey Walter’s machines. The fact remains that infants from every society in the world can and do internalize the communicational system of that society in approximately the same amount of time, so that the “normal” 6-year-old is able to move smoothly within the communication system of his society. There is no need to become involved in arguments for gestalt versus associational or any other model of learning. Years of carefully ordered observation and analysis of children in the learning situation are necessary before the mechanisms of this incorporation can be known, and the traditional learning experiment apparatus does seem inapplicable for this study. But one thing is clear. We cannot study the social behavior of a fish by taking him out of water. The child is a child in his world—the pieces he displays in a laboratory represent a very small and, perhaps, unrepresentative sample of his repertoire.

The child is born into a society already keyed for his coming. A system exists into which he must be assimilated if the society is to sustain itself. If his behavior cannot, after a period of time, become predictable to a degree expected in that society, he must be specially treated. In some societies the nonassimilator will be allowed to die; in others he may be given special institutional treatment. This special treatment can range from deification to incarceration. But ultimately the goal is the same: to make that child’s behavior sufficiently predictable that the society can go about the rest of its business.

From a different point of view, depending upon the society’s expectancy structure, the child must in a given period of time learn how to learn what the society expects of him, how to use this as a source of new learning, and he must learn how not to learn and to use that skill in not being diverted. Perhaps even more fundamental than this, his very survival depends upon his receiving and sending certain orders of message from and to those about him. The Spitz babies, like the Blauvelt kids and lambs, provide us with all too clear insights into the fact that the organism must receive certain kinds of stimulating experiences or it dies. We can combine the results of these suggestive experiments with the data provided by the sensory-deprivation studies and evaluate this insight in the light of our increasing knowledge about the complexity of the perceptive process. This outline of the problem of bringing a new member into society reveals a process so critical and complex that even the least impressionable student is inclined to wonder how we make it at all. This process is commonplace for every society. Yet the fact that we must, in every psychiatric setting, discuss this matter is testament to the fact that the process is not always successful.

We know so little about the dimensions of biological or social time that we cannot say whether the infant and the society have a long or short time in which to accomplish the basic task of incorporation. We know only that it must be done and that some societies act as though there were very little time for this task while others do not even conceive of it as a problem. We may, however, make this generalization: in every society, before attaining membership in that society, the child must gain control of the pattern of, and be incorporated into, the communication system of the society. And, to repeat, in every society we know anything about, at least insofar as language is concerned, this occurs by the time a child is six years old. Now to state explicitly what was implied before: gaining control of language is not the simple accumulation of an aggregate of words; it is not the possession of a certain-sized vocabulary. Nor is the control of that infracommunicational system, body motion, made up of memorizing a list of facial expressions or gestures. Communication control is not achieved through a simple additive process which involves the accumulation of parcels of sounds or body motion which carry encapsulated chunks of meaning. Nor is it the slightly more complex matter of hooking together these pieces called words and gestures into little meaning trains called sentences. I use the word simple here in derision, for if this were the way we had to incorporate our communicational system, the human life span would not be long enough to permit us ever to achieve such control. Human culture is possible because we do not have to do it this way–because we learn in a patterned way.

Look for a moment at the pitifully little that is known about the rate and sequence of human language and motion incorporation. When I say “pitifully little,” however, I imply no apology. Recent developments in linguistics and paralinguistics, in kinesics and parakinesics, at least make possible the systematic descriptive analysis of this developmental process. Even these few and very tentative descriptions, gathered from all too little observation, make it possible for us to envision a day when we can objectively analyze the communication behavior of a particular child and forecast his ability to adapt to his communicational milieu. For the linguistic material I rely on the observations of Smith and Trager, modified by discussion with Hockett and McQuown, and strained through my own conceptions which are, at least in part, the result of kinesic observation.

The number of sounds distinguishable from each other that the so-called vocal apparatus can make may run into the thousands, depending upon the instruments used for delineating them. The possible combinations of these is beyond the number of atoms postulated for the universe. Yet we need not trouble ourselves with these possibility figures. The fact of the matter is that while societies choose different segments and sections of the range, phoneticians have found no society whose significant phonologic sounds could not be described from a set of 42 basic positional symbols each modifiable by from five to ten marks which indicate special placement or release. And to do phonemic analysis, which deals with the least meaningful classes of sounds used by any language, even fewer symbols may be required. Trager has said that no society that he knows anything about has less than fifteen of such basic units or many more than fifty. The number of phonemes in the repertoire of any given society does not seem to mean very much about the complexity of that society. In our own we utilize 45, which includes nine vowels, three semivowels, twenty-one consonants, four stresses, four pitches, and four junctures.

Comparably, while the human face alone is capable of making some 250,000 different expressions, I have fifteen placement symbols plus eleven special markers sufficient to record the significant positions of all the faces I have seen. Less than one hundred symbols are all that are required to deal with any kinesic subject which I have yet studied—and this recording covers the activity of the whole body in its through-time activity.

The human infant is an amoral mass of wrigglings and vocalizing; it lives in a milieu of moral speakers and movers. By the age of six it will be a moral vocalizer, that is, it will have reduced its range of noises to that narrow list employed by the members of his milieu. I am not sure when he becomes a moral wriggler, although there is every indication that adolescence (and here generalization is restricted to North American culture) marks a period in which the wriggling becomes restrained into moral limits. The difference between the kinesic and linguistic system is probably related to the fact that although body-motion communicational behavior is just as much learned behavior as is language behavior, we simply have not, heretofore, known enough about it to teach it. That is, parents and peers have the range and structure of the phonemic system sufficiently in awareness to direct and more or less explicitly rectify the behavior of the young speaker. Yet this teaching aspect should not be overstressed. It is said that the apparently incoherent babbling of a 6-month-old is already sufficiently structured that a French baby will have a predominance of French phonemes and an American baby a predominance of those characteristic of American English. I have not watched enough babies from enough different societies to make a similar generalization about their respective kinesic repertoires.

All this discussion has been about very old babies, because by the time a baby is a year old he has already gained some acquaintance and, I am tempted to say, control of large portions of the cross-referencing phenomena which will make his language a patterned system and the incorporation of which will make him a patterned learner of the details to follow. By the age of 6 weeks he begins to respond fairly systematically to the vocal qualifiers used by the children and adults who verbalize around him. These include particular variations in intensity and pitch height and in extent variation, which would include drawl and clipping. Again, research in kinesic phenomena is too limited to permit our determining what is systematically reacted to by the child. Although I do not have the experimental data to support it, I am inclined to believe that the child comes to comprehend his kinesic qualifier behavior and his vocalization behavior, which includes the vocal qualifiers and the vocal characterizers, in a full package. The vocal characterizers, incidentally, include that patterned behavior which encases language, such as giggling, snickering, whimpering, sobbing, yelling, whispering, moaning, groaning, whining, breaking, belching, and yawning. There is need to demonstrate that these are structured by each society in its paralinguistic and parakinesic system. However, these phenomena are patterned and are learned. It requires very little observation to see that at least by the age of two the child has considerable comprehension of what the mother is doing when he cannot hear her and what she feels about what she is saying when he can only see her.

We are getting too far ahead of the developmental picture. There is reason to believe that by the age of four months a child is responding to the intonation patterns of the language and that by the age of nine months, if not already talking in partial sentences, he is usually babbling in his language’s intonation pattern and engaging in some kinemorph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Editor’s Note
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Learning to Be a Human Body
• Part II. Isolating Behavior
• Part III. Approaching Behavior
• Part IV. Collecting Data: Observing, Filming, and Interviewing
• Part V. Research on An Interview
• Appendixes