Abstract
This article reviews accounts of “hugging” across evolutionary paradigms to expose how understandings of gesture are shaped by scientific theorizations of the ways humans and animals differ. The divergent roles assigned to gesture in human communication by Vygotskian and Chomskyan researchers can be traced to research on human exceptionalism during key historical periods in the Soviet Union and United States. When Vygotsky introduced his sociocultural theory of cognitive development during the early Soviet period, human exceptionalism was tested through reproductive crossbreeding. When Chomsky hypothesized a language acquisition device for the human brain during the Civil Rights era, human exceptionalism was tested through interspecies communication. These scientific histories inspired critically different approaches to gestural meaning. Taking a fresh look at the great ape language debates of the 1970s, the article attributes the dismissal of ethnography in late twentieth-century human language study to a developing experimental protocol that required gesture’s eviction.
Highlights
The extraordinary Dr Jane Goodall visited a small college town in the western United States as part of her 2015 world tour and gave an inspirational lecture to a sold-out crowd of 8700 admirers
While the interactional focus of the Vygotskian model led to the integration of gesture in subsequent research, in studies incorporating ethnography, the Chomskyan model led to its ejection through a process we identify as gestural cleansing, the erasure of bodily movements from experiments testing cognitive ability
As ethnographers working across the traditions of medical anthropology and linguistic anthropology, we suggest that the comparative investigation of scientific research in different sociohistorical time frames lends important insight into the place of gesture in theorizing human distinctiveness as well as human communication
Summary
The extraordinary Dr Jane Goodall visited a small college town in the western United States as part of her 2015 world tour and gave an inspirational lecture to a sold-out crowd of 8700 admirers. As ethnographers working across the traditions of medical anthropology and linguistic anthropology, we suggest that the comparative investigation of scientific research in different sociohistorical time frames lends important insight into the place of gesture in theorizing human distinctiveness as well as human communication.
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