Introduction: The Politics of Gesture

Abstract

At the heart of the academic case for ‘thick description’ lies the ambiguous meaning of a physical movement—a boy ‘rapidly contracting his right eyelid’. A simple observation (it is said) will not disclose the meaning of the signal—a twitch, a wink, or a parody of somebody's conspiratorial wink might all appear the same. Only an ethnographic analysis will disclose the meaning, or meanings, of this movement to those at the scene. 1 Of course, for almost all historians the kind of ethnographic analysis invited by this point of departure is impossible but the thought has been influential in the reading of particular texts. In Darnton's celebrated essay on the massacre of cats in Paris in the 1730s, for example, a similar methodological move is made: ‘when you realise that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it’. 2 The inexplicit or unstated meaning of action or utterance is what discloses the cultural frame to the observer; or, close analysis of the explicit reveals the conceptual underpinnings which make it seem possible, or natural, for participants. Here there is, perhaps, a connection with the Cambridge school of intellectual history, informed by Austin's writing on speech acts and intent on recovering the ‘illocutionary force’ of particular texts through thorough contextualization, including an attention to what is not said, or to the particular choice made among available means of expression. 3 The oft-remarked convergence of social, political, and cultural history has as a central concern the importance of the implicit and unstated to an understanding of what was going on, and what it meant to participants. Non-verbal communication in face-to-face encounters is crucial to that enterprise, and this volume explores how far historians might get in entering that terrain.