Gesture Language in Culture Contact

GESTURE LANGUAGE IN CULTURE CONTACT Gordon W.Ilewes Cultural interchanges frequently occur between groups entirely different in language, and who live far apart, so that neighborly observation is not involved. In many cases, interpreters or bilingual individuals are available. When these are lacking, it is often reported that the parties understood each other "by signs". Despite these reports, some anthropologists (e.g. La Barre 1964) reject the notion that there are common denominators of human gesture or signing, just as many linguists have resisted the findings relating to spoken language universals. However, the last few years have witnessed a revival of interest in human ethology and possibly innate deep linguistc and/or cognitive structure, and growing objection to the notion that human groups live in a set of closed, culture-bound compartments, further isolated from each other by Whorfian incompatibilities at the semantic level. Here I shall assemble, mainly from early voyage and travel accounts, some evidence which favors the view that human beings can regularly transcend the limitations of their particular cultural backgrounds and language systems, and exchange information with each other by means of gestural signs. These data suggest that gestural communication is the regular counterpart, for cross-linguistic, cross-cultural communication, of vocal language or speech which is our primary vehicle for communication within local communities. My interest in this subject has been greatly stimulated by the achievement, in two independent projects, of modest language skills in chimpanzees - the now well-known Washoe (Gardner and Gardner 1971) and Sarah (Premack 1971) - which have overthrown the assumption that only human beings could acquire propositional language, and the attention which the Washoe experiment in particular has directed toward manual Sign Language Studies 4 gesture languages (Stokoe 1960, 1966, 1972). Meanwhile, a number of investigators working with child language acquisition have recently suggested that there may be something like a pan-human cognitive / communicative deep structure, which begins to manifest itself in children even before they learn to speak (Denzin 1971; Cicourel and Boese 1972). While it is easy enough to discover that not all seemingly "basic" gestures are human universals (Jakobson 1967; 1972), the data I am going to present suggest that where such differences exist, normally intelligent human beings seem to be able to overcome them. If, as I have indicated in a recent paper (Hewes 1973), man's first propositional language(s) rested on gesture primarily, rather than vocalization, the continuing ability to switch to non-vocal language when conditions require it may have a phylogenetic basis. Some very good discussions of problems bearing on this can be found in the volume edited by R. A. Hinde (1972), on non-verbal communication. The Vietnamese scholar Trdn Dfic Thdo has shown how a basic propositional language could have emerged from the fundamental behavior of manual and digital pointing (1966, 1969). My voyage and travel examples to follow should dispel the notion that pointing with hands and index finger is a culture-bound custom. People all over the world use their hands and fingers to point, and if a few groups consider it bad etiquette, as in the well-known case of the Navaho, it is still likely that they know how to point with their hands and fingers, and do so when vague lip-pointings are not sufficiently precise in critical situations. The early voyagers and travellers whose accounts I shall use did not report on use of sign-language in order to support some argument about the priority of gesture over speech, or for that matter to make any theoretical point at all. Mostly they were simply explaining how they communicated with people in distant, previously little-known parts of the world. Nor, we can be fairly sure, did these mariners and other travellers come prepared to use gestural communication, through previous studies of monastic communities or the deaf, where manual gesture languages had developed into fairly elaborate systems. To make themselves understood to the peoples they encountered, and to decode the signs made to them, they used whatever came "naturally" to them - including, to be sure, Hewes whatever nonvocal gesture or pantomine played a part in their home cultures. None of the accounts in my sample...