Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity (review)

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Northern Europeans, regarding themselves as nongesturers, clearly held in disregard the elaborate gesturality of Southern Europeans, quintessentially Neapolitans. Andrea de Jorio, Canon of the Cathedral of Naples and an expert on Greek antiquities, noticed that the gestures represented on ancient Greek vases appeared to be the very ones executed with such vigor and panache by his fellow citizens (p. 4). He therefore undertook what would be the first ethnographic study of gestures in everyday life in order to defend Neapolitans, and by extension Southern Europeans, against imputations of primitivism, vulgarity, and emotional extravagance by connecting their gestural practices to classical antiquity. Gestures in ancient Greek art and writing, he thought, could be interpreted through contemporary gestures. By the same token, these Neapolitan gestures could be ennobled by attribution to classical sources.

Adam Kendon, a contemporary gesture theorist and editor as well as translator of the present work, speculates that Naples may have been uniquely positioned to preserve and elaborate the Greek gestural practices to which it is heir. Originally founded as a Greek city state, Naples became and remained for centuries thereafter a crowded, densely built urban center. Because of its mild climate, interior spaces were only partially bounded and Neapolitans, as one eighteenth-century observer noted, lived most of their life in the streets (p. civ). The possibility of maintaining visual forms of communication over the ambient noise, using gestures as a private or partially concealed channel in contrast to broadcast speech, or producing gestural counters to or commentaries on their own or other's conversations, led Neapolitans to cultivate gestural communication with gusto (pp. cii-cvii). Kendon points out that the act of gesturing itself may have the epideictic effect of making the body a heightened object of attention in a crowded environment (p. cvi).

The book consists of an illuminating discussion of gestures, Naples, and de Jorio by Adam Kendon, followed by de Jorio's analysis of gestures, and then the collection itself, some 340 pages of gestures, catalogued under their essential meanings (amore, curiosity, death); under the body movements that make them (hands on hips, fig hand, squint); under the speech acts they accomplish (irony, swaying the emotions, metaphor); under the object they represent (time, tobacco, money); or under the body part in question (eyes, face, specific fingers). All these items are simply ordered alphabetically. Their classificatory vagaries are addressed in two indices, an index to body parts (elbow, moustaches, buttocks) or movements (fingers, tube formed by; fingers, index and little extended) and an index to meanings (desire, go away, insult). The descriptions are illustrated in Gaetano Gigante's bambocciate, scenes of everyday life in which figures are represented gesturing appropriately; in three famous plates of hand or hand and face gestures; and in copies of classical works and texts, the difficulty with these last being that "four-fifths of them are felt as an affront to delicacy" (p. 18). De Jorio's intention is to provide a dictionary of gestures for archaeologists analyzing antiquities from the excavations of Cuma, Herculaneum, and Pompeii, which had taken place around Naples in the previous century, and to clarify contemporary Neapolitan gestures for foreigners who, "on account of their cool and sluggish temperament are rather unsuited to gesturing" (p. 5). But it is his gay rendering of Neapolitan street life that makes the book lively reading.

Three gestures for deception illustrate the richness of gestural codification in Naples. First is the gesture for squint-eye, the "index finger placed under an eye, pulling the eyelid downward in order to deform it," which de Jorio takes to arise from the ancient Greek belief that bodily stigmata, like a squinty eye, were signs of an evil nature. He also mentions...