Gesture studies is a recent but fast growing field, which is now established across various disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and neurocognitive sciences. In the last decade, the field has established an association (the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS)), a journal (Gesture, edited by Adame Kendon, one of the founders and pioneers of the field), an associated book series (“Gesture studies,” also edited by Adam Kendon for John Benjamins), and regular international conferences (Austin, TX, 2002; Lyon, France, 2005; Chicago, IL, 2007; Frankfurt/Oder, Germany, 2010), as well as summer schools.
Jürgen Streeck has played a key role in the establishment of the field by organizing the first ISGS Conference in Austin, TX and by serving as the first ISGS president. His book, Gesturecraft, is the second volume in the “Gesture studies” series—the first is a volume in honour of David McNeill, a key historical figure of the field (Duncan, Cassell, & Levy Reference Duncan, Cassell and Levy2007).
Streeck's research activity on gesture began in the 80s when he completed his Ph.D. on child communication (Streeck Reference Streeck1983). Streeck (Reference Streeck1984), in one of several critical papers he wrote about speech act theory, critically engages in the discussion about how “context” is defined—first by the participants, then by the analyst. On the basis of video-recorded activities of small groups of pupils in a classroom, Streek shows that context is actively constructed by the participants—the children eventually struggle against the teacher to defend their own definition of it. This definition of context is achieved in an embodied way, by constructing orderly postural configurations and organizing relevant frames for the conduct of talk as a jointly attended-to activity. In another article, Streeck (Reference Streeck1988) discusses how the significance of gesture is established; he describes how participants shift from a “talk-only” interaction to a “movement and talk” interaction by focusing their attention to gesture and thereby making gesticulations meaningful to talk. These articles show the continuity and the coherence of Streeck's work, and the significance of Gesturecraft in his intellectual trajectory.
Gesturecraft proposes an exploration of the communicative ecologies in which hand gestures occur, detailing various practices such as orienting, clearing, tracing, pointing, depicting, ceiving, and managing turns. Adopting a microethnographic approach, Streek's exploration is based on a naturalistic study that used video recordings of human interactions as they appear in their sociocultural, ordinary settings. His microanalysis is influenced by Frederick Erickson's work (cf. Reference Erickson, LeCompte, Millroy and Preissle1992); in the 70s, Erickson introduced audio-visual samples of classroom behavior aimed at (i) highlighting both the moment-by-moment organization of classroom interaction and the societal institution of school, and (ii) improving ethnography of communication's data collection and data analysis. Streeck's microethnography has been further influenced by the interactionist tradition, Erving Goffman's work, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis, and by the early approaches of gesture in human communication—particularly, the work of Scheflen (Reference Scheflen1972), founder of Context Analysis, who emphasized not only the role of gesture but more generally the role of spatial arrangements of bodies in interaction; and the work of Kendon (Reference Kendon1977), which has been foundational for the study not only of gesture but also more generally of gaze, body postures, and spatial dispositions (see Ch. 2 for the reconstruction of this intellectual genealogy). Another important influence comes from phenomenology; it reminds us of the primacy of concrete, practical, physical activities in the world, which is consequential for founding abstract structures of the mind on body experiences and motoric schemata, and for defining hand gestures; gestures arise as a by-product of practical actions. In this sense, the hand is a “vehicle for being in the world” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1962:82) and Streeck offers an account of the evolutionary history of gesture, beginning from the hand as an organ of transportation, to a means of grasping, and then to a symbolic embodied resource (see Ch. 3).
Chs. 4 to 8 cover the empirical, analytical contributions of the book. They deal with a range of ecological practices that concern the way in which gesture orients to the world at hand (Ch. 4), that depict and reconstruct, imagine or recollect an absent and distant world (Chs. 5 and 6), that configure thought and the conceptualization of the world (Ch. 7), and that manage and reflect about speech actions (Ch. 8). In this way, the fundamental dimensions of action, language, and thought are discussed through the exploration of the repertoire of gesture practices. The book is fundamentally empirically based: Streek is not interested in providing yet another classification of gesture, but instead explores the rich variety of practices achieved by hands. To accomplish this, a variety of empirical materials are used, including: instructions by a mechanic in an auto shop in Texas (in English L2); descriptions of the fields surrounding a rice farm in the Philippines (in Ilokano); a friends' conversation about Kleist's play, Pentesilea (in German); a conversation about car accidents (in Japanese); a psychotherapy session (in German); and an exhibition vernissage (in German). Not only are these data carefully transcribed and illustrated, but videos are available on the editors website (http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sg2.video).
In Ch. 4, Streeck shows how by touching, feeling, and grasping the immediate world, gesture transforms an opaque, uncomprehended environment in a visual and haptic field, which is intelligible, jointly known, and handled in common. In this sense, gestures are “environmentally coupled” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2007), making sense of their surrounding through their exploration. In this chapter, the world is “at hand” and “within sight,” so that it can be pointed at, be given an orientation, highlighted, partitioned, and assembled or disassembled, all within a shared focus of attention.
In Ch. 5, we see how participants turn from a focus on the world to a focus on the gesture themselves, which are then “decoupled” from the environment. The chapter details a range of methods through which speakers organize the gaze behavior and the attention of co-participants, monitoring and managing gaze in interaction. For example, in a demonstration based on a video recording of an artist explaining her work to a not-always-attentive audience, Streeck shows how the form, amplitude, and explicitness of gesture is closely related to the degree of attention paid by the recipients (114ff.).
In Ch. 6, various practices are described, such as depicting real or fictive motion, drawing figures in the air, and enacting uses of objects and transportation of things. Gestures are shown to be reminiscent of the practical actions they ordinarily carry on, deriving modes of depiction either from their haptic engagements (e.g. grasping an object) or from their tactile engagements (e.g. touching a surface).
Ch. 7 focuses on the relation between thought and gesture, which is revisited through the notion of ceiving, which refers to a conceptualization constructed by gesture. Speakers “think with their hands,” relying on their bodies to enact, discover, and elaborate a conceptual structure. Again, this notion reminds us that manual activity is the primordial site for the development of thought.
Ch. 8 is devoted to what is generally referred to as pragmatic or interactive functions of gesture. Here a variety of open-hand gestures are examined with respect to their sequential positioning within the turn, since at different positions the speaker is confronted with different interactional tasks (e.g. turn completion, where it becomes relevant either to continue or to select the next speaker, i.e. to “hand over” the turn). Communicative actions done with the hands are also described (as questioning, focusing, rejecting, and negating).
Through the chapters, a critical view of the notion of representation is repeatedly developed: gestures do not represent things, but show how they are grasped and handled, what is done with them, and ultimately how the world is conceived, made intelligible, and structured within practical situations in which humans are engaged. Gestures do not produce visual representations but are a medium of understanding that incorporates a “haptic epistemology” (208) coming from fundamental kinesthetic motor patterns. “Gesturecraft” precisely refers to this praxeological foundation of gesture understood as “craft,” as embodied, skilled practice.
The book is full of insights contributing to various disciplines, such as anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, communication, and psychology. For linguists, Streek teaches that language does not need to be studied in a logocentric perspective—language and gesture are indissociable, one configuring the shape and the action of the other. To analyze them separately is an artifactual and reductionist decision. The book not only shows that meaning is constructed in an embodied way; it also shows in detail how the organization of speech—and even of grammar—is embedded within the organization of multimodality (see e.g. some interesting pages on utterance design, offering a comparative discussion of syntax and gesture in German, French, Ilokano, and Japanese; 94–104).
The limitations of the book are mentioned by the author himself in his conclusion (206): the main point is that the exclusive focus of the analysis on the hand can have the perverse effect of forgetting that embodiment concerns the entire body and not only parts of it. This can seem paradoxical for a book inspired by a strong phenomenological influence—insisting on the way in which the body inhabits the world. This can also seem paradoxical for an author who, in other published work, has actively engaged (i) with bodily practices such as hip hop; (ii) with inscriptional practices like writing and drawing, implying artifacts and objects at hand; and (iii) with spatial configurations drawn by the positions of the body. These body practices, as well as many others encountered on the social arena, call for a integrated view of multimodal resources, further expanding the book's focus and taking into consideration talk, gesture, gaze, facial expressions, body postures, body movements, arrangements of bodies within space and manipulations of objects, artifacts, and technologies.
