Gesture as a Cultural System

WHEN GREGORY BATESON was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, his friends among the native Iatmul could not understand why he had to work so hard to learn their language: “But our language is easy to understand” they told him, “we just talk.”1 I wonder how Romans would react to an American studying their gestures from a distance of two millennia. A predictable response would be that their body language is easy to understand; they just move. It is in this common lack of self-reflection that both the complications and rewards of studying ancient gesture lie. Since gesture normally does seem the natural thing to do with the body from day to day, the texts and visual representations from antiquity tend to be uninterested in depicting the particulars of how Romans moved their bodies as they interact with their environment and each other. At the same time, however, this very lack of interest makes the subject ideal for a cultural critique. When our sources mention a gesture being performed, and its intention being understood by a viewer, we gain access to a shared area of knowledge, one based not on the expression of individual will but on cultural circumstances.2 As an early modern historian has remarked in introducing a group of essays intended to apply the study of gesture to the humanities, to “interpret and account for a gesture is to unlock the whole social and cultural system of which it is a part.”3 To give an example that has recently engendered much discussion and that I shall not discuss in this book: when a Roman man scratches his head with his middle finger, and his audience is able to understand that he wishes through this gesture to advertise his sexual availability to another man, the common area of belief underlying the practice affords the scholar a glimpse into a world of homoerotic activity for which Roman texts of the period otherwise give only shadowy outlines.4 In researching and writing about Roman gesture I have kept in mind Bourdieu’s concise formulation concerning the role of the body in the social and political life of the individual: “It is because agents never know completely what they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know.”5 The