Signifying Actions: Towards an Anthropology of Human Movement

Williams directly links the unfolcling of space and time to an unfolding of person. There is no such thing as space or time in a simple sense. Time and space are conceptual, moral, and ethical before they are physical. If the selection of time and space indexes is reduced to the utilitarian (as it usually is), the actor is essentially disembodied, at best one~dimensi~nal, with no real motive, in Weber's sense of motive. The social dimensions that could come into being remain invisible, like th_e ten or eleven dimensions curled up inside molecule-sized universes in some recent cosmological theories. Williams makes it clear that cosmological space or metaphyical space or dramatic space all emerge performatively from the enactment of self, just as a promise or threat unfolds from the words, nuances, and intonations of the self in the moment of utterance, enclosing a world of action. The meaning of all subsequent action-the Mass, the T'ai chi, the ballet-flows from that moment.