Gestures, Intercorporeity, and the Fate of Phenomenology in Folklore

Abstract

Abstract Culture apprentices the body to its style. Gestures are the visible and kinaesthetic trace of that apprenticeship. They are specific to bodies, families, age grades, ethnic groups, social orders, and historical moments. They are folklore. The gestures I consider here are affiliated with talk. They conjure up in the gesture space in front of the body the iconic and metaphoric objects that talk mentions. In a gesture, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, "the intentional object is offered to the spectator at the same time as the gesture itself” ([1962] 1995:186). The gesturer’s intentionality colonizes the spectator’s, making it intersubjective: phenomenology’s foundational perspective.

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