Gestures, Rituals and Memory: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Patterned Human Movement across Time.

The ways humans express themselves and interact with each other and with their environment through gestures have been extensively studied from a synchronic perspective. The description of patterned human movement  in skills, rituals and every day life transactions has been an important part of ethnography  since its inception. Various recording methods have been created to meet the challenge of translating these flowing patterns into repertories of body postures, hand and head motions, and modes of perambulation, often in relation to verbal utterances. Attempts have been made to construe such dynamics as systems expressing the technological level and cultural ethos of social groups. However, little is known about how these neuromuscular processes and their meanings have evolved, how they have been preserved or transformed over time, and how they relate to changing cultural norms.

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the possibility of studying gestures and rituals across time, and to probe the memory resources of the human brain which can account for their continuity and change. The symposium will address the issue of how technical skills and communicative gestures, rituals and magic, theatrical acting and dances, for instance, are transmitted vertically from  generation to generation  and often spread horizontally from population to population. Particular attention will be paid to the transformations which occur during this process not only in the forms of the movement but also in their symbolic meanings. A full understanding of these processes, which are at the core of the  cultural specificity of humans, requires the inputs of a wide array of disciplines, from the cognitive neurosciences to cultural anthropology, and including the history of religions, the study of manual techniques and social gestures, the ethnography and history of rituals and dramatic performances, the psychology of face-to-face interactions, and the representation of such behavior in literature and the visual arts. This symposium will endeavor to explore some of the directions mentioned above and to lay the basis for a large-scale conference on this topic to be organized in 2005.