Christine Kenneally, "You Have Gestures "

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. Kenneally’s article begins with a thought experiment: imagine describing the house you grew up in to another person. Kenneally moves then to assert that it is “highly likely” that you would see yourself gesturing during your description; she says, as well, that it is “almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing.”  Without mentioning gesturing, ask some of your friends and acquaintances to describe places they’ve lived. What do you notice? Is Kenneally right?

2. At a pivotal point in her article, Kenneally cites Mike Tomasello on the importance of moving beyond questions about why primates don’t have language: “A much more productive question, and one that can currently lead us to much more interesting lines of empirical research, is asking why apes do not even point.” Why is exploring the absence of certain intentional gestures in primates a better way to go? What does this question make visible that remained unnoticed while researchers where focusing on language alone?

3. Kenneally lists two categories of gestures: attention getters and intention movements. At the end of her article, she notes recent research that unsettles the commonplace understanding of “gesture as reflecting an individual’s mental state,” research that suggests “gesture contributes to that state.”  Drawing on examples of gestures that Kenneally provides and others from your own experience, fill out the hypothesis that gesture is not simply reflective of a mental state, but also constitutive.

Questions for Writing:  

1. Kenneally proposes that the studies she has discussed “demonstrate that speech and gesture are part of the same system,” before calling for a new word or phrase to designate intentional communication, one that highlights that such communication “is fundamentally embodied.” Both writing and reading surely fall into the category of intentional communication, and yet it is not immediately evident what role, if any, gesture and embodiment play in these experiences. If Kenneally and her colleagues were to focus on these intentional acts, what would they attend to? How would you extend Kenneally’s insights into the significance of gesture and embodiment to the daily acts of reading and writing that define the lives of students? Or would you recommend attending to other forms of intentional communication?

2. The dominant version of Darwin’s theory of evolution focuses on competition and rallies around the concept of “the survival of the fittest.” The research on gesture that Kenneally discusses, however, highlights the importance and the centrality of reciprocation, cooperation, and altruism. “Language,” Kenneally states, “is an act of shared attention.” Language can, obviously, be used in the service of aggression and hostility, as well as cooperation and altruism, so what is gained by defining language as “an act of shared attention”? How does this differ from saying that language is a means of communication, for example, or a vehicle for persuasion?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1. Is language a technology? By tracking the differences between the ways that primates and humans use gestures, Kenneally highlights the evolutionary development of the capacity for intentional communication. While the development of this capacity was not the expression of an individual desire or individual initiative initially, looking after language acquisition is a central concern of any developed society—through parenting, schooling, and educational programming, for example. Has the steady advance in the human powers of communication produced “revenge effects,” as Edward Tenner defines the term in “Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead”? Have these developments been driven by human desire or has language itself, as a technology, served to shape the needs and choices humans have made to advance our powers of communication?

2. “Language,” Kenneally states, “is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.” With Henry Jenkins’ analysis of the Harry Potter Wars in mind, discuss the degree to which it is possible to cultivate this “willingness to listen” in others. Do “affective communities” necessarily promote this willingness or are they formed, in part, by a shared refusal to listen to those outside the community? Is convergence culture enhancing this willingness to listen or is it having some other effect?