Kinesics and Context Essays on Body Motion Communication [Paperback]

Ray L. Birdwhistell, in this study of human body motion (a study he termskinesics), advances the theory that human communication needs and uses all the senses, that the information conveyed by human gestures and movements is coded and patterned differently in various cultures, and that these codes can be discovered by skilled scrutiny of particular movements within a social context.

Ray L. Birdwhistel, an anthropologist and expert on how people communicate with body motions, retired in 1988 from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined the faculty in 1969. From 1942 until 1969 he taught and did research at the Universities of Toronto and Louisville, the State University of New York at Buffalo and Temple University.

Ray Birdwhistell . . . is the first to have built a bridge between anthropology and the world of contemporary arts. —Marshall McLuhan

Few brilliant pioneer workers have the opportunity that Professor Birdwhistell has had to see his unique observations validated through technical innovation. So he was able to develop kinesics, which has now become part of a systematic anthropological investigation. —Margaret Mead