Introduction: The Politics of Gesture

Introduces Past & Present Supplement 4, 2009. The volume grew out of a conference organised by the journal and held in 2007, exploring the place of non-verbal communication in marking out social relations within a given culture, and the possibilities for contestation and misunderstanding that ar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Past & present 2009-01, Vol.203 (suppl-4), p.9-35
Main Author: Braddick, M. J.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Introduces Past & Present Supplement 4, 2009. The volume grew out of a conference organised by the journal and held in 2007, exploring the place of non-verbal communication in marking out social relations within a given culture, and the possibilities for contestation and misunderstanding that arise. The politics of gesture is understood here as the question of how power relations, cultural or partisan identities and divergent social interests were expressed and contested non-verbally. The inquiry essentially examines how much further historians can get with the analysis of the expression, reproduction, and transformation of social orders by complementing existing analyses with a study of non-verbal communication. This article seeks to map out some of this territory, drawing both on the articles in the volume and the author's own work on early modern England. (Quotes from original text)
ISSN:0031-2746
1477-464X
DOI:10.1093/pastj/gtp001