herzfeld - reflections on the embodiment of ethnographic practice

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DOI: 10.1177/1466138109106299 2009 10: 131Ethnography

Michael Herzfeldethnographic practice

The cultural politics of gesture: Reflections on the embodiment of

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The cultural politics of gestureReflections on the embodiment of ethnographicpractice

Michael HerzfeldHarvard University, USA

A B S T R A C T Ethnographers enter the field as legible signs ofotherness to their interlocutors. In this article, I explore the ramificationsof my personal experience of being variously read in the course ofencounters in Bangkok, Thailand, to show how a gradual process of bodilyinculcation can reduce the sense of difference and partially overcome theexpectations induced by phenotype in particular, leading to greater accessto the protected zones of cultural intimacy (including recognition of thenewcomers linguistic capacities). Such transitions also entail a learnedincrease of ease with informal modes of embodiment, as opposed topostures signaling varieties of power that are intrusive and palpablyforeign to local experience. The processes of mutual recognition thusdescribed are embedded in political relations of international as well asinter-personal significance. They thus have multi-faceted consequences forthe outcomes and implications of our research.

K E Y W O R D S embodiment, cultural intimacy, gesture, personalappearance, fieldwork, language

There is a curious separation in anthropological writing between the desireto be relevant and to speak to the big issues on the one hand, and theequally powerful tendency to focus on very small details through which, inthe most interesting work, the larger perspective becomes accessible through

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new and more intimate angles of vision. One consequence of this, in an ageof sound bites and quick fixes, is that anthropological writing often doesnot get the public attention that it deserves. This results in a lack of fundingthat in turn reflects a general unwillingness to take seriously the merenessof gossip, gesture, casual encounters, and ordinary things in ordinary places.Consequently, despite all the talk about diversity (which itself has becomereified and singularized),1 anthropologys messages of complexity and theimportance of detail come across as disconcerting rather than enlightening.They raise more hackles than dollars.

For their part, anthropologists have too often failed to follow throughon the realization that the detail with which they seem so obsessed canbe used to speak about major public issues in new ways. They usually fail,for example, to connect the details of gesture with the management andshaping of public space. Aside from the relatively mechanistic early effortsof writers such as E.T. Hall (1959) and Ray Birdwhistell (1952) to bringproxemics and kinesics into a relatively unified anthropology of space,the analysis of gesture has largely become a technical, quasi-linguisticexercise with virtually no analysis of the spatial organization of power orof the role of gesture in maintaining or subverting that power and itsformal structures. The occasional exceptions to this tendency (e.g. Farnell,1995; Williams, 1997) have certainly shifted the ground. But there arevery few studies that examine, except in passing, the political dimensionsof meaning-making through gesture as a theme that also holds implicationsfor the ethnographers own participation in social life.

Some notable studies of embodiment in its social context for example,Wacquants (2004) study of the pugilists body and Alters investigations ofthe Indian wrestler (1992) and the Indian yogi (2004); important studies ofthe regimentation of bodies in national sport (notably Brownell, 1995) establish a clear connection between ideologies of identity and embodiedpractice. These, however, are recognized, formal, set-apart contexts, andthe analyses are less concerned with the technicalities of how to representgesture without reducing it to the purely verbal. The informal and oftenunacknowledged (though not necessarily unrecognized) dimensions ofgestural interaction, by contrast, rarely seem to merit extended treatmentas channels for the highly localized reconfiguration of micropolitical rela-tions. Cowans (1990) remarkable study of gesture, gender, and dance innorthern Greece is a truly rare exception in that she breaks down the arti-ficial distinction between formal events and everyday interaction, as befitsa study of performativity, and at the same time shows how local talk abouthuman movement is these are my words, not hers an explanation ratherthan a translation. I borrow the term set-apart from her analysis of danceevents. She acknowledges that separation as a specifically local perception,however, and shows how in practice the forms of dance and of everyday

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movement are embedded in the same ideological matrix and in a shared,everyday cultural universe.

The more informal dimensions of gesture constitute one of the fewmodalities that, precisely because gesture does not necessarily involveverbalization and is often quite unreflexive, usually though not invariably escape the censorious eye of officialdom. Dances can be banned forlewdness, for example, but it is much harder to do the same with passingmovements of the hand in conversation. When gesture does fall afoul ofthe bureaucratic establishment, as when teachers and parents try to discour-age children from gesticulating too much in conversation, its disapprovedstatus is the clearest guarantee that it is not going to be taken seriously.Hard to pin down, despised (or at least deprecated) even by those who useit, casual gesture resists sustained analysis, although there have certainlybeen important and in some cases successful attempts.2 In this sense gesturereveals the conceptual and empirical limits of the category of intangibleheritage: its very evanescence is what makes it highly resistant to catalogu-ing or other forms of census. But this is precisely what makes it both usefuland, often, effective. In public spaces, the public micro-performance ofdissent a pursing of the lips at the mention of a dictators name, thewordless whistling of songs composed by a prisoner of the regime (Herzfeld,1997: 2236) subtly but insistently undermines the pretensions of absolutepower. It is entirely possible to walk through a piazza with a jaunty in -souciance that challenges a harsh rulers authority, and the deliberate andmonumental theatricality of that space actually enhances and even enablessuch challenges for those who know how to read them.

These aspects of gesture, and especially the intersections of gesture withsocial space, condition the production of ethnographic knowledge. Theyindex the zones of what I have called cultural intimacy (Herzfeld, 2005),which is exactly where most ethnographers try to be. Gesture is a way ofcreating intimate communication while under public gaze; the members ofa given society presumably all recognize more or less the same modalitieseven as official discourse denies their very existence, creating a special kindof competence that lies at the heart of what distinguishes ethnography from,say, journalism. By cultural intimacy I do not simply mean close acquain-tance with a culture but, rather, the zone of internal knowledge wherebymembers of a society recognize each other through their flaws and foiblesrather than through their idealized typicality as heroic representatives of thenation. I call this mutuality a fellowship of the flawed flawed, that is, inthe eyes of more powerful cultural brokers or nations and I see in it anexplanation of why, against all the odds, nation-states are able to commandtheir citizens loyalty unto death. People do not necessarily sacrifice them-selves for some abstract form of patriotism, though they may do so onoccasion and may well be convinced that this was their underlying motive

Herzfeld The cultural politics of gesture 133



on others; instead, it is precisely that fellowship of the flawed that elicitstheir deepest affect, even though most would be reluctant to admit as much.

This space of ostensibly negative value that in fact conceals deep socialbonds is above all a zone of discomfort with, and largely implicit critiqueof, the official discourse that in turn denies and condemns everything thatconstitutes cultural intimacy. Imagine the IRS admitting that what madeAmericans good citizens was their cleverness in avoiding taxes; imagine theGreek government conceding that it was mostly the Turkish aspects ofeveryday life that provided the familiar contexts of sociability even amongthose serving in the army. This is why it is so difficult to put the idea ofcultural intimacy across to an audience more used to the formal, histori-cally grounded theories of nationalism served up by Anderson (1983),Gellner (1983) and Hobsbawm (1990). These more macro-politicalaccounts suffer from two basic weaknesses. First, they are repressively top-down, representing nationalism (and therefore the affect that it inspires) asthe invention of well-educated intellectuals; even Andersons emphasis onprint capitalism fails to escape this limitation, and thus to explain why itis so often the least educated classes who sacrifice themselves most uncritically for the collective good of that abstract thing, the nation.

The second problem is that these authors largely endorse an intellectu-alist and elitist definition of culture. They also overlook the fact that, evenafter independence, many nations find themselves compelled to answer fortheir values to a larger audience that holds them to what I have called theglobal hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2004); the bourgeois leadership owesits domestic hegemony to a fawning emulation of the cultural, moral, andpolitical values of more powerful countries. That hierarchy may no longerbe entirely Western in inspiration, but it still carries many of the Westscherished official moral prescriptions and emphases. Yet many people even within powerful Western countries would find it very difficult to livetheir lives according to those values, and in fact seek comfort and companywith those who share their addiction to very different ways of acting andthinking. As a result, cultural intimacy often consists of what everyoneknows. This is inadmissible knowledge before the court of official opinion,and thus is often conveyed in idioms that escape the textual, verbocentric,and legalistic preoccupations of bureaucracy and formal education.

It seems to me that what is needed here, then, is to shift emphasis awayfrom a fundamentally taxonomic anthropology of gesture, or even moreattractively from an anthropology of embodiment, to an embodiedanthropology.3 Gesture betrays many of these dimensions to those in theknow, and it is itself seen as the expression of a loose sense of self-control,at least in northern Europe. Perhaps this is why gesticulation came to beassociated there with disorder, excess, and inarticulacy, and consequentlyreceived such short shrift in schools. But there are also other modalities of




self-muting that keep threatening to escape into public view. In England,for example, Jews of my parents generation often lowered their voiceswhen talking of anything Jewish not, they thought, because it wassomehow dangerous, but out of a defensive and perhaps misplaced senseof tact that served to reinforce the feeling that there was somehow some-thing negative about that identity in the eyes of the majority population.Perhaps this habit encapsulated the experience of persecution, but it alsoseemed to me to encourage it, or at least, disturbingly, to reproduce theconditions under which one day it might again become thinkable.

There was also an element of expressed resentment in such self-muting echoes, perhaps, of the ressentiment that, according to Liah Greenfeld(1992), is the foundational motivation of emergent nationalisms. Suchpsychological terminology may, however, be misleading; the issue is less oneof how people feel than of how they begin to grope toward a sense of sharedidentity from a space where that identity is still felt to have negative valueand where only that fellowship of the flawed offers some protection froma larger disapproval and its effects.

Here Edwin Ardeners (1971: xliv) concept of blank banners of protestwould appear to be much more useful than any speculation about motiva-tions, whether individual or collective. Peoples bodily stance may index asense of unease with the status quo a stance that does not amount toresistance in the sense popularized by James Scott (e.g. 1985; see, contra,Reed-Danahay, 1993), nor even a more inchoate notion of muddlingthrough (Scott, 1998: 328 et passim; De Certeau, 1984; Reed-Danahay,1996), but rather something akin to the significantly named cultural cringethat Australians sometimes claim to perceive in their stance toward theBritish. Bourdieu (2004; see Reed-Danahay, 2005: 25) clearly recognizedsuch patterns in his personal experiences of embodiment and sought anexplanation of what differentiated his bodily habitus from that of Parisianintellectuals of a more traditional stripe by invoking his small-town,working-class Barnais upbringing. While these patterns are experiencedindividually, they coalesce as collective, cultural phenomena that afford ameasure of surreptitious solidarity. That solidarity, when verbalized, alsotakes the form of self-mockery.

Indeed, it is important to remember that gesticulation is framed in thecenters of power as the antithesis of logic, discursive precision, and dis -passionate judgment. In the 19th century, the Neapolitan pantomime inpractice, a particularly precise mode of conveying certain kinds of message was taken as a sign of the backwardness of southern Italians, a role thatit has continued to play, at least implicitly, in much of the more populariz-ing ethnographic literature on the Italian south. The idea that gesture isemotive and therefore not semantically precise is itself an expression of acondescension made possible by relations of extremely unequal cultural and




economic power; it appears early in the prejudices of 19th-century Britishwriters about southern European peoples (notably, Tylor, 1964: 37).4 Assuch, it confirms the warnings of the Italian anthropologist Franco Lai(1992) about the ways in which anthropological and local attributions ofbackwardness reinforce each other and thereby collude in the maintenanceof the status quo.

That being the case, I would suggest that we anthropologists should paymuch closer attention as Bourdieu did toward the end of his life (see Reed-Danahay, 2005: 289) to what our own gestural patterns imply. Thisentails focusing not only on the subjective aspects of our performances, butalso on the interpretations that our informants put on these. And I wouldlike to reinforce the point with a vignette drawn, not from my own research(to which I will turn later), but from the excellent study of gambling andrisk conducted by Thomas Malaby (2003, especially pp. 1345) in theCretan port town of Chania. In his richly self-mocking ethnographicdescription, Malaby pays exemplary attention, not only to his own sensa-tions at learning to hold a coffee tray correctly, but also to the amused butalso profoundly didactic reactions of his local informants. After that I willbriefly draw from my own successive experiences in fieldwork in three countries Greece, Italy, and Thailand in order to draw out what I seeas the most important consequences for our understanding of the publicsphere of being able to acquire mastery of a local gestural system. Let meanticipate the argument a little by saying that, while I do not discount thesignificance of mastery for its own sake and as providing access to partic-ular kinds of information, perhaps the most valuable category of that infor-mation is experienced through our own bodily experiences of cringing andposturing by turns something perhaps too intimate to be described beforean audience of critical academic peers.

Malaby and risk in Crete

What Malaby especially draws out in his discussion of serving in the Cretancoffee-house is the way in which a whole ideology of masculine heroics inthe face of risk, as well as a realistic assessment that the courageous risk-taker is more likely to succeed than the hesitant pedant, can be discernedin the management of the male body. When he was too gingerly in hisattempt to carry a tray of full coffee cups to the customers in one of hisfavored coffee-houses, Malaby was told in no uncertain terms that thiswas inappropriately timid and, indeed, when he began to develop a moreinsouciant manner, his confidence grew and the cups seemed ever moresecure. This is a world, let us remember, in which precise attention topetty monetary debts (Herzfeld, 1991: 170) and measurement in craft




production (see Herzfeld, 2004) are both signs of weakness of a pedanticscholasticism, or rather of an anti-Maussian bureaucratic ethos, that hasno place in the dangerous marketplace of male reputations. It is also a worldin which a palpably inept bodily stance (kormostasia) can elicit contempt although it is worth noting that this criticism can be, and often is, articulated in words.5

Malaby does not in fact tell us much about the gestures that accompa-nied his transformation; one wishes someone had filmed the various stagesof his apprenticeship, although his rich description of the subjective expe-rience is a surprisingly powerful substitute. The gradual mastery of thebody-plus-space that his movements conveyed to his customers and infor-mants emerges with striking clarity for his readers. It also effectivelyconveys the way in which ideologies are sedimented in bodily practices (seeConnerton, 1989), although I would argue that this is also a space in whichthose same practices can be performatively deployed to bring about thekinds of ideational and attitudinal change that Gutmann (1996), forexample, has observed in men in Mexico City.

Malabys description shows that, even though what he describes is anonverbal scene, it is well understood and verbalized by his infor-mants, for whom it is quite explicitly a test. It may well be that hispresence as a tall and fairly obviously foreign young man made it easierfor his Cretan informants to objectify what they found odd about his wayof moving (and what one can also observe in Western European and NorthAmerican students trying to learn the steps of Greek dances with anintense focus on detail and especially on their own feet that makeslittle sense to their teachers). Improvisational styles are often the space ofsocial grace; compare the beeper-timed precision of the Starbucks produc-tion line with the complex social engagement of an Italian barista and onecan easily perceive the impact of industrialization and rationalization onthe gestural component of social interaction. For the anthropologist, thechallenge consists in becoming aware of the rhythms of movement andtheir relationship to encompassing social realities. The embodiment ofexperience is central to fieldwork; as Jenkins (1994: 4523) nicely putsthe matter, registering that embodiment is, for anthropologists and theirinformants alike, an adequate method for grasping the ordering ofeveryday life.

For most people, rendering these processes accessible does often meantrying to put them into words. Dancing history (McCall, 2000) takes aremarkably skilled ethnographer to recognize it for what it is, for example,and it is not easy to communicate to those who have not yet felt the connec-tion between the bodys trajectory and the passage of collective time. Therelationship between embodiment and speaking is complex, but we shouldnot forget that words are academics primary medium and that we are




therefore quite dependent on them for making sense-qua-reason out ofsense-qua-feeling.

Roman gesture

Let me now shift my ethnographic focus to Rome, sometimes-reluctantcapital of a major European country, and capital of a country where localself-stereotypes emphasize both loquacity and the liberal use of gesture(gestualit). Rome is a place where locals pride themselves on living invillages (paesi), by which they mean face-to-face communities withmarked, highly localized cultural peculiarities. That pride almost an affec-tation of cultural simplicity is a bit deceptive; it goes hand-in-hand witha remarkable historiographical sophistication that is the envy of many otherItalians, an ability to link the monuments and even the minor embellish-ments of the historic streets with a rich and to some extent popular histor-ical literature. Roman informants who had enjoyed relatively short schoolcareers were nonetheless adept users of local history, in part because thiswas a skill that brought access to the real resources of tourism, but predom-inantly because in Rome the peculiar form of agonistic relations consists inprecisely this skill at relating ones life to the imposing ruins and religiousarchitecture as well as the more scabrous stories of the citys once teemingback alleys.

At the same time, not all their knowledge of the past was expressed inverbal terms. In the course of my fieldwork in Rome I became especiallyfascinated by the frequency of a gesture made with hands clasped togetherin a syncopated up-and-down movement that expresses affectionate exas-peration, resignation to the obvious and the inevitable, and a convictionthat the speaker is right. Before I explain the relevance of this gesture, letme recall that especially left-leaning Romans in the centro storico tend tobe fiercely anticlerical, and particularly recall the hardships their ancestorsendured under papal rule; they attribute to the harshness and authoritari-anism of the papal authorities their own much-vaunted tendency tocompromise with power while continuing to follow through on their ownreal intentions.

One butcher I asked about this, a man whose communist leanings andreligious agnosticism made him especially acerbic about the role of thepapacy in Roman history, used it to express his feelings about the fact thatweve sent the popes into exile . . . but the pope keeps coming back, I dontknow why a phrase expressed in a strong Roman accent and with dialectforms of which this man is self-consciously proud. When I asked him whatthe gesture was about, he did not try to gloss it with a translation butanswered: The gesture? The gesture is like this, its a papal gesture! This




helpfully ambiguous response attributes the origins of the gesture to the papalhand blessing, but the fact that in everyday life it is used less in benedictionthan in amiable exasperation suggests that the historical claim was as ironicin intent as, under the circumstances, it sounded. I should add that I incorpo-rated this discussion into my film on Roman mens memories, Monti Moments(Herzfeld, 2007), because I found that the power of this gesture to bringtogether different contexts of amused exasperation was every bit as telling asthe historical pedigree that the butcher attributed to it. Thus, one man, anelectrician, uses it to express his outrage at the banks failure to provide loansfor artisans and small merchants the majority of the older populationwhere I was living and accompanies it with the remark, Italy is a land ofconniving idlers (lazzaroni)! Another man, a retired taxi driver with aremarkable appetite for historical detail and a collector of historical bookson Rome into the bargain, uses the same gesture to introduce the disrep-utable tales that he is intent on telling me, to the evident distress of the morerespectable friend who was also participating in the conversation. It seems,in other words, to have served as a subtle marker for the zone of culturalintimacy among Romans skeptical of their state and church.

Given this context, the use of the gesture about the popes, no less thanits attribution to the popes, suggests that beneath the resigned acceptanceof papal power to which Romans attribute their long-lived sense of accom-modation to power lies a capacity for irony that can always express itselfthrough the body, even when language must be suppressed. It would havebeen hard even in the most repressive days of papal rule to arrest someonefor expressing his emotions with his hands! And since the taxi-driver alsowished to deflate the anthropologist me in a humorous vein, he usedthe same gesture when telling his companion that the professor wants tohear the criminal scandals of that time and that he had once used theprofessors visiting card to get into a rather closely guarded library hemay be a fine amateur historian, as indeed anyone who saw the film wouldimmediately see, but here was an institutional barrier that his cooptationof one figure of apparent authority allowed him to subvert. This was amultiple triumph of wit in all the senses of that word.

The nature of gesture

Gesture is often accompanied by a highly exegetical disposition. Indeed, itseems to me that it is often anthropologists who are less aware of theirembodied self-expression than are their informants. An exceptional fewhave reported on their informants reactions and on their own consequentlearning process. Dorinne Kondo (1990), notably, felt uncomfortable inJapan because she looked Japanese but moved like a foreigner thereby




subverting well-established boundaries and challenging the contours ofplace (in Douglass [1966] sense). Roxanne Varzi (2006: 113), conversely,seeing her reflected body clad in Islamic black in Tehran, baulks at thestrangeness of the image of a self ostensibly conquered by a religious stateideology, but finally, cautiously, concludes that certain clues cannot beignored: somewhere in there I am.

The interplay of framing such as clothing, phenotype, and gesture isindeed of considerable importance, though not necessarily in ways that weanticipate. (Cretan villagers speak of individuals profora literally,pronunciation as meaning the way they look.) There is presumably alsosome mutual effect operating between language proficiency and the degreeto which a visitors physical movements harmonize with those of the locals and harmony may well be of the essence; watching Thai women awaitingthe start of a community meeting fanning themselves, initially individuallyand then gradually with greater and greater synchronization of their move-ments, suggested to me that the Thai-Buddhist ideals of harmony were literally embodied here, providing a soothing backdrop to the stormydiscussions soon to follow. It struck me then that, as the women began todevelop more and more choreographic symmetry in their movements, theyalso began to look more and more alike. They were preparing the culturalbasso continuo for a space of public discourse.

But in fact I had a more direct personal experience of how language andgesture interacted through my own learning of Thai, and this offered animportant insight into the ways in which the intimate access desired byanthropologists depends heavily on a mastery that in many cases is not self-consciously acquired, even though it can form the explicit topic of a discus-sion both locally and with colleagues. It is constrained by a politics ofidentity grounded more in racial than in cultural attributes and capable ofproducing brutally polite forms of rejection (where are you really from?)that interrupt such processes of transition, as European citizens of Asianand African descent often discover especially when they do not speakwhat are supposed to be their native languages (Ang, 2001: 2934). Inthis sense, the politics of phenotype limits an actors capacity to manage thepolitics of specifically cultural aspects of appearance, gesture and languageincluded. Partial success is nevertheless feasible but of necessity it usuallyremains partial, because phenotype is always lurking in the background,ready to jump forward and disrupt the pleasant experience of acceptance.On the other hand, an anthropologist should arguably always be ready toembrace the sharing of cultural traits that such conditional acceptanceimplies, rather than expecting to indulge in the no less prejudice-ladenfantasy of going native altogether.

When I first went to do fieldwork in Bangkok, although I had alreadyreached a hypothetical level of proficiency that allowed me to engage with




my academic peers in (no doubt deeply flawed) Thai, it was extremely diffi-cult to get ordinary people on the street to respond to me in that language.Given the amount of effort that as a middle-aged man I had needed to putinto learning it, I was predictably somewhat annoyed by this lack ofresponse, and would sometimes expostulate, But Im speaking to you inThai using a hand gesture that I later came to realize seemed eitherstrange or, indeed, threatening, and that was almost certainly a residue ofmy Italian fieldwork of a few months earlier.6

Anthropologists might thus usefully reflect on the implications of theirabsorption, not of an entire culture, but with much greater ease and profi-ciency than they usually achieve with language, at least in the early stages of its incorporated aspect; if they work in more than one place, they mayacquire a variegated and internally dissonant repertoire, as happened to me.My expostulatory gesture, which in Italy would have been consideredexpressive of a normatively theatrical combativeness, did no more goodthan an explosive complaint would have done and explosive complaintsdo absolutely no good at all. The usual Thai response to any expression ofserious anger is an impenetrably charming smile of thanks the most effec-tive way I have ever seen of deflecting anger back on the person who isexpressing it. I felt baffled, humiliated, and stupid.

Thus discouraged after a summer of repeated blank stares and incom-prehension, I returned to the United States for three months. Immediatelyafter my return to Bangkok, to my astonishment someone asked me fordirections on the street.7 And almost everyone with whom I talked nowresponded in Thai. I was elated, but totally astonished until, one day someweeks later, a food vendor I knew told a woman who was passing by andexpressed surprise that I spoke Thai, He looks Thai too.8 In some perplex-ity I pointed to my face: I have a farang face. That doesnt matter, theanswer came back. You have Thai gesture (mii thaa thaang thai). And atthat moment I suddenly became aware discursively educated by myvendor friend that I was trying not to stand over her,9 was using my handsin a completely different way, and was experiencing a certain amount offacial muscle ache (presumably because of the greater degree of nuancedsmiling through which Thais express a range of social attitudes). I was alsovaguely aware, and became much more so in subsequent months, thatalthough or because this woman was arguably of lower status than Iwas, I was hunching myself deferentially as someone who was unsure ofhis ability to speak properly (the Thai cringe known as jawng-jawng)10 an appropriate form of courtesy in that I had no desire to play the equallyperformative role of either the bandit (naklaeng) or the aristocrat (nai).Because jawng-jawng embodies a more collective, cultural cringe, much asthe sullen stance of craft apprentices in Crete encapsulates larger Greek self-stereotypes of resentment and cunning, a foreigner who engages in it ends




up looking Thai without much difficulty. It is not the stance expected ofa farang.

After this experience I came to realize that looking Thai in this sensehad nothing to do with phenotype, although that is usually the first cluethat triggers the assumption that one cannot speak Thai. Like many othersin Thailand (or, for example, in Thai restaurants abroad), I have sometimes,in the company of East Asians who did not speak Thai, caused confusionfor my Thai interlocutors by doing so. The first reaction is usually to assumethat the Asian person must have uttered the words, or at least that this isthe person with whom the conversation should now properly continue.11

When the interaction places more emphasis on gesture and voice, however,the physical face is not so much backgrounded (Douglas, 1975: 7) as rele-gated to a secondary level of importance, so that looking [like a] Thaicomes to convey a sense of familiarity and comfort rather than attentionto phenotype.

At the time of this incident, I was regularly engaged in some evaluationwork for a committee under the Ministry of Research in France. A fewmonths after my epiphany in Bangkok, I had to go to France for somemeetings of the group. I was concerned that, now that my Thai felt so muchmore comfortable, I would suddenly have difficulty with French instead. Ineed not have worried; French is a language I have spoken fluently sincemy teens. But I got some strange looks until I realized that I was perform-ing jawng-jawng in a meeting where a senior academic would normally beexpected to do some haughty lip-pursing and generally affect indifferenceto the opinions of others. I began this unfortunate performance by enteringthe room with my hands pressed together in the familiar Thai gesture ofdeference and gratitude (wai), ducking my head to make sure I was notdisturbing the view of those already seated. To make matters worse, I triedto offer a respectful wai of thanks to a colleague who came up to give mea book as a gift. As I recall now, it must have been a slightly panicked lookin this mans eye at this strange behavior an astonishment that I recipro-cated by wondering why he was so rudely handing me the book with onehand (and his left hand at that!) instead of both hands together that finallygot me to pull myself together. Another colleague, an old friend, was brieflyput out by my unintentional (but apparently all too obvious) blanchingwhen he came to embrace me; Thais rarely touch each other.12

Now I am definitely not arguing that I had suddenly become Thai, orthat I was speaking Thai particularly well. (This unaccustomed modestymay nevertheless also be a Thai verbal gesture, as is the irony that leads meto show it in the first place.) I do not think that anthropologists easily gonative, simply because I do not believe that there are discrete culturesanyway. There are many anthropologists who romantically assume a poseof complete cultural conversion, but most simply accept that they are




influenced in varying degrees by the cultures they study. I was simply addinganother layer to the complex sediments of cultural habitus to which myanthropological vagrancy had exposed me and in which my Thai friendshad seasoned me. In my hunching and scrunching, and in my sudden andtotally unaccustomed attacks of deference, I was demonstrating a no doubtamusingly imperfect command of a cultural idiom on which the leasteducated of my Thai informants and observers (yes, they are observers too!)could have confidently passed explicit judgment, but that was utterlypuzzling to my French colleagues, heirs to very different attitudes towardthe appropriate public comportment of intellectuals. I had been adapting,not without awkwardness: think of those Greek dances again, though I amtold that in my younger days I could do them quite well! And note howmy arrogance quotient increases when I shift the frame of reference fromThailand to Greece I am now thinking in a different language, as it were.

More than that, in expressing deference I was substantively rejecting therole that most Thais associate with farang (white-skinned foreigners, acategory that carries overtones of anti-colonial resentment but that manyThais claim to be affectively neutral).13 That role is one of overbearing insis-tence on being served and treated with deference. By showing deferencemyself, I was encouraging my interlocutors to be more tolerant with me inturn. That stance did not serve me particularly well in France, but inThailand it had already begun to make my life a great deal easier and, Ihope, made me less of an embarrassing burden to my kindly Thai friends.

The key to all this is, I suggest, that anthropologists are always to someextent off stage and on display (see Shryock, 2004). They are constantlyunder observation, but they are not performing for a public. On thecontrary, the goal of good ethnography, as I have argued in CulturalIntimacy, must always be to achieve an intimate rapport with informants.Gesture, then, is one way in which anthropologists perform their definitivetask of entering the zone of cultural intimacy in a way that signals with adiscretion that is only effective because it signals in a sufficiently public waythat they are already privy to intimate secrets. A real mastery of the publicsphere is demonstrated in the ability to convey messages clearly to those inthe know while excluding others without necessarily letting these othersrealize that this is what is happening. When anthropologists act in this way,they are trying to get their informants to get off the stage and whisper allthose intimate and slightly disreputable bits of gossip that make good, juicyethnographic data. But it is in the nature of fieldwork that one often doesnot have the opportunity to get ones informants away from the crowd.Signaling that one is a virtual insider in the midst of a public space is thusthe most effective way of achieving the necessary rapport, perhaps reserv-ing a more private meeting for later (much as a glance used to be the onlybasis for initiating relationships between young men and women in




southern European societies [see, e.g., Cutileiro, 1971].) Getting thegestures even partially right in the busy market street where I lived gave memoments of pure pleasure that compensated enormously for the months ofsheer frustration during which I was too obtuse to realize how clumsy I wasbeing.

Let me illustrate this point about secretive behavior in public spaces witha very different example from the Greek island of Crete, where coffee-houses are pre-eminently spaces of male self-display and agonisticconfrontation. While I was working in a mountain village where thepastoral majority of adult males were heavily invested in reciprocal animal-rustling, creating chains of contest and alliance in relations with othervillages in the area (Herzfeld, 1985), I had made it a matter of principle(and prudence!) to resist my sheep-stealing friends attempts to lure me intogoing raiding with them. But when one especially persuasive characterovercame my scruples and I assented, we first went to the coffee-house forsome prior refreshment. There, he made me wait on tenterhooks until hehad decided the time was ripe perhaps two hours later! At that point, hemade an inquiring gesture with head and hand. I replied verbally, sincethis was my habitual, academic mode by asking whether we were in factnow ready to go. He then tossed his head in a contemptuous, silent denial,and we sat for a while longer. When we eventually left and I demanded toknow what he thought he was doing, he said, I made a gesture (noima) toyou, but you spoke!

The message was clear, if indirect. Verbally incontinent,14 I would havemade a terrible thief, and put us both at risk. In short, I failed the test oflearning to master the private mode of communication in a public space where, nevertheless, the fact that almost everyone else is indeed a culturalintimate means that the risk of exposure is still very much present andindeed contributes to the masculinity of those embarking on the adventure(see Malaby, 2003). The simple public-private opposition fails to capturethis complex interweaving that is itself constitutive of social mastery.

But in a more general way most of us can and do learn a basic level ofgestural mastery. In that effort, willy-nilly (if we are any good at our job),we start to move and sound like the locals. That again does not mean thatwe have suddenly become local, and in some cultures and political campspeople actually resent foreigners who learn the language too well as someGreeks rather irritably tell me, Youve gotten into our uncharted waters.15

Language ideologies (Schieffelin et al., 1998) are an important part of thestory.

But why do we call them language ideologies? They are, rather, thesubmerged culture ideologies not those of officialdom, but the ones thatconstitute what I have called the cultural intimacy that rejects officialvalues and the foreign presence that so often seems to be responsible for




perpetuating those values. They are the culturally intimate ideologies thatpeople parade on display, again in public space. That space is theirpublic space; the town square is a collective place of privacy, and now that,as with the piazzas of so many Italian cities, it is teeming with inquisitiveand insensitive tourists, a nod and a wink would give the locals muchgreater purchase than the rhetorical orotundities for which these squareswere originally constructed. It is no coincidence that for at least one anthro-pologically informed Italian student of architecture the creation of a publicspace is itself a form of gesture (gesto) (Abruzzese, 1992: 94).

These public spaces were surely never constructed only for verbalrhetoric and grand oratorical gesticulation. The point of a theatrical spaceis that the audience is always present, always involved. Those fine declam-atory arm-flingings must then also be read against the curled lip and raisedeyebrow (or their local cultural equivalents) in the audience. And when thewaiter comes toward you staring anxiously at his tray instead of noncha-lantly dashing through the crowd with the tray balanced on one hand, youknow, as a local, that something is wrong, discordant. You see that figurein local costume, speaking the language fluently, not being quite at one withthe swelling scene. And you wonder why that other anthropologist, whoevidently knows the language, is still not getting very far with it. These arepublic events too affirmations of a public secrecy that only the locals reallyknow, as they try to persuade themselves.

There are, to be sure, ways of entering into that space of collectiveintimacy; eliciting verbal reactions to what may in a direct sense be verballyinexpressible forms of physical motion, a technique modestly but impor-tantly pioneered by Jane Cowan (1990: 92). But by the point at whichethnographers have gained sufficient rapport with local people to be ableto get them to agree to such an exercise in the first place, they have clearlyalready earned a reputation for some degree of both mastery and intimacy which in this sense are one and the same thing. The difficult part is toreconstruct the almost insidious process by which they achieved thatmastery in the first place.

Here, I have attempted to sketch part of that process by reverting to acompletely unapologetic anecdotalism to the narrative gesticulation that,in our verbocentric academic world, is the enabling device for participat-ing in our peculiar forms of what we might call professional intimacy.These forms are covert, derided, and decidedly off stage as far as anypublic conversation is concerned, as the still-occasionally-rumbling negativereaction to Rabinows (1977) expos of fieldwork makes abundantly clear.

Last scene: back to Rome. For Romans say of their dialect itself acurious piece of regional rusticity in the capital city of a major economicpower that it is not a language, but a way of living; and that this includesa high degree of gestualit, of the quality of gesticulation. Mastery over the




nuances of language is something people guard jealously as the best protec-tion against the invasion of their cultural intimacy. In Greece, this occursat the level of the national language, which, at least until the countrys entryinto the European Union and the subsequent arrival of thousands of obvi-ously foreign immigrants who were able to learn the language quickly andefficiently, was considered too difficult for foreigners to learn. I myself wasassumed either to be a spy or a Greek who was so ashamed of his identitythat he did not wish to reveal it this being in itself a remarkable illustra-tion of the Greek version of the cultural cringe. In Italy, however, a countrywith a complex pattern of regional identities often at (cultural) war witheach other, that level of difficulty is set, not at the level of the nationalstandard language (fluency in which is often regarded as a mark of foreign-ness rather than of indigeneity!) but at the level of the local dialects.Romanesco, in particular, is locally portrayed as impenetrable, not so muchfor its morphology and lexicon (both of which are close to the nationalstandard), but for all the paralinguistic trappings, gesture included, thatinvest it with locally salient meanings and a type of humor that is distinctiveto the city.

And this is the key point I wish to make: that it is possible, amongcultural intimates, to allude to precious and closely guarded cultural secretsin very public places. Rome, as the caput mundi in both the religious andtourist senses, is actually an intensely public place, its piazza the quintes-sence of theatrical self-display. But just as secrecy is something that mustbe performed in public in order for its presence to carry any social weight,as I have noted in another context (Herzfeld, 2009), so, too, culturalsecrets must be bandied about so that outsiders can intuitively grasp theirfundamental ungraspability. The public squares of big southern Europeancities are indeed the spaces of collective self-display. On that same stage,however, people can act in ways that they, and only they, are really able tointerpret. Anthropologists who can persuade local people of their ability tointerpret those actions correctly have done rather better than go native; theyhave earned admiration for their cleverness in breaking into these veryclosed areas at all and thereby have set up the means of venturing stillfurther.

This has important consequences for the practice of ethnography. Manyan anthropologist has fallen afoul of the local view that outsiders cannotpossibly understand such intimate dimensions of their collective social existence. To some extent, to be sure, they are right. But it is less the masteryof an official language and customs that serves the able anthropologist inseeking cultural knowledge or even aspiring to serve the goals of the popu-lation being studied; it is, rather, the ability to demonstrate obliquely through gesture, subtle dialect usage, and quite simply knowing when toshut up that marks the capable and canny anthropol ogist and replays that




Geertzian wink with something equally resistant to any kind of reductiveanalysis.16 And it is the ability to describe such moments that constitutesthe greatest challenge for ethnographers today and suggests that, for alltheir limitations, the new digital technologies may, however partially, beable to help us capture the ineffable in mid-flight.

If on the other hand anthropologists cannot describe or otherwise conveysuch moments, they will not be doing much better than those bureaucraticagencies that preserve intangible heritage by rendering it tangible, rejectingthe entire range of what is considered indecent or trivial as irrelevant tothe culture of a given people. We have seen that political scientists andhistorians have already committed this error of complicity with themanagers of power, by reproducing in their models of nationalism preciselythat sense of perfection that ordinary people reject in their social lives.Anthropologists must take care not to reproduce the same complicity bycolluding in the disappearing of what cannot be measured, described withcertainty, or photographed. There is no point in talking about indetermi-nacy, as is fashionable today, if we do not recognize that there is a greatdeal in social life that is culturally too intimate to be reduced to palpabil-ity. (Is that process not what we mean by reification?) We must thereforebe willing to accept that our writing will never offer the bare precision thatofficial and scientistic discourses offer. It should aim to be richer than that.

Notes

1 Compare the fate of the term data in much academic discourse; itsreduction to a singular term in virtually all popular and a great deal ofscholarly usage has destroyed the utility of being able to distinguishbetween a single datum and a generic category of data. But the case ofdiversity is more insidious still; it sneaks a simplification into everydayusage under the guise of an appreciation for complexity and variety.

2 See the work of Kendon (1986) and especially his partly historical overview(2004).

3 I owe this formulation to Loc Wacquants perspicacious response to theconference draft of this article. I have never liked the anthropology ofidiom for quartering a discipline that has always, with equally speciouslogic, insisted on its holistic scope. Some writers (e.g. Farnell, 1995) seemto me to have usefully avoided this trap by focusing their attention onhuman movement (see also, notably, Williams, 1997). But very little ofthis work looks at what anthropologists themselves do in the field surelya necessary move for a discipline that today lays claim to a distinctive levelof reflexivity and self-awareness. One exception to the general pattern isKondo (1990); her original and challenging study does push the analysis




of gesture toward the analysis of inter-subjective relations between anthro-pologist and informant, albeit not in a particularly systematic way.

4 In some respects, this attitude resembles the initial refusal of Americanlinguists to recognize logic in the linguistic universe of urban AfricanAmericans (see the radically effective critique by Labov [1972: 20140]).This capacity to verbalize the significance of bodily stance belies the oncepervasive scholarly reluctance to credit informants with discursive insightinto their non-discursive habits, a problem that characterizes Bourdieus(1977: 1819) attribution of inexplicitness to relatively undifferentiatedsocieties and mars even Giddenss (1984: 415) otherwise persuasiveaccount of structuration.

6 It would be interesting to know whether such transferences occur becausewe tend subconsciously to assume semantic equivalence between thegestural accompaniments of all foreign languages even as we no lesssubconsciously pick up habits that actually point up the differencesbetween the gestural systems in question.

7 Since much of what I am describing in this article did not make it into myfieldnotes but instead constituted part of the background of which it is somuch harder to make oneself aware, I am conscious of reconstructing agreat deal from memory. I am morally certain of the comments that I quote,at least to a very close approximation, but the temporal dimensions areconsiderably vaguer in my memory at this point.

8 To look like in Thai is a phrase compounded of duu (to look) moean(like), as in English except that the verb is both active (look-at, regard;cf. French regarder, etc.) and passive (appears); this usage, which reflectsa common feature of sentence construction, suggests the completemutuality of peoples gazes. These, however, are usually indirect. On oneof the first occasions I managed to get an unknown Thai to accept that Iwas speaking Thai I asked a cleaning woman for directions to the bathroomby means of the simple expedient of beginning to speak to her before shecould see me properly; when she finally realized that I was a foreigner, shehad already committed herself to responding in Thai, and a short momentof surprise faded rapidly to acceptance that we were indeed, contrary toall expectations, speaking Thai.

9 To hold my head directly over hers would have been disrespectful; the headis considered the most sacred part of the body.

10 I am indebted to Montira Horayangura and Apinetr Unakul for conveyingthis term to me and explaining its use.

11 Once, for example, in a small Bangkok restaurant where I was a regularcustomer, I sat with a Chinese-American student, to whom the waiter who knew me quite well insisted on speaking Thai until I finally explaineddiscreetly to him that she knew no Thai at all, at which point he suddenlyseemed to become aware of his gaffe and even a little embarrassed by it.




12 As with so much else in Thailand, rules here admit of notable exceptions.Two key leaders of the community where I ended up doing fieldwork onanti-eviction protest, in which I became an actively engaged supporter oftheir cause and with whom I therefore developed an affectionate friend-ship, routinely embrace me whenever we meet after a long absence. I amnot sure whether this is a concession to a farang modality or, as I suspect,a recasting of friendship as familial closeness paralleling the use of a kinshipterm to convey both respect and affection.

13 Thailands relationship with colonialism is complex, since the country wasnever formally annexed by any of the Western colonial powers. It wasclearly subjugated to colonial interests in various ways, however, and theimplications of this ambiguous situation are the subject of lively discus-sions among anthropologists and historians. See especially Herzfeld (2002);Loos (2006); Thongchai (2000).

14 The allusion to incontinence is not simply an expressive metaphor. Ethnog-raphers (notably Campbell, 1964, a rich source on the significance of bodilycomportment) have long noted the emphasis placed by rural Greeks on maleself-control, sexual self-restraint being especially prized. And urinary conti-nence is similarly a mark of masculinity; once a young and well educatedCretan friend pointed to a spry nonagenarian man who was walking alongthe side of the road as we were passing and remarked, with enormous admi-ration and apparently no sense of hyperbole or irony, that this man onlyurinated once a week! It is womens alleged verbal incontinence, realized asa penchant for gossip, that makes them the weak link in the defense of familyand community secrets, at least from the mens perspective.

15 See also Crump (1985) on a very similar attitude among the Dutch.16 The allusion is to the now famous passage on interpreting a wink (Geertz,

1973: 67).

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MICHAEL HERZFELD, Professor of Anthropology at HarvardUniversity, is the author of ten books, including Cultural Intimacy:Social Poetics in the Nation-State (2nd edition, 2005), The BodyImpolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value(2004), and Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of ModernRome (2009). Currently serving as Editor-at Large withAnthropological Quarterly and a former editor of AmericanEthnologist, he has conducted field research in Greece, Italy, andThailand. Address: Department of Anthropology. HarvardUniversity, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA02138, USA. [email: [email protected]]




herzfeld - reflections on the embodiment of ethnographic practice

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