Body Language - Lapham's Quarterly →

The excerpt below is from the end of the essay, but the whole thing’s very interesting! Delves into whether gestures are “language” or not, history of the study of gestures, etc.

David McNeill, a psychologist who has spent his career studying gesture, first took notice of it watching two of his colleagues converse. They looked to him like “sculptors working in different media. One was always pounding and pushing some heavy blocklike stuff. I imagined that his medium was clay or marble. The other was drawing out and weaving some incredibly delicate, spidery stuff. His medium looked like strings or spiderwebs.” Research of the past few decades has shown that putting our thoughts in our hands can help us learn and remember better, can help us speak more fluently and find the right words.

When we speak, we shape our thoughts for language, and when we gesture, we shape them in the space in front of us. We may be different kinds of sculptors using different kinds of media, but our molding, weaving, and chiseling does us good.