African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 299
Hand Gestures
Hand gestures have a wide variety of functions in relation to oral communication,
particularly to storytelling. Although they are often regarded as primarily mimed versions
of spoken communication, gestures can imitate, amplify, substitute for, and even
contradict speech. These functions are categorized by scholars of gesture in various ways.
In their study of Swahili-language gestures in Kenya, Carol Eastman and Yaha Ali Omar
distinguish gestures that are verbal-dependent from those that are independent of speech
and those that are mimetic. Doreen Klassen’s study of Shona storytelling in Zimbabwe,
however, goes further in that it examines the varied ways in which gesture can be
mimetic or imitative of an oral narrative.
Eastman and Omar’s classification of gestures makes several significant distinctions.
In separating those gestures that are verbal-dependent from those that are verbalindependent,
they differentiate gestures that clarify the meaning of ambiguous words
from gestures that are readily understood as a shorthand expression within a specific
social or cultural context. Consequently, a gesture may help clarify a local idiom or a
verbal expressive such as an ideophone. However, speakers may also use a commonly
understood gesture, sometimes called an emblem, in place of an expression such as
“Alright,” “yes,” “Nothing,” or even, “How should I know?” Some scholars dismiss these
gestures as agreed-upon by the culture as a whole, while others probe the significance of
using a particular gesture within a specific social situation.
Klassen, like Eastman and Omar, considers gesture to have a mimetic dimension, but
finds at least four ways in which gestures in Shona storytelling are imitative. Firstly, she
separates those gestures that reenact an action from those that diagram it. Secondly, she
examines those gestures that have an indirect relationship to whatever they are
describing. Next, she discusses those aspects of gesture that reveal the space and time
dimension of a narrative. And lastly, she reveals how gestures, and particularly bodily
movements, make transparent the form and moral dimensions of a narrative.
Body Gestures
Gestures that reenact an action make visible a narrative in various ways. At times a
narrator uses her body to portray the action of a character in a narrative, seemingly
becoming the character. Consequently, the listener sees how a large animal ambles, how
a hawk swoops down on its prey, how a thief disappears from sight, or how a tiny animal
gives a threatening pursuer a beadyeyed look. At other times, a storyteller uses part of her
body to diagram or map an object or action. Again, the listener sees an imaginary path
through the woods, the outline of a woven basket, an arm serving as a tree trunk, or the
shape of a straw protruding from a hidden drinking gourd. Rarely a storyteller offers an
anthropomorphic gesture, one that appears to give human attributes to the action of an
animal, and so the audience observes how a woman would catch flies with her hand,
although she is describing a crocodile snapping at them with his snout.