The Hands as Reflex Republic

Abstract

Among linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in multimodal communication, much attention has been paid to the motor activity of the hands. Psychologists have treated the hands as a window onto the mind and as a facilitator of thought. Linguists have treated the hands as articulators of linguistic signs, and linguistic anthropologists have treated the hands as an integral part of broader, interacting semiotic processes. This essay builds on these approaches by attending to DeafBlind observations about the communicative potential of the hands. Hands are what you touch when you meet someone, and their texture, temperature, and movements remain available to you over the course of an interaction. From the hands' qualities, the rest of the person and their environment can be inferred. From this perspective, the hands appear not only as a window onto the mind, as a facilitator of thought, or as an articulator of signs, but also as a kind of appendage to the self—like cilia, left out in the world to register the dynamics of social life. This suggests new methodological possibilities for analyzing the motoric activity of hands as a sociocultural and biosemiotic problem.