948 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
the network diagrams of today. The ques-
tion still remains as to how one moves to the
larger urban view through network analysis.
Mitchell (pp. 44-50) suggests that this can be
done by combining the network approach
with institutional analysis, and he offers
useful guidelines in this direction. But few
African urban studies have done this so far.
The network view seems likely to move
more and more in the direction of graph
theory and the statistical manipulation of
network ties. Insofar as this occurs it will
lead to greater scientific accuracy but to-
ward a cold science. An approach which
began in part as an attempt t o understand
how individuals operate in the urban social
milieu, and how they arrive at decisions and
invoke social ties, is likely t o become a
highly formal system of analysis in which
the individual as a human being disappears in
the network calculation.
Yet, this is an imaginative and skillful
book, a fine pulling together of pioneering
ideas and field experiments in an expanding
area of social analysis. It deserves t o be
widely read and discussed.
References Cited
Swartz, M., ed.
1968 Local-level politics. Chicago,
Aldine.
Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Mo-
tion Communication. RAY L. BIRD-
WHISTELL. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1970. xiv + 338 pp.,
tables, appendices, bibliography. $3.95
(paper).
Reviewed b y EDWARD E. HUNT, JR.
Pennsylvania State University
Body language, or kinesics, is the chore-
ography of social behavior involving facial
expressions, movements of head, trunk and
limbs, and their relations to other communi-
cative modalities such as vocalization. Before
proceeding to Birdwhistell’s work, it is in-
structive to look at kinesics in the writings
of two eminent Victorians: E. B. Tylor and
Charles Darwin. In 1871, Tylor’s Primitive
Culture gave us a muchexpanded view of
culture and identified language as a prime
example of cultural behavior. Among many
[73,1971]
other things, Tylor discusses language in
children and adults and cultural kinesics in
the form of gestures used in different human
societies for counting and mental arithmetic.
Darwin published his work The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and the Animals in
1872. To him, the kinesics of emotional
displays was evidence of evolution in that
behavior shared by related species could be
derived from their common ancestry. In
man, Darwin was less clear than Tylor in
separating cultural kinesics from inborn ex-
pressive behavior.
In the subsequent century, Tylor‘s trea-
tise has helped to unite linguistics and
cultural anthropology, while Darwin’s has
led t o the flowering of ethology, the natural-
istic study of animal behavior. Kinesics
partakes of all three traditions. Kinesics,
linguistics, and ethology are now undergoing
what Birdwhistell calls a “phenomenological
revolution” through the use of cinema,
television, and tape recordings, and particu-
larly equipment for replaying events in slow
motion and still pictures. This instrumenta-
tion reveals a wealth of subtle, almost
instantaneous kinesic patterns and allows the
study of body regions both piecemeal and in
combination with each other and with
speech.
A prime mover in this “revolution” is
Ray Birdwhistell. His book tells of nearly
two decades of his kinesic research in
twenty-eight essays and three appendices.
Some are new, and others previously pub-
lished or delivered as lectures. Birdwhistell is
a cultural kinesicist who has studied not
only members of several human societies,
but infants, children, normal adults, and the
mentally ill. Their behavior is now on film in
a diversity of naturalistic and contrived or
experimental situations.
Birdwhistell characteristically films home-
ly kinesic sequences that occur millions of
times in everyday life. He has gone deeply
into the communicative significance of
smiling. He often records mothers changing
their infants’ diapers or families at the
dinner table. His films show that two adja-
cent regions of Kentucky have different
kinesic styles of expressing mild illnesses. A
delightful example, not in the book, is his
study of elephant cages in the zoos of several
cities in the Eastern and Western hemi-
spheres. The standardized situation at each
 METHODOLOGY
cage is a family feeding peanuts to an
elephant.
He has a superb eye for theater. He notes
that in France, during intense action by the
principal actors, the supporting cast con-
tinues relatively fervent kinesic behavior. In
the United States, the spoken lines count for
more during such sequences, and the sup-
porting actors are more relaxed and im-
mobile than in France. I speculate that
France has a background of Latin liturgy,
not understood by most Frenchmen, who
had to focus more on the kinesics of the
Catholic ceremonial. Indeed, it may not be
accidental that the classical ballet has strong
French roots. The relatively verbal style of
American theater perhaps is more derived
from the less kinesic Protestant sermon, the
intense rhetoric of the Jews, and more
remotely, even from Protestant strictures
against dancing.
The learning of kinesics in every culture
begins with the infant’s reactions to his
mother and others in his social milieu. Very
young children show culture-bound kinesic
patterns, even to playmates. Birdwhistell
cites a girl aged fifteen months at play with a
boy aged two-and-a-half years. She uses a
common stance of women in her upper
middleclass, Southern American subculture,
with thighs together and pelvis retracted.
The boy uses the male stance of thighs apart
and pelvis forward.
Birdwhistell is more than a behavioral
amanuensis. He has devised a workable
alphabet of kinesic choreography called
kinegraphs. He variously estimates the num-
ber of human facial expressions as twenty
thousand and two hundred and fifty thou-
sand, but reduces this complexity t o a few
dozen symbols. Indeed, the nineteen body
regions reduce to less than a hundred kine-
graphs. This count is similar t o the number
of symbols used by linguists for phonemes,
junctures, stresses, and other features of
ongoing speech.
Birdwhistell rightly considers kinesics as
more than “paralinguistic” behavior. To
him, communication has many channels
such as body contact, olfaction, taste, and
proprioception, but speech and kinesics so
far are the most feasible channels for study.
Indeed, he uses somewhat similar concepts
in linguistics and kinesics, which I interpret
as follows: Kine: a limited class of motion in
949
one body region (equivalent t o phone in
linguistics); Kineme: a class of alternative,
substitutable kines (allokines), not neces-
sarily in the same body region (analogous to
phoneme); Kinemorph: an assemblage of
kines in a given body region (comparable to
natural class in the theory of sound produc-
tion); Kinemorpheme: one or more kinemes
which contribute minimal isolable meaning
to a kinesic communication (similar to
morpheme in linguistics).
The articulation and grammar of kine-
morphemes present formidable problems,
analogous t o the frontiers of descriptive and
structural linguistics. Junctures and stresses
are often important in both speech and body
language. In the carriers of any given culture,
allokines can occur in widely separate parts
of the body, and often people enact kinesic
communications that contradict their
spoken utterances, are not simultaneous
with what they say, or are executed in
silence.
Paraphrasing Birdwhistell, a central set of
propositions shared by kinesics, linguistics,
and culture theory might be: (1) Specific
phones, kines, and culture patterns are not
closer t o the biological base of man than are
others; (2) Few, if any, such behaviors are
sufficiently inborn to be particularly re-
vealing of the emotional life of the indi-
vidual; (3) Few, if any, such phenomena are
sufficiently inborn and universal in man to
be evidence of particular, predisposing
psychological states regardless of the cultural
background of an individual.
As a human biologist myself, I applaud
the productivity of such doctrines in much
valuable study of culture, but have doubts as
t o their total veracity. Like Darwin, I am
impressed by obvious similarities of some of
the emotional expressions in man and other
mammalsespecially higher primates. R. J.
Andrew and others have shown these resem-
blances in some of the very traits of facial
expression that Birdwhistell studies. Every
naturalist knows that communication occurs
between species, and that both wild and
domestic animals and birds in part can send
kinesic and vocal signals that people compre-
hend. I hope that the firmness and produc-
tivity of the cultural kinesicists is strongly
buttressed by the insights and knowledge of
the ethologists. I am convinced that there is
an inborn kinesics of man, just as there is
950 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
truly inborn vocalization, as shown brilliant-
ly in deaf children by Eric Lenneberg.
The content of inborn kinesics can only
be surmised by cross-cultural studies and
research on non-human primates. Even these
animals have cultural kinesics, as is becoming
clear when the young of one species are
reared with members of another. The alpha-
bet of kinegraphs, with a few additional
symbols for uses of the feet and tail, seems
to be adaptable to the study of primate
behavior. I would be surprised if the kine-
morpheme, and even higher grammatical
categories of body language, will not be
useful in decoding primate communication.
To an outsider like myself, Birdwhistell’s
work is proof of the great vitality of cultural
kinesics. Its importance may grow even
greater in the future, as the values of the
western world move in more explicitly
kinesic channels than in the past. This
change in itself should motivate more inves-
tigators t o admire Birdwhistell’s contribu-
tions and build on them.
Help! For the Small Museum: A Handbook
o f Exhibit Ideas and Methods. ARMINTA
NEAL. Boulder, Co: Pruett Press, 1969.
200 PP., figures, photographs, 4 appen-
dices. $7.50 (paper).
Reviewed by ROBERT W.NEUMAN
Louisiana State University
During the past several decades the in-
crease of public interest in their cultural
heritage has nurtured a parallel growth in the
establishment of museums. One need not
travel too far and wide before experiencing
the realization that a preponderant number
of these new museums are characterized by
collections of a most regional nature, are
operated with very limited funds, and, of
course, it follows that their structural
housing does not include extensive square
footage. Confronted with these qualifica-
tions and with the desire to proudly exhibit
their collections in a meaningful and pleasing
manner, the staffs of small museums have
sought aid and advice from trained personnel
of the larger and more permanently estab-
lished museums. One important outgrowth
stemming from this solicitation has been the
publication of numerous articles describing a
[73,1971]
multitude of ingenious, economical avenues
for design and display for small museum
exhibits. With more than two decades of
experience in museum exhibits design, the
author of the book being reviewed has
contributed specific articles which would
assist in small museum display techniques.
The present book is a rewriting and expan-
sion of an out-of-print, mimeographed book-
let containing a collection of her original
articles.
Arminta Neal has titled her book quite
specifically in that her concern is with
exhibit ideas and methods; the reader should
not expect t o find detailed information on
restoration and preservation of specimens,
cataloging systems, or storage methods. The
book is divided into two parts and part one
is entitled “General Principles.” The subjects
discussed consist of the function of display,
planning museum displays, gallery design,
corridors, exhibit cases, case exhibits, panels,
problematical objects, color, light, and la-
bels. Included are sections describing the
changes in museum display from curio cabi-
nets t o modem exhibits, floor planning, size
and placement of exhibit cases, suggested
places and times for economically obtaining
building material for displays, construction
plans for remodeling old display cases, and a
variety of plans for constructing new ones.
The reader will also find assistance in the
arrangement of items within an exhibit,
selection, uses and combinations of various
colors and lights, and suggestions for the
most effective ways of utilizing letters and
labels. Part two of the book, entitled “Con-
struction Notes,” is directed toward tools,
materials, panel and case construction,
wiring and installation of electrical features,
case furniture construction, labels, and fur-
nishing methods. Here the reader will find
advice on the selection and use of tools; the
quality and dimensions of building material;
construction plans for panels and cases;
manufacturing of letters of various sizes,
shapes, and materials; and information on
painting, staining, and the use of textured
paint and cloth for panels. Included with the
text of the book are more than two hundred
photographs and drawings.
As a final contribution the author has
compiled four appendices. The first is a brief
outline relative to recording information
about each display. The second lists 162