948 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [73,1971]

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 to understand how individuals operate in the urban social milieu, and how they arrive at decisions and invoke social ties, is likely to 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 to 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 by 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

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 to 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 949

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 to 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

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 to 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 [73 ,1971]

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

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