Birdwhistell

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The scientific study of gesture, posture, facial expression and other bodily movements as a form of nonverbal communication
2. A field of research examining how people convey meaning through body motions and expressions rather than through spoken words
3. The discipline that analyzes kinesic behavior, studying how movements of the body communicate feelings and intentions between people

Etymology: Ray Birdwhistell (1918–1994) was an American anthropologist who spent much of his career filming ordinary conversations frame by frame to see how people communicate with their bodies. In the early 1950s he coined "kinesics" for this study of body motion as a system of meaning, building it from the Greek "kinesis," meaning movement, with the scientific suffix "-ics." His name became attached to the field in popular and academic writing, so "Birdwhistell" now often stands in for the discipline itself, though the term he actually introduced was "kinesics." Birdwhistell's ideas were influential in the 1950s and 1960s, when anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists were borrowing methods from one another to analyze face-to-face interaction. He compared body movements to language, arguing that gestures, posture, and facial expressions could be broken into smaller units and studied systematically. Later researchers criticized some of his more sweeping claims about how much meaning is carried by nonverbal behavior, and the field has since moved toward more empirically tested approaches.