body language - background and history
Philosophers and scientists have connected human physical behaviour with meaning, mood and personality for thousands of years, but only in living memory has the study of body language become as sophisticated and detailed as it is today.
Body language studies and written works on the subject are very sparse until the mid-1900s.
The first known experts to consider aspects of body language were probably the ancient Greeks, notably Hippocrates and Aristotle, through their interest in human personality and behaviour, and the Romans, notably Cicero, relating gestures to feelings and communications. Much of this early interest was in refining ideas about oration - speech-making - given its significance to leadership and government.
Isolated studies of body language appeared in more recent times, for example Francis Bacon in Advancement of Learning, 1605, explored gestures as reflection or extension of spoken communications. John Bulwer's Natural History of the Hand published in 1644, considered hand gestures. Gilbert Austin's Chironomia in 1806 looked at using gestures to improve speech-making. Charles Darwin in the late 1800s could be regarded as the earliest expert to have made serious scientific observation about body language, but there seems little substantial development of ideas for at least the next 150 years. Darwin's work pioneered much ethological thinking. Ethology began as the science of animal behaviour. It became properly established during the early 1900s and increasingly extends to human behaviour and social organization. Where ethology considers animal evolution and communications, it relates strongly to human body language. Ethologists have progressively applied their findings to human behaviour, including body language, reflecting the evolutionary origins of much human non-verbal communication - and society's growing acceptance of evolutionary rather than creationist theory. Austrian zoologist and 1973 Nobel Prizewinner Konrad Lorenz (1903-89) was a founding figure in ethology. Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, discussed below, is an ethologist, as is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) a leading modern thinker in the field. Ethology, like psychology, is an over-arching science which continues to clarify the understanding of body language.
The popular and accessible study of body language as we know it today is very recent.
In his popular 1971 book 'Body Language', Julius Fast (1919-2008) wrote: "...kinesics [body language] is still so new as a science that its authorities can be counted on the fingers of one hand...
"Julius Fast was an American award winning writer of fiction and non-fiction work dealing especially with human physiology and behaviour. His book Body Language was among the first to bring the subject to a mainstream audience. Significantly the references in Julius Fast's book (Birdwhistell, Goffman, Hall, Mehrabian, Scheflen, etc - see body language references and books below) indicate the freshness of the subject in 1971. All except one of Julius Fast's cited works are from the 1950s and 1960s. The exception among Fast's contemporary influences was Charles Darwin, and specifically his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, written in 1872, which is commonly regarded as the beginnings of the body language science, albeit not recognised as such then.
Sigmund Freud and others in the field of psychoanalysis - in the late 1800s and early 1900s - would have had good awareness of many aspects of body language, including personal space, but they did not focus on non-verbal communications concepts or develop body language theories in their own right. Freud and similar psychoanalysts and psychologists of that time were focused on behaviour and therapeutic analysis rather than the study of non-verbal communications per se.
A different view of human behaviour related to and overlapping body language, surfaced strongly in Desmond Morris's 1967 book The Naked Ape, and in follow-up books such as Intimate Behaviour, 1971. Morris, a British zoologist and ethologist, linked human behaviour - much of it concerned with communications - to human 'animalistic' evolution. His work remains a popular and controversial perspective for understanding people's behaviours, and while his theories did not focus strongly on body language, Morris's popularity in the late 1960s and 1970s contributed significantly to the increasing interest among people beyond the scientific community - for a better understanding of how and why we feel and act and communicate.
An important aspect of body language is facial expression, which is arguably one part of body language for which quite early 'scientific' thinking can be traced:
Physiognomy is an obscure and related concept to body language. Physiognomy refers to facial features and expressions which were/are said indicate the person's character or nature, or ethnic origin.
The word physiognomy is derived from medieval Latin, and earlier Greek (phusiognominia), which originally meant (the art or capability of) judging a person's nature from his/her facial features and expressions. The ancient roots of this concept demonstrate that while body language itself is a recently defined system of analysis, the notion of inferring human nature or character from facial expression is extremely old.
Kinesics (pronounced 'kineesicks' with stress on the 'ee') is the modern scientific or technical word for body language.The word kinesics was first used in English in this sense in the 1950s,
deriving from the Greek word kinesis, meaning motion, and seems to have first been used by Dr Ray Birdwhistell, an American 1950s researcher and writer on body language. The introduction of a new technical word - (in this case, kinesics) - generally comes after the establishment of the subject it describes, which supports the assertion that the modern concept of body language - encompassing facial expressions and personal space - did not exist until the 1950s. Proxemics is the technical term for the personal space aspect of body language. The word was devised in the late 1950s or early 1960s by Edward Twitchell Hall, an American anthropologist. The word is Hall's adaptation of the word proximity, meaning closeness or nearness. From the word kinesics, Ray Birdwhistell coined the term kine to refer to a single body language signal. This is not to be confused with the ancient and same word kine, meaning a group of cows. Neither word seems to have caught on in a big way, which in one way is a pity, but in another way probably makes matters simpler for anyone interested in the body language of cows.
The Greek word kinesis is also a root word of kinaesthetics, which is the 'K' in the VAK learning styles model.Kinaesthetics (also known as kinesthetics) in the study of learning styles, is related to some of the principles of body language, in terms of conveying meaning and information via physical movement and experience.
Body language is among many branches of science and education which seek to interpret and exploit messages and meaning from the 'touchy-feely' side of life. For example, the concepts of experiential learning, games and exercises, and love and spirituality at work - are all different perspectives and attempts to unlock and develop people's potential using ideas centred around kinaesthetics, as distinct from the more tangible and easily measurable areas of facts, figures words and logic. These and similar methodologies do not necessarily reference body language directly, but there are very strong inter-connections. Bloom's Taxonomy, and Kolb's Learning Styles are also helpful perspectives in appreciating the significance of kinaesthetics, and therefore body language, in life and work today.