“BEE Hand Gestures reflecting Bengali Culture” by Hakim Arif offers a systemic intra-cultural application of classic approaches to non verbal language. It aims to detail the sign systems that provide a dynamic, enriched, symbolic basis for cultural and national identity. The paper is valuable in terms of its focus, by a research member, on particularities of current national and regional traditions and rituals, mainly those of Bengali Everyday Emblematic (BEE). The emphasis is on hand gestures— communicative signs of the Bengali ‘gesture-community’— as they reflect different patterns of everyday Bengali life-styles, especially their rituals, greetings, ways of expression, promises, orders, and commitments etc. The paper is a contribution to traditional and emerging cultural expression in a non European, Asian demography.
In “For a Critique of the Subject. The Sign ‘Self’ and Its Interpretations”. Susan’s Petrilli uses an expansive style that matches the importance of her subject, and allows her to share an accomplished and fully researched approach. The sustained meditation on post-Cartesian understandings of the self provides an articulate vehicle, indeed index, of a range of prominent thinkers. This eclectic approach to keynote thinkers is welcome. Any contemporary perspective needs to go beyond individual keynote philosophers, and include diverse traditions of twentieth century in inclusive crystalline flexible frameworks for contemporary study. The essay makes admirable gain in an important subject, in an assured style, and is recommended reading for all levels, including students. If it is hoped that this publication will find, and support, audiences that include students of various levels, then this paper is surely a good place to start.
Janys Hayes in “Gesture in Actor Training: Embodied Partial Narratives,” integrates research from cognitive science and in particular the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau Ponty, to explore the ways in which gesture and language interact in intentional action. The study is multi disciplinary, and is grounded in the professional practice of actor training. As Paul Bouissac says in his ensuing interview in this issue, semiotics is as much a set of questions as it is established cluster concepts and methods. Gestural studies still lack consensus about preferred terminology, and the questions and exploration of Hayes’ papers seems akin to questions that semiotics should be pursuing. Hayes helps open up a field of inquiry, and on occasion this journal will publish papers that have an implicit affinity with more explicit and articulate semiotic approaches.
In her paper “The Human Body in the Russian Language and Culture: the Features of Body and Body Parts”, Svetlana Pereverzeva addresses issues of classification of somatic parts and expression. Her paper commences an inquiry into a pressing problem: what consensual theory and particularities codification will underpin the study of the human body and non verbal language to rival the detailed observation and analytic rigour that linguistics and semiotics provide for verbal language. However dynamic and animated and complex non verbal signs might be in practice, the argument for a ‘nonverbal semiotic body code’ cannot be denied. The scholar ‘should clearly point out the somatic objects he is going to examine and work out the methodology and the metalanguage of their description.’ This seems a prerequisite for any gestural research.
Geoffrey Sykes provides a long review of Gėrard Deledalle’s “Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs.” As a prominent exponent of American philosophy in Europe after World War II, Deledalle provided a springboard for generations of European students and thinker, to enter the philosophy of American pragmatism – in particular the work of James, Dewey and Peirce. Deledalle introduced Peirce to several keynote European philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze. An anthology of his collected papers – one of the last publications in his lifetime – is the ideal vehicle to introduce and evaluate Deledalle’s work as a whole – its biographical context, and its main studies, especially of Peirce. It is a chance to continue the work of Deledalle to facilitate a transatlantic synthesis of semiotic studies.