Gestures

Anthropology teaches us that gestures and behaviors are rarely the product of an individual’s invention, but are rather social and cultural in origin. The crafts that involve the mastery of gestures are most often acquired by apprenticeship and practice, where a skilled teacher demonstrates how to hold, cut, rotate and shape, stimulating imitation and demanding practice and repetition. The gestures taught have emerged from a long process of making them more essential, effective and efficient: the best way of bending an arm or of holding a tool, of tying a knot. This cultural transmission also focuses on imparting the relevant elements of the materials to observe, such as the changing color, texture, smell, vibration or temperature. These crafts are patiently taught so that new apprentices do not need to themselves reinvent the craft and repeat the mistakes of the past: all the movements that went wrong, that broke the glass and the clay, that split the wood or sounded off-tune. In other words, transmitting cultural gestures involves transmitting the long quest for lightness of the many people in the past who have engaged in a craft.